NYT orders reporters: Avoid “occupied territory,” “refugee camp,” and “genocide”

I’ve covered U.S. politics for almost two decades, and I can tell you that no news outlet exerts more influence over how the public and policymakers perceive Israel’s war in Gaza than the New York Times. The collapse of other newspapers and digital outlets over the years has left the Times effectively alone at the top of the hierarchy.

That makes the reporting the New York Times does, and how they do it, exponentially more influential. And nobody is checking them — except The Intercept.

Now, an internal New York Times memo leaked to The Intercept shows how their reporters have been instructed to avoid terms like “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “genocide” — shading the paper’s coverage to favor Israel’s narrative.

As public opinion increasingly turns against Israel’s war on Gaza, we’re now seeing a backlash from leaders and institutions seeking to enforce lockstep support for U.S. aid.

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The internal New York Times memo leaked to The Intercept instructs reporters to use the word “terrorist” to describe attacks on Israeli civilians, but does not apply the term to Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Usage of “refugee camps” is also warned against when describing areas that house hundreds of thousands of U.N.-registered Palestinian refugees.

The memo further discourages use of the phrase “occupied territories” to describe Gaza and the West Bank, eliding a term used by the U.N. and even the U.S. State Department to describe land seized by Israel in 1967. “Genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” are also restricted; in January, the International Court of Justice found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza.

A source in the Times newsroom described the memo to us as “the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”

This kind of systematic bias isn’t just misleading to readers. It powerfully shapes the policy debate in Washington, with Joe Biden continuing to pump billions of dollars of military aid into Israel.

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