The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians. I do not believe that this is a conspiracy. But more important, I do not think it is a coincidence. An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. It’s not that the facts of the stories are so wrong—though sometimes it is that—it is what is not said, the passive voice, the ceding of authority to military flacks, the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.