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The world’s worst-kept secret is the longstanding decay of the Western mainstream media and its deep-rooted shortcomings. Whilst that has largely been the quiet consensus, there were always schools of thought that held out hope, that concluded it wasn’t wholly irreparable. Or at least that some vital organs remained, yet to be contaminated by the spreading bias and misinformation.

But Israel’s ongoing remorseless slaughter and intentional annihilation of Gaza have been enabled by a compliant mainstream media ecosystem that has consistently failed to accurately convey the facts. They’ve ensured only fragmented, skewed images of Israel’s crimes are presented — a calculated manipulation that shields public consciousness from the scale of devastation.

Today, 100 Palestinian children are being killed daily by Israel, a population of more than 2 million in the enclave is being deliberately starved and repeatedly forcibly displaced from what remains of their communities, whilst the limited functioning hospitals, the last hope of survival, are being systematically decimated.

The genocide being perpetrated by Israel, as Amnesty International concluded, echoed by countless United Nations experts, is as unmistakable as it is unrelenting. In breaking every law, trampling over every resolution and remoulding the very essence of impunity, Israel has simultaneously shattered any remaining notion of credible or redeemable journalism within the mainstream media landscape.

Nowhere has this been more evident than with Britain’s supposed bastion of rigorous and fearless journalism: The Guardian.

A range of practices — including, but not limited to, distorted headlines shaped by passive voice, the omission of critical context, the deliberate thinning out of information, and the overt sanitisation of war crimes — have become routine, particularly across British broadcast and press coverage.

Hind Rajab’s brutal killing — the result of 335 Israeli tank-fired bullets — was reduced by the BBC to the passive headline: “Hind Rajab found dead”. Sky News described the grim massacre of medical workers as an “alleged killing“. The Times made no secret of the hierarchy of human life, reporting: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died.”

The Guardian is supposed to be in an entirely different class of journalism from the above, and prides itself on precisely that. It is “well-placed to provide comprehensive, fact-checked reporting, to help all of us make sense of events,” reads its website.

People should support their “independent” and “quality, investigative journalism”, they insist, in their call to subscribe and support the paper.

But just as those outlets fall short of truthfully depicting Israel’s litany of brutal crimes, The Guardian appears well-versed in the same playbook.

The Guardian tells you Palestinians died, not who killed them

Ten days into Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza, which included an illegal siege amounting to collective punishment, The Guardian reported on Palestinians’ “dehydrating to death“. There was no room in the headline or sub-heading for Israel to be named, subtly shifting the focus away from those responsible.

When the growing calls in Israeli society for Palestinian land theft and ethnic cleansing in Gaza were discussed in a Guardian podcast in November 2024, it was reduced simply to settlers “preparing to move” to Gaza, whilst in the brief description, the ongoing forcible dispossession was described as Palestinians ‘fleeing’.

In March 2025, a thorough report was published that documented the extent of the horrors as Israel intensified its bombardment. It detailed that the victims of Israel’s deadly strikes were overwhelmingly children, citing countless doctors at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza who had been treating them.

Less than 24 hours later, a Guardian report covered an Israeli airstrike on that same hospital. Despite the reality of Israel’s indiscriminate attacks presented just a day earlier, the article uncritically repeated the Israeli narrative that the strikes were “precise and targeted” to minimise civilian harm — a claim made without caveat or correction.

Not even the newspaper’s findings that illustrated the opposite were used to challenge this assertion and properly inform readers.

Weeks later, this practice was again apparent. When Israel’s claim was proven to be a characteristically flimsy fabrication as it massacred 15 paramedics, an analysis was penned in the Guardian on April 8 that comprehensively unpacked the “long history of changing its story” and the “familiar pattern of denial”, concluding there is reason to cast doubt on Israel’s “evolving narrative” because of a consistent “pattern of obfuscation over the years”.

On April 9th, Israel pummeled a neighbourhood in Gaza that destroyed an entire residential building, killing at least 29 Palestinians and leaving many more missing. In The Guardian’s live feed that reported on that atrocity, the Israeli narrative was again amplified and regurgitated without question, including the pretext that it was targeting a Hamas militant and that steps were taken to mitigate the damage.

