When journalism abdicates, propaganda takes hold, and the media-driven West becomes the docile stage for a narrative violence as lethal as the weapons it conceals.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
In this context, Alain Gabon’s article presents an alarming observation, revealing that the French media, far from acting as a counterweight to power, have become structural relays of Israeli propaganda. Published during the siege of Gaza, his analysis details how this orchestrated and uniform coverage masks the extent of the crimes against the Palestinians and neutralizes the visibility of their suffering. Gabon exposes the coordinated strategies of disinformation, territorial erasure, and language manipulation, revealing, as mentioned above, a media alignment comparable to the subservience of European leaders to Washington and Tel Aviv.
In an approach combining critical media analysis, discourse analysis, and sociology of organizations, the following text reveals the deep mechanisms of this historical drift, by examining the industrial architecture of Israeli propaganda – where omission becomes a weapon – and by scrutinizing the language used as a veritable battlefield (sanitize, depoliticize, absolve) in order to unveil the institutional logics that have been hidden until now.
From political vassalage to informational servility
The dominant French media outlets – BFMTV, LCI, France 2, TF1, Le Parisien, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération, and Europe 1 – function here as logistical chains for the colonial narrative, not as news organizations in the strict sense. Their dangerousness is comparable to that of drug cartels or terrorist groups: not because they shoot, but because they desensitize, normalize, and legitimize mass death. Just as cartels control territories, these media outlets control language. Just as terrorist groups destroy the fear of crime, these newsrooms destroy the fear of lies. They are no longer media outlets: they are launderers of state violence, moral launderers in the service of a colonial power. The paradox is that these French media outlets are an atypical reflection of most of the mainstream media that fuel debates in the public sphere of the Western world, giving the impression that they all draw their sustenance from the same source: Nazi-Zionism.
It is precisely within this framework that Alain Gabon argues that the transformation of French media into structural relays of Israeli propaganda contributes to masking the scale of a process described as genocide against the Palestinian people. Despite a temporary shift in tone between May and October, aligned with the moderate criticisms of certain Western governments, this evolution amounted to little more than a media-driven management of the damage, without any real questioning of “massively pro-Israeli” positions.
Further on, the author demonstrates that this coverage relies on systematic and coordinated strategies, common to both public and private television channels, and to the print media from the center-left to the far right, with the marginal exception of L’Humanité, communist daily with a smaller readership. These strategies have neutralized any lasting visibility of Palestinian suffering, while continuing to adopt, in their own jargon and sometimes verbatim, without any critical distance, the rhetoric of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli army.
A critical analysis of these insidiously crafted and surreptitiously pursued strategies reveals a primary central mechanism: disinformation by omission. Even though the genocidal nature of the Israeli offensive has been acknowledged by Holocaust scholars, an independent UN commission, and prominent Israeli Jewish figures, the French media, like other Western media outlets, saturated their airwaves with Israeli officials and propagandists, while simultaneously granting unchallenged airtime to genocide deniers. Armed with falsehoods, figures like Georges Bensoussan and Caroline Fourest were thus able to deny the humanitarian blockade, claim that Palestinian deaths were exaggerated and should be “divided by at least five or even ten,” or disseminate fabricated narratives such as that of “decapitated babies,” without any serious challenge.
This disinformation was accompanied by a deliberate erasure of territorial and human realities, particularly outside Gaza. Alain’s article highlights that Le Parisien failed to cover the West Bank for eleven months, thus obscuring an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. Similarly, the evening news programs on France 2 and TF1 drastically reduced their coverage of Gaza at the height of the offensive, devoting more time to trivial matters (celebrity news and social media rumors concerning Brigitte Macron), which, according to the author, amounts to active censorship of the mass crimes committed against Palestinian civilians.
