This is why it's important for capitalists to buy things like Twitter and force the selling Tik Tok. These things threaten the monopoly on information.
I don't want to come across as supporting the NYT, but this sounds like the memo is a style guide against biased language which is pretty common.
News is supposed to give you information, not persuade you to take an opinion and normally a style guide helps do that in a consistent voice. I'd be interested in seeing the entire memo.
That being said it seems like the NYT does a poor job of following its own guidelines in presenting unbiased news.
The linked article makes very clear that style guides are common.
However, the specifics of this style guide also happen to follow pretty exactly how Israel likes things presented - there is no "Palestine", they didn't turn the Palestinians into "refugees", they didn't "slaughter" the 15000 children that they killed, with the opposite standard for the Palestinians.
That being said it seems like the NYT does a poor job of following its own guidelines in presenting unbiased news
I don't have a copy of the entire style guide so I can't comment on the specifics of how they intend to cover Israel. Could you share your copy of the style guide so we can have the specifics that you mentioned?
Apparently you have a copy of the linked article that I don't have access to since the article I read only has snippets of the style guide as reported by anonymous sources.
steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
It really doesn’t seem the guidance aims for not persuading you to take an opinion
The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip 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.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo.
The latest Palestinian death toll estimate stands at more than 33,000, including at least 15,000 children — likely undercounts due to Gaza’s collapsed health infrastructure and missing persons, many of whom are believed to have died in the rubble left by Israel’s attacks over the past six months.
In the cases of describing “occupied territory” and the status of refugees in Gaza, the Times style guidelines run counter to norms established by the United Nations and international humanitarian law.
as each has a slightly different status.” The United Nations, along with much of the world, considers Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem to be occupied Palestinian territories, seized by Israel in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.
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