The New York Times newspaper has instructed its journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza enclave to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
Many NYT staffers told The American Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives when reporting on the Gaza war.
The memo first distributed to the journalists in November as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war.
The document which was shared as a guidance collected and expanded on past style directives about the Israeli–Palestinian issues, presents an internal window into the thinking of Times international editors as they have faced upheaval within the newsroom surrounding the paper’s Gaza war coverage.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians who were expelled from other territories of Palestine. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
The memo, written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies, “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”
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