Miami News Has Gall To Still Give More Coverage To #Surfside Than Palestine

“This is seriously overwrought, especially since so many of the victims were just Jews.”

Miami, July 6 – Journalism operations focused on South Florida and the state’s largest metro area have yet to refocus on the all-important issue of Palestinian grievances since the collapse of a local high-rise residential building back in June, industry watchdogs report.

Media observers decried today the failure of Miami-area reporters and news outlets to return even now to the default media attitude placing Palestine front and center, instead choosing to maintain daily coverage of the Champlain Towers South disaster that took the lives of at least several dozen people, with more than a hundred still missing and 11 injured. Media watchdog groups called the continuing coverage “out of proportion” and “a grave injustice to the people of Palestine and to victims of Zionist aggression.”

“It’s been almost two weeks at this point,” noted Electronic Intifada chief Ali Abunimah. “That’s quite enough time to get the picture: ok, a bunch of people died; some folks screwed up big-time on preventing the collapse; maybe a follow-up story in August on page eight, or a two-minute segment on the late-night local news. But this is seriously overwrought, especially since so many of the victims were just Jews, and probably Zionists, so there’s a serious travesty going on here. This is broadcast time and newspaper or website space that could have been devoted to the only genuinely important story of our time, but no – these so-called journalists have to pretend people need or want to know about some stupid condominium that was probably owned by Jews, too.”

972 Magazine contributor Mairav Zonshine complained that it fell to her and her colleagues in the online anti-Israel world to bring to the public the stories of Palestinian suffering and Jewish brutality or perfidy that coverage of the Surfside collapse overshadowed. “Some of us worked our tails off, but at the end of the day we just don’t have the exposure that the mainstream outlets do,” she acknowledged. “Because even national or international operations such as CNN and the BBC, companies that normally jump at any hint of a story that makes Israel look bad, have for some unfathomable reason decided their audiences care or should know about some dead Floridians, no one has heard about the latest accusation from a Gaza Palestinian that Israel has tortured him to death for like the fifth time.”

“The best we’ve managed, when we realized the focus wasn’t shifting back to its customary Palestine-first mentality, has been to try to make Surfside about Palestine,” observed Richard Silverstein, who runs the Seattle-based Tikkun Olam blog. “Some of us did that through tweets questioning or criticizing the search and rescue personnel on the scene from Israel; some of us tried to draw analogies to building collapses in the Gaza Strip that resulted from Israeli airstrikes. Ultimately, though, it’s just going to take time until the world rights itself again and equilibrium is restored, with Palestine the only story, every single day.”

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