‘How to Sell a Genocide’: Media Critic's Book Details Biased Coverage of Israeli Assault on Gaza
Adam Johnson said his analysis of thousands of articles and TV segments showed that "US media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement."
A new book is using an exhaustive data analysis to demonstrate that mainstream US media outlets "systematically favor Israel" in their coverage of the Gaza genocide.
For his book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, which became available last month from Pluto Books, journalist Adam Johnson said he "examined over 12,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC," which has since rebranded as MS NOW
He said that by analyzing the content of these news outlets, he seeks to "demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that US media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement," frequently using "double standards" that treat Israeli life and safety as inherently more important than those of Palestinians.
Johnson focused especially on center-left outlets that were considered influential within the administration of then-President Joe Biden, who continued to provide almost totally unrestricted aid to Israel despite fierce opposition by many Democratic voters in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
An article written by Johnson published Tuesday in The Intercept previews seven statistical findings proving this anti-Palestinian bias, particularly during the first year of the conflict when Israel's leaders were working hardest to establish a "narrative" in the American press that could justify the total destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of its people.
He found that the media used the phrase "right to defend itself" almost exclusively to refer to Israel, which used it to justify numerous civilian massacres. Guests, anchors, and reporters on CNN and MSNBC referred to the right of Israelis to defend themselves 755 times during the first 90 days of the conflict, while the same right was invoked for Palestinians only eight times over that period.
Johnson found that print media outlets invoked Israel's right of self-defense 100 times more frequently than for Palestinians.
Although Palestinians lack a sovereign state due to Israel's illegal occupation, meaning their right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter is disputed, they are still afforded the right to self-determination and the right to resist occupation under international law.
Media outlets examined by Johnson also used the phrase "human shields" to describe instances where civilians were killed in close proximity to Palestinian militants. Though Johnson noted that this justification is "rejected by human rights groups," he found that CNN and MSNBC described Palestinians killed by Israel that way nearly 800 times, while print outlets did hundreds more.
But media outlets almost never described Israel's use of Palestinians as human shields, even though there have been multiple cases of Israeli troops documented forcing Palestinian detainees to carry out life-threatening tasks on the battlefield in order to protect themselves from injury.
The killing of Israeli civilians was frequently described in much more "emotive" terms than it was for Palestinian civilians, even as the latter were killed in far greater numbers.
Words like "massacre," "slaughter," "savage," and "barbaric" were used hundreds of times by print and TV outlets to refer to the killing of roughly 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023. But Israeli forces' subsequent killings of approximately 24,000 Palestinians during the first 100 days of the conflict hardly ever elicited these words.
This is despite numerous documented attacks on schools, hospitals, aid facilities, and other civilian sites, as well as a near-total blockade of food, water, and medicine entering Gaza, which resulted in mass starvation and illness.
All the while, the horrific statistics coming out of Gaza were downplayed by the persistent use of the phrase "Hamas-run" by news networks to cast a shadow of doubt over the Gaza Health Ministry, which was the main official source for death toll figures in Gaza.
The US State Department, the World Health Organization, and Human Rights Watch had long relied on the ministry figures and investigations into their reporting on past conflicts found them to be accurate. But CNN nevertheless adopted it as an official policy to refer to the health ministry as "Hamas-run," a term which implied its figures were likely being inflated for propaganda purposes, even though independent estimates suggest it actually vastly undercounted the dead.
Facing pressure to cut off support for Israel, Biden and several officials in his administration used similar language to suggest the death tolls could be exaggerated, including National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, who called the ministry “just a front for Hamas.“
In January 2026, after spending more than two years using the "Hamas-run" pejorative to cast doubt upon the idea that civilians were killed en masse in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) finally acknowledged the accuracy of the Gaza Health Ministry's death count, which by that point had surpassed 71,000.
Johnson further contextualized this anti-Palestinian bias by comparing coverage of the Gaza conflict to the coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
He found that CNN and MSNBC discussed child casualties more often in Ukraine, where about 262 children were killed during the first 100 days of the war, than in Gaza, where more than 10,000 children were killed during the same time frame. The killings of journalists was mentioned with roughly the same frequency, even though the number killed in Gaza was 77 compared with just eight in Ukraine.
The words "war crime" and "genocide" were also rarely invoked in the early days of the Gaza war, but were used liberally to describe Russia's attacks on Ukraine, despite the fact that vastly more civilians were killed and displaced in Gaza during the respective periods.
Johnson found that this biased coverage extended to the home front, especially as the war in Gaza fomented ethnic hatred. Incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia increased in the months after October 7. But headlines from the first six months of the conflict referred exclusively to antisemitism about 31 times as often as they referred exclusively to Islamophobia.
This emphasis on antisemitism only grew as protests on college campuses became more forceful throughout the conflict's first year. Though the protests often exclusively focused on Israel, they were commonly framed as attacks on Jewish students.
Coverage and discourse surrounding these protests and campus administrators' responses to them often drowned out coverage of the conflict itself.
One example of this that Johnson described as particularly "poignant" was The New York Times' wall-to-wall coverage of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned following pressure from Congress to crack down on pro-Palestine protests and a plagiarism scandal.
While hundreds of articles and TV spots were dedicated to covering the Gay story, Johnson found that the media almost totally ignored the IDF's killing of the 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was left to die in a car by soldiers after her entire family was killed around the same time. In fact, there were 95 headlines about Gay in print media between December 5, 2023, and January 5, 2024, while just six focused on the killings of thousands of Palestinian children.
In an interview promoting the book's release, Johnson said that the role of media institutions was not ancillary to the Gaza genocide, but rather they played a central role in prolonging it and maintaining support from the Biden administration.
"You need them as a kind of validator... to justify things like [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] is Hamas, aid workers are Hamas, Al-Shifa [Hospital] is actually a secret command and control center, mass rapes were Hamas policy," he said. "These fundamental axioms of genocide were essential to the genocide, and they cannot exist without The New York Times."