When language erases victims to whitewash violence
Here, the crime is no longer merely omission, but semantic falsification. The Western media – CNN, BBC, Reuters, AFP, The New York Times, The Guardian – form an international alliance of euphemism, a Holy Alliance of sanitized vocabulary. These newsrooms behave like tragic clowns of the Empire, priests of colonial holy water, repainting mass graves as “zones of tension.” Their servility to Tel Aviv and Washington is the exact mirror image of that of European leaders: the same alignment, the same cowardice, the same moral abdication. They do not report reality; they disinfect it, like cleaning a crime scene before the arrival of witnesses. It is precisely the same method that is applied to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict: Russia is the “aggressor”; Ukraine is the “victim,” or again, Russia is “bad”; Ukraine is “good.” On their television sets, they rejoice when a Russian soldier falls on the battlefield, when a drone strikes somewhere in Russia, or when a terrorist attack is perpetrated on Russian soil against a Russian citizen, but they are saddened when any of these things happen in Ukraine. In their ideological mindset, a Russian soul is never the equivalent of a Ukrainian soul. This gives the impression that maternity wards in the West reproduce the hierarchy of human beings: the established here and the marginalized there, with Westerners being the established and the rest of the world, the marginalized.
Furthermore, a second pillar of this all-encompassing coverage emerges from Alain’s article: the systematic sanitization of language. According to the author, the genocide is reclassified as a “war against Hamas” or a new episode in the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Fundamental terms – “colonization,” “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “massacres,” and “occupied territories” – are omitted in the manner of the omnipresent Rina Bassist. “Ethnic cleansing” becomes a “population displacement,” the bombing of civilians is described as strikes on “enemy positions,” and a state labeled “racist, colonial, and religiously supremacist” is presented as a “democracy” belonging to “the West,” yet governed (Israel), according to Gabon, for years by a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, murder, and other inhumane acts. The passive voice – “the Palestinians are dying” – systematically erases Israeli responsibility, to the enchantment of a false symmetry.
The article also goes on to highlight structural double standards. According to the author, media criticism bodies (Acrimed, Arrêt sur Images, LMSI, Blast) have documented a radically pro-Israeli framing: overwhelming dominance of pro-Netanyahu voices marginalization and disqualification of pro-Palestinian guests, who are accused of being “pro-Hamas.” This asymmetry is blatant in the treatment of hostages and prisoners: the release of 20 Israelis received extensive and empathetic coverage, while that of 90 Palestinians was only briefly addressed, the latter being referred to as “prisoners” and sometimes collectively equated with “terrorists,” even when they were children.
These biases extend, in an absolute asymmetry, to geopolitics, particularly in the reception of Trump’s “peace plan,” which demands the demilitarization and “deradicalization” of Palestinians without ever considering those of Israel, which is responsible for an incomparably higher number of civilian deaths.
Finally, the author identifies recurring discursive processes, such as reductio ad Hamas, reductio ad October 7, the false symmetry between victims, and the “fallacious presentism,” which consists of erasing the long history of colonization and ethnic cleansing that began in 1947. Any attempt at contextualization is then assimilated to a justification of violence.
The article’s conclusion is unequivocal: from a professional and ethical standpoint, French coverage of Israel-Palestine constitutes a “journalistic disaster,” aligned with French foreign policy since the Sarkozy era. According to the author, the French media have been more pro-Israel, propagandistic, and unconditionally Zionist than many Israeli journalists, Holocaust or Shoah historians, NGOs like B’Tselem, and even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert himself. The same pattern is observed in the coverage of the proxy war waged by the Nazi-Zionists against Russia in Ukraine since 2014, following the Euromaidan coup that brought Zelensky to power.
The question is no longer whether the French and Western media are providing poor information, but rather for whom they are truly working. In light of Israeli propaganda, they appear not as observers, but as actors in the narrative crime, complicit through language, omission, and alignment.
We are now faced with a historic responsibility to judge these media outlets not by their slogans of neutrality, but by the deaths they render invisible. For when journalism chooses the side of power over that of victims, it ceases to be a counter-power and becomes a weapon of mass moral destruction.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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