Social media users are exposing how major news headlines manipulate language to sanitize violence in Gaza—proving that a simple annotation can be a means of resistance.
Language Is Never Neutral
The best way to communicate something is usually the simplest way to communicate something. Yet, journalists and editors will offer wordy or deficient headlines knowing that readers are likely to interpret a headline in ways that align with dominant cultural narratives and ideologies. In a media landscape where people rely on headlines for the full story, clarity and accuracy should be the goal. A 2024 study led by Penn State analyzed more than 35 million public Facebook posts and found that users shared links, both political and non-political, without clicking on them more than 75% of the time. Further analysis of the political links found that users were more likely to share a link without clicking when it aligned with their political views. And of 2,969 links that contained misinformation and were shared over 41 million times, 76.94% of the shares came from conservative users and 14.25% came from liberal users. As such, headlines becoming the story is dangerous because even when assumed to be neutral, the choices journalists and editors make aren’t just about style, they’re about politics, and they contribute to narratives that shape how we perceive the world.
Within the last two years, since Israel has continued its genocide in Gaza, I’ve noticed a grassroots effort on social media where users screen capture biased headlines, often from outlets in the “big five” media conglomerate, and annotate them to call out agenda-driven reporting. These social media users are highlighting problematic and misleading phrasing and comparing headlines that report the same story in noticeably different ways. In doing so, these users are calling out linguistic biases in media that are used to uphold oppressive systems, sanitize violence towards Palestinians, and obscure the United States’ and Israel’s responsibility in the occupation of Palestine.
Small Acts of Editing
As a linguist, I hold a strong belief that anyone can be a linguist because we all engage in linguistic analysis frequently. We notice differences in each other’s accents and question why words spelled the same are pronounced differently—and these media call-outs are another example of such analysis. Media in the United States has a long history of biased reporting and sensationalism spanning the last couple hundred years, so these sentiments surrounding biased reporting are not new. But what does seem different are the various ways in which everyday people have engaged in calling out the media to restructure the narrative.
These seem like simple gestures, but they are powerful ones. With some social media posts reaching over one million views and garnering tens of thousands of interactions, the impact that these posts have on an individual’s interpretation of these events cannot be ignored. With the ability to reframe the narrative, these acts of underlining misinformation, rephrasing oddly-written sentences, and comparing headlines are indirectly teaching and warning readers about the choices made in crafting headlines.
How Journalists Shape Interpretation
In understanding how media uses language to serve the interests of the dominant sociopolitical group, consider the examples below:
The two BBC and New York Times headlines here show how journalists make choices to affect the public’s perception of violence. In both cases, an airstrike killed civilians. However, only one headline from each publication mentions an agent, the person or entity who can be held responsible. This is not a neutral linguistic choice. Naming agents in some cases, while omitting them in others, reveal an inconsistency that reinforces oppressive systems by deciding who is responsible for violence and who is not.
In another example below from the BBC, the comparison of two headlines reveals how using an expression that softens violence can avoid confronting it directly. Both headlines report on the killing of children, but in the headline about a baby in Ukraine the wording is explicit. The verb “killed” is unambiguous and shows that a life was actively taken.
On the other hand, the headline about Hind Rajab in Gaza uses the passive voice, “found dead,” to describe the violence. This choice in wording creates distance from the death and its cause, as though Hind’s life ended in some unexplained or natural way. The absence of both the active verb and the agent responsible softens the violence enacted by Israel and presents the child’s death as a happening rather than the result of an attack. This discrepancy shows how subtle choices in language obscure accountability and shape how readers understand violence.
Lastly, contrasted headlines from Reuters show how choices in language shape how readers absorb information. In both cases, the headlines discuss American citizens, however, the headline discussing the Palestinian teenager is syntactically heavy: the central point of the headline, the killing of the teenager, is buried beneath layers of modifiers. Additionally, one of the modifiers, the American citizenship, is not plainly stated, and instead uses the uncommon phrasing, “with U.S. citizenship,” adding to the wordiness of the headline. In contrast, the second headline about the hostage is direct, and foregrounds the American identity, resulting in a headline that is clear and emotionally resonant without the padding seen in the other headline.
