Jon Snow's basic error in commenting on Israel's Iron Dome: confirmation bias, emotional reasoning, and the seduction of affectively-charged thinking.
Jon Snow, the accomplished British journalist and presenter of Channel 4 News, seems to me to be a very compassionate human being with the highest standards of integrity. He has a sharp intellect and a capacity for asking perspicacious questions of those he interviews, applying his analytical mind in an objective way to complicated situations, and persisting in his attempt to extract honest answers from interviewees who throw up a fog of subterfuge. To his credit, he was most assiduous when he attempted to interview Hamas's foreign affairs spokesman, Osama Hamdan, on 30 July, asking him why Hamas militants do not desist from their missile attacks on Israel, which would then lead to Israel's military action in Gaza being terminated. Jon Snow may not have been able to penetrate the fog of ranting and mendacious subterfuge from Hamdan - the Joseph Goebbels of fascist Hamas, whose Charter is committed to the complete annihilation of Israel and the global genocide of all Jewish people - but at least he did try.Yet Mr Snow begins this interview with Hamdan by saying:
"Osama Hamdan, Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to go on killing Gaza's women and children, civilians generally: why are you encouraging them by still continuing to fire your ineffective rockets into their territory?"
There are two serious and fundamental flaws with Mr Snow's opening question, however. The first is the choice to use the punchy, emotive expression "Israel killing Gaza's women and children" without suitable qualification. The Israel Defence Force is doing all it can to avoid civilian casualties, even using texts and telephone calls to Gazans to advise them to leave their neighbourhoods before IDF military strikes on buildings where Hamas militants are believed to have concealed military ordnance take place. The problem is that, not only are fascist Hamas deliberately hiding such ordnance in civilian buildings and highly-populated areas, and firing it from such areas, it is also encouraging civilians to remain in their buildings, and even to take their children onto the rooftops, to act as human shields. After all, civilian deaths are something regarded as a double-positive by these Islamist religious extremists: not only do Hamas claim Gazans who die in the conflict will have immediate access through the portals of paradise as "martyrs"; but also, civilian deaths in Gazan human shields are Hamas's key weapon in the propaganda war that gullible and tunnel-visioned members of the international community are allowing fascist Hamas to win. Although the claim Mr Snow makes in his question is accurate - Israel is killing Gaza's women and children - it nonetheless excludes sufficient information to make the question one that is not misleading. It has an emotional charge of bias. It is by no means a perfect analogy, but in some respects it is similar to saying a heart surgeon is killing his patients - men, women, and children - without mentioning that these are patients who only have a chance of survival if they undergo an operation that has a significant chance of causing their deaths. The deaths of Gazan civilians are unintended and unwanted by the IDF, in the same way that the deaths of his heart patients are unintended and unwanted by the surgeon. Both are a tragic by-product of aiming for a positive, valued outcome that is very different from the deaths that come about as a result of pursuing that value.
It is selective use of facts to produce utterances that, although not strictly untrue, convey information in a way that reflects bias in the person uttering them, and are likely to effect bias in the people hearing them who are not in possession of the full facts.
The other flaw with Mr Snow's opening question lies in his reference to the Hamas rockets being fired into Israel as "ineffective". On the previous day to this interview with Hamdan, after he had returned from Gaza, Mr Snow claimed on Channel 4 News that Israel's defensive anti-missile shield, the "Iron Dome", was keeping "absolutely everything out".
