The evolution of the process that led to the ceasefire in Gaza exposed, without any cushion, the so-called “media bubble”. A space where shock and surprise reign and where, from the public to commentators, from politicians to journalists, convictions built on wrong assumptions multiply.
Narratives confused with information. Objective news mixed with interpretation. Wishful thinking served as analysis. Thinking with your heart is still more comfortable than thinking with your reason.
In a bubble characterized by equivocation — excess or proliferation of information, often conflicting — the noise from commentators, who suffer from the same problem as the public, only reinforces the echo effect. Social networks complete the picture: they spread partial versions at lightning speed and make verification irrelevant. In minutes, opinions become facts. Facts are dismissed as mere opinions.
And he’s not innocent.
There is disinformation and propaganda deliberately launched by agents of the conflict itself. Photographs out of context, manipulated videos, inflated or minimized numbers, fabricated reports. All with the same aim: manipulating perceptions, conditioning public opinion and shaping the global narrative to serve those who fight less on the ground and more on screen.
They are cognitive weapons — and, in this war, they work with surgical efficiency.
Today, the decisive tool for navigating this bubble is no longer obtaining information. It’s filtering it. Debug the data. Separate the essential from the accessory, the objective from the bias, the fact from the emotion. It is the literacy of distrust — the border between the informed citizen and the mere replicator of noise.
Without this filter, public perception becomes a reflex conditioned by external agendas. Decisions, in civil society and at the political and diplomatic level, react more to the media pressure of the moment than to a cold and sustained assessment.
Gaza is an example of this: an almost automatic alignment of positions, fueled more by emotion and targeted media material than by rigorous knowledge of the facts.
And then we come to the surprise. The ceasefire, and in particular its terms, caught many off guard. But it was an induced — and predictable — result that favors Israel, allowing it to assume, with recognized legitimacy, what has always been visible to those who did not allow themselves to be imprisoned by the fog of the media bubble.
The rest is noise, distributed between occasional indignations and paused certainties — until the next bubble.
Strategy, Security and Defense Analyst