The discrepancy in the headlines suggests not only a particular reluctance to name the Palestinian teenager as an American citizen in a straightforward way, but also as a way to use their ethnic origin to lessen the effect of the killing. Their Palestinian identity is foregrounded, not as a point of pride, but as a linguistic move to distance the reader from the victim and soften the weight of such violence at the hands of Israel. Through the manner in which the content in these headlines is presented, it becomes clear that some lives matter, while others are obscured with layers of conditions.
Pragmatic Manipulation in News Coverage
To understand why the media call-outs are powerful, it helps to look at how language is manipulated. In linguistics, pragmatics provides a framework for analyzing the relationship between what is said, what is implied, and how it is understood. A common framework used is Grice’s Maxims of Communication—a set of four unwritten rules which guide effective and cooperative communication:
- Quantity: Be informative
- Quality: Be truthful
- Manner: Be clear
- Relevance: Be relevant
Like all communicators, journalists will bend these rules to suit their intentions, making decisions about when to defy, or flout, these maxims and when to abide by them. When harmdoers aren’t named, when violence is softened, and when uncommon sentence structures are used, headlines break these cooperative rules. Such decisions result in headlines that are strategically unclear, misleading, and uninformative.
This is a form of pragmatic manipulation. The headlines above related to Palestine were constructed in a way that strategically guides what readers are meant to interpret. These headlines flout the maxims of quantity (“to be informative”) and relevance (“to be relevant”) by withholding important and relevant information, such as Israel being the agent of harm. They also flout the maxims of manner (“to be clear”) and quality (“to be truthful”) by using convoluted or softened constructions that obscure the details of an event, and such convolution or softening is misleading.
To take Grice’s framework a step further, linguists also use Relevance Theory to analyze how language is understood. It suggests that people seek meaning with the least mental effort, assuming they are presented with information that is true and sufficient. Media outlets take advantage of this tendency and rely on readers to fill in the blanks or interpret vagueness using their own prior knowledge and assumptions. By flouting the maxims of quantity, relevance, manner and quality through excluding the harmdoers, minimizing violence, and using vague and misleading language, these headlines guide readers toward a particular understanding that protects the image of Israel.
This contrast between the headlines about Palestinian victims, and the headlines about Ukrainian and American victims shows manipulative speech. The choices that journalists and editors make guide the interpretation of the news by shaping what readers should understand as most relevant, and what gaps readers need to fill in. Media call-outs, like those we looked at above, are critiques that insert truth and clarity.
Language as a Means for Resistance
What makes these news media call-outs powerful is that they fill in the blanks and expose what was left obscure. In the examples outlined, journalists and editors crafted biased headlines under the guise of neutrality, and relied on readers to apply their own prior knowledge and assumptions. However, the annotations left by concerned social media users made agency and harm clear, and exposed the underlying agenda to protect harmful institutions.
These call-outs follow a long lineage of reframing the narrative as a form of resistance. Social justice movements have always fought for control over the narrative, understanding that language shapes what we believe is tolerable and how we can envision change. It’s exciting to see people noticing these manipulative maneuvers in journalism and doing linguistic analysis as a means of resistance.
However, this is about more than linguistic theory; it’s also about power. Headlines are part of a machine that don’t just describe the world, they shape it. If journalists use headlines that obscure violence and shield institutions, they contribute to a world where injustice remains unchecked. And when people intervene, they’re reclaiming narrative power.
These acts of editing may seem insignificant compared to mass demonstrations, but in a world where it takes all kinds, these acts add to the machine of resistance. They demonstrate that we are not passive consumers of media, and we recognize the significance of how language influences our understanding of violence. These acts encourage a media literate world and ripple outward to create conversations, both online and offline, about the telling of our stories, and they remind us to notice the gap between what’s written and what’s real.
Institutions will always use language to protect themselves. As a community, it is our duty to use language to push back. The media call-outs are small and mighty refusals to accept the world as it’s framed for us. They show us that editing is not always about grammar or purism; sometimes it’s about survival.