If you slide the cursor to 1:53 in the above video, you will hear Mr Snow say,
"Now, of course, Hamas, for its part, was throwing rockets into Israel designed ideally - as they would put it - to kill Israelis. But of course, Israel, courtesy of American finance, has invented the most brilliant shield, which is keeping absolutely everything everything out. And that's a big difference." (My emphasis)
Given that at least 10% of Gazan rockets manage to penetrate the Iron Dome, and that the Iron Dome is ineffective against Hamas mortar attacks, this was a serious factual error on Mr Snow's part. Apart from the Israeli deaths and injuries caused by such rocket and mortar attacks, the psychological impact on the civilian population of continually having to respond to air raids, knowing there was a 10% chance that any rocket was going to explode on Israeli territory, and not knowing where, is traumatic. This is quintessential terrorism: the population being terrorised by an ongoing threat to their lives from an extremist organisation. People are unable to go about their daily lives in peace. If this was happening to UK citizens at the hands of a genocidal, fascist neighbouring government, we would surely expect our government to destroy the enemy's capacity for launching those rockets, too: even if that enemy was using human shields and a significant number of civilians would die as a result.
Journalists make mistakes, of course. Yet apparently not knowing that mortar fire and 10% of Hamas rockets were penetrating the Iron Dome and killing, injuring and terrorising Israeli men, women and children trying to go about their peaceful lives, was surely a very serious error for any journalist reporting on Gaza, and especially so for a journalist of Jon Snow's seniority, experience and calibre. The fact that Hamas rockets and mortar shells are penetrating the Iron Dome and landing in Israel is the very raison d'être for the current Israeli military action in Gaza. How this fact could have escaped Mr Snow's attention is astonishing.
I do not believe for a single moment that Jon Snow knew that Hamas mortar shells and rockets were still hitting Israel but chose to lie on national television and claim they were not. He is a person of great integrity. He clearly did not know the full facts: even a fact as basic as this one. This is highly instructive, as it is a glaring example of confirmation bias: selective attention in the researching and gathering (in this case) or presentation of information where one's opinion about a subject is already made up, and where there is an emotional investment in an interpretation that would be disturbed by the proper effort to diligently research and consider information that contradicts one's opinions. The consensus in the western "liberal" media is that Israel is almost entirely at fault, and that everything must be interpreted and presented from that perspective, with disapproval from one's similar "liberal" social and professional circle if one dares to stray from the accepted anti-Israel Weltanschauung. It is not at all clear to me how Jon Snow could have been ignorant about Hamas weapons hitting Israel unless he had not taken the trouble to carry out the most basic research into Israel's explanation for its current military action.
This seems to me to be an example of what is happening more generally in the West with regard to the interpretation of Israel's highly vulnerable position in the Middle East in particular, and to Israel's military action in Gaza in particular. If even an accomplished journalist such as Jon Snow can fall into such an easily-avoidable snare of confirmation bias
with regard to Israel and Gaza, so can large swathes of our populations. Most people are not really interested in finding out the causes of the conflict between Israel and Gaza and in researching the region's complex history, and they simply react to images of Gazan civilians being killed, imbibing the interpretation offered to them on a plate by the Western "liberal" media that Israeli action in Gaza is wrong: an interpretation that is forged and confirmed when journalists are so strongly invested in an interpretation, that devoting time and effort to researching and considering evidence that might undermine their interpretation and put them at odds with the consensus interpretation they are rewarded for buying into, is neglected, as it feels too aversive and seems too unlikely to yield salient information.
I once saw a T-shirt on sale at a psychology conference with the slogan, "Don't believe everything you think." This is surely wise counsel: especially when our thoughts are associated with a powerful emotional charge and are reinforced by a feeling of belonging to a community of people who approve of those who value and believe such thoughts. It can sometimes be a pleasurable thing to discover our thoughts are inaccurate; but sometimes, it can be very painful, and expressing dissent from a common "liberal" consensus can result in more pain still when social disapproval kicks in. The best investigative journalists will be alert to the pitfalls of confirmation bias and sacrificing objectivity and impartiality on the altar of consensus conformity and emotional reasoning. When a particular pitfall is so treacherous as to claim journalists of Jon Snow's calibre, integrity and compassion, we can understand how so many millions of unsuspecting good people get unwittingly sucked into it. Most significantly, it is not only an interpretation that does a great injustice to Israel. It is an interpretation that rewards fascist states when they choose to use civilians as human shields, which positively encourages the immoral practice of human shield deployment in warfare.
© Gary Powell, 2014
