Habitual media: interrogating Western legacy media’s complicity in the epistemic ‘war’ against Palestinians

This paper addresses the coverage by habitual Western legacy media of the 2023/24 Israeli genocidal war against Gaza. It considers the observable media-related practices these media used in coverage of the war and how these practices have helped define, articulate, imagine and intervene implicitly and explicitly in the war, its securitisation, visualisation, mediation, narration, and representation. Together, it suggests, these practices serve to normalise Israel’s epistemic violence against the Palestinians while also depriving them of agency as knowable subjects/agents. It suggests the practice of devoicing the colonised through epistemic violence aims at sowing a narrative that sustains the asymmetry of power in global affairs and attributes a higher moral authority in the ‘Global North’ while widening the gap between the West and the Rest.