Mainstream journalism insists that its core function is to investigate the actions of the most powerful people in society. The BBC’s editorial guidelines state: “We must always scrutinise arguments, question consensus and hold power to account with consistency and due impartiality”. 

According to AG Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times: “Journalists hold power to account by exposing corruption and abuse. Journalists reveal injustice and inequality”.

Nowhere has this myth been more thoroughly exposed than in news coverage of the war crimes that have been committed in Gaza since 7/10.

Critics have identified how Palestinians have been consistently dehumanised and marginalised in the media and highlighted the fact that established news outlets have firmly reproduced a consensus on Israel’s unambiguous right to “self-defence”.

History has been erased, genocide normalised and language brutalised when describing massacres as “precision air strikes”.

Much of the criticism of this coverage has understandably focused on the most visible and outrageous examples of bias. 

But there’s another side to the problem of the media: the stories that are not covered and the uncomfortable truths (for Israel and its supporters) that are not acknowledged.

This is particularly the case when it comes to the issue of how the UK military has contributed to Israel’s assault on Gaza.