They’re not quoting the IDF’s plans for what they called an “ethnic cleansing.” They’re quoting someone who characterized the plans as an ethnic cleansing. I think it’s foolish to assume they meant to imply the IDF was waving around plans for something titled “the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Rafah.”

Commondreams is a good outlet. Yes, they may editorialize and are not shy about their left-leaning positions, but that doesn’t inherently make an outlet untrustworthy. Fox calling themselves “fair and balanced” and using charged language in their chyrons—for example, I was at the gym and I saw them referring to the Campus sit-ins as “riots” and the participants as “antisemites.” (If I’m remembering those correctly, but it was insanely loaded language of their own creation)—is what leads them to be a problematic outlet. They skew facts, obscure the truth, and heavily edit out anything that doesn’t rile up their viewership.

Commondreams has a mission to give good information that may cater to the left, but they’re a non-profit outlet. And there is an inherent difference between left-bias and right-bias. Right bias has to alter reality to fit their narrative. The established left-leaning outlets like Commondreams aren’t altering and obscuring. They’re highlighting what they see as important information that, yes, adheres to a more left-leaning worldview, but what does that mean in this context? They’re willfully calling out Israel when “center” and right-leaning outlets are beholden to them. They’ll investigate issues that are important to civil rights, privacy, etc. But that doesn’t mean their worldview warps the reality of the topics they cover. They’re just more relevant to progressives/leftists.

Now, there are definitely a lot of terrible, probably non-journalist run outlets that really cropped up around 2016 like those “blue news” Wordpress sites or whatever that used to fly around Reddit. There is a way to be untrustworthy and left/liberal-biased. Definitely not saying it’s impossible. But it’s a different beast when discussing long-established, trustworthy left-leaning sources.

You know how it’s been said “reality has a left-leaning bias?” Well, that’s pretty relevant here. To be left-biased, you still report on facts that speak to leftist people. To be right-biased, it means you’re singling out minority groups, catering to big business in disingenuous ways (because that’s how they operate. They can basically run propaganda as private institutions, and the right-biased outlets unquestioningly run with it.) Left-biased outlets are critical, right-leaning uncritical. That’s a huge difference.