The scepticism towards Israel’s falsehoods, and the critical scrutiny applied to its tenuous justifications at the Guardian 24 hours earlier, mysteriously vanished as Israel’s narrative resurfaced.

It wouldn’t be far-fetched to wonder: if there’s such zeal at the Guardian towers to include Israel’s account for the sake of ‘context,’ why then are the countless genocidal statements, which lay bare Israel’s brutal ambitions, consistently left out?

When Israel cut off medical supplies from entering Gaza in March, weeks before imposing another crippling illegal blockade and withholding fuel, water and food, the Guardian characterised it as Israel seeking to “change the ceasefire deal”. A crime against humanity and an act of collective punishment, as condemned by the UN, was misleadingly presented as a negotiation tactic and a military strategy, as though it were a legitimate act.

Absent from the article was any mention that this amounted to a violation of international law, ordered by a prime minister with an arrest warrant for enabling precisely such crimes. The term ‘war crime’ was only presented as an accusation from Hamas, thereby reducing a clear-cut fact to a deniable allegation from an adversary.

These are a handful of examples from a catalogue, identified at different junctures and on different scales of crime, but showcase the diluted language, deceptive descriptions and passive framing that have driven mainstream media coverage and ultimately whitewashed Israel’s crimes. The net outcome is a readership that is unlikely to piece together the reality, left only with a partial understanding of the depth of horror in Gaza. If the picture is only being partially told, then on all counts, that is a failure of journalism.

Importantly, a cursory review of the Guardian’s archives reveals that such negligent reporting when it comes to Israel’s crimes is not a lapse but ostensibly the longstanding norm.

More than seven years ago, when Israeli snipers targeted Palestinians as they peacefully embarked on the Great March of Return protests, The Guardian’s headline read “the Gaza Strip mourns its dead after protest is met with bullets”.

On October 4 2023, when Palestinians were again protesting in Gaza and again deliberately shot by Israeli forces, The Guardian reported that ‘protestors received bullet wounds to ankles, medics report’.

How hypocrisy became the norm

For comparison, just last week, when Russia pounded a Ukrainian city, the Guardian’s headlines were vivid and categorical, leaving no uncertainty about the perpetrator, the victim and the impact. “Russian missile strike kills dozens in Ukrainian city of Sumy” was the headline. Nobody was met with or received Russian acts of unmistakable aggression — they were killed by them, leaving no room for ambiguity.

These might appear to be trivial, inconsequential details, but that the linguistic devices and the attention to detail used to convey the news to observers differ depending on the actor responsible flies in the face of what responsible journalism is supposed to be.

Nor are these critiques of The Guardian rooted in an irrational antipathy toward the newspaper. Rather, they reflect and add to a growing body of documented concerns about its editorial standards.

Both the extent of censorship when it comes to Palestine and the considerable pressure the Guardian faces — and succumbs to — from the pro-Israel lobby have been exposed recently.

Additionally, a recent investigation by Declassified UK revealed that The Guardian’s editor was among other editors who privately met with a former Israeli general one month into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, when at least 10,000 Palestinians had already been killed, raising serious questions about intent and motives behind its reportage.

My own investigation found that discontent is mounting within the newspaper, with staff increasingly disillusioned by the direction of its coverage on Israel and Palestine. This internal frustration has reached the point that staff have compiled an ‘exhaustive spreadsheet’  to log examples of egregious reporting and coordinate any dissent.

This is also not to make the sweeping claim that its output is completely insufficient and skewed. It has published important reports shining a spotlight on the depth of suffering in Gaza, from high-profile journalists to the children permanently disfigured by Israel’s bombs. Their investigations on Israel’s use of artificial intelligence, both to wipe out entire Palestinian families but also for sinister surveillance purposes, have been especially significant.

But zoom out and the bigger picture is eerily familiar with the same patterns of systemic bias, deliberate distortion and deceptive underreporting apparent in the day-to-day coverage of Israel.

The apocalyptic scenes in Gaza on loop and the devastating number of lives mercilessly taken leave no room for enabling the institutions and their practices that have sustained the incomprehensible reality. Part of that reckoning is to reconsider old, entrenched mindsets, and that includes permanently putting to rest the notion that The Guardian occupies a fundamentally different space in the mainstream media ecosystem and amounts to a standard-bearer for principled journalism.

Original article: newarab.com