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genocide
‘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."
May 12, 2026
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."
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Not Just a Moral Crisis, Israel Is Now a Political Liability for the Democratic Party
Democrats appear unable to grasp how dramatically public consciousness around Israel has shifted.
May 11, 2026
The political ground beneath unconditional US support for Israel has shifted dramatically. For Democrats in particular, continuing to arm a genocidal apartheid state has always been morally indefensible, and is becoming increasingly politically incoherent.
That shift is already visible inside the Party, as demonstrated with the mid-April 2026 Senate vote on the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs). A substantial majority of Democratic senators voted to block the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in offensive weapons to Israel, including 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers almost certain to be used in the destruction of Palestinian homes and the bombing of neighborhoods across occupied Palestine and Lebanon.
Still, many of the Democratic senators who voted against those resolutions, along with House members who continue refusing to sign onto legislation to “Block the Bombs” and halt US investment in such terror, remain unable to recognize what even Trump has recently acknowledged: The Zionist state is increasingly becoming a political liability, with unconditional support no longer automatic or easy to defend.
Over the past few months, Democrats have by and large criticized the war and overwhelmingly voted in favor of War Powers resolutions, seeming at the very least eager to capitalize on mounting anti-Trump sentiment. Even longtime, steadfast allies of Israel within the Senate and broader Democratic leadership—many of whom have been proud to serve as political representatives for Israeli interests inside the US Congress—have shown a willingness to publicly draw a line on Iran.
Yet when it comes to publicly condemning Israel itself, or calling to end ongoing arms transfers, many of these same members of Congress remain in lockstep with both the Israeli regime and the US administration they would otherwise claim to oppose.
Beyond the blatant hypocrisy and duplicity of such a position, many Democrats appear unable to grasp how dramatically public consciousness around Israel has shifted. Recent polling has shown that a growing number of Americans believe the war on Iran is being fought more in service of Israeli interests than those of the United States.
A rising portion of the public recognizes the absurdity and futility of continuing to bankroll a wider war that promises nothing beyond mass civilian death, economic hardship, geopolitical fallout, and endless regional escalation. For an ever-loyal MAGA base, when anti-Iranian propaganda fails to persuade, Israel emerges as the next most digestible explanation for this violent catastrophe. Rather than confronting Trump’s own agency or private interests in dragging the US into another intractable conflict with no coherent objective, many instead frame him as having fallen captive to Israeli interests—fulfilling ambitions Netanyahu has articulated for decades to advance the “Greater Israel” project.
The GOP itself has increasingly begun fracturing along the fault lines of unwavering support for Israel. Some of the party’s most prominent public figures and media propagandists have emerged as unusually vocal critics of Israel. While there remain conservatives whose Zionist ideology produces a near cult-like acceptance of Israeli violence and even an embrace of apocalyptic regional war, others increasingly view unconditional support for Israel as directly conflicting with Trump’s otherwise nationalist, supposedly “America First” agenda. For Democrats—whose base polls far more critically of Israel—that shift should be setting off political alarms.
Democrats, then, who will publicly rage that the war on Iran endangers public welfare, costs taxpayers billions, and undermines long-term US “security” objectives, yet remain staunch allies of Israel committed to subsidizing its arms transfers, prove themselves incapable of recognizing their own political reality. To say they have lost sight of their own constituencies, if not captured by Zionist PAC donor interests, would be an understatement.
Last week, fourteen US citizens were abducted by the Israeli military in international waters, only 37 miles off the coast of Greece, for participating in a international, nonviolent direct action aimed at challenging Israel’s ongoing illegal siege and blockade. Israeli forces violently seized and sabotaged civilian vessels belonging to the Global Sumud Flotilla before abducting more than 175 civilians, many of whom were subsequently assaulted, brutalized, and tortured inside Israeli prisons.
That American civilians were attacked by a foreign military in blatant disregard for international law should have provoked outrage across the United States. Instead, it was met with near total silence from both mainstream media and US lawmakers.
Only a small cohort of nineteen members of the House of Representatives, and not a single Senator, made any formal statement on the matter. The few who did speak out were largely the same contingent of progressives who have long been willing to condemn Israel since it launched its full-scale assault on the Palestinian people and the destruction of the Gaza Strip in 2023.
After years of functioning as the primary political and PR shield for the genocide in Gaza under the Biden administration, it is perhaps no longer surprising that much of the Democratic Party remains unwilling to confront Israeli terrorism–even when waged against US citizens.
But this silence is not just another profound abdication of Congressional duty and moral responsibility. It is political idiocy.
It has now been months since the DNC’s own political autopsy reportedly found that Democratic backing of the genocide likely cost Harris a significant percentage of votes in the presidential election. The rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani has further underscored how dramatically the Democratic voter base has shifted on Palestine. It has shown that even as pro-Israel lobbying groups and militarized donor networks spend tens of millions attempting to shape electoral outcomes and discipline Democratic politicians, anti-Zionist candidates can still win, while establishment-backed candidates can—and likely will—lose.
And as always, the material reality of what Democrats continue funding and shielding has become too horrific, too visible, and too widely documented to continue obscuring behind the language of “self-defense.”
Gaza remains under an Israeli blockade engineered to sustain a biological genocide. The almost total restriction of food, water, medicine, fuel, and other basic life-essentials, alongside the systematic destruction of hospitals, sanitation systems, and civilian infrastructure, has produced a deliberately manufactured catastrophe of disease, displacement, and mass malnutrition.
In Lebanon, civilians continue to be massacred daily in Israeli strikes that mirror the total, genocidal bombardment of Gaza, while Iranians endure US and Israeli war crimes–including attacks on schools, hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure. Across occupied Palestine, especially in the West Bank, Israeli settler attacks and military raids continue to escalate in pace, scale, and brutality, as Israel moves ever more openly toward ethnic cleansing and the seizure of Palestinian land. This all falls under the full protection of the so-called global “Board of Peace."
Israel also continues pushing the boundaries of what world governments are willing to excuse, as the impunity protecting its violence deepens without consequence. That now includes abducting foreign nationals like Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila in international waters before imprisoning and torturing them without charge for an entire week.
Israel’s level of depravity may not register as morally or legally disqualifying to members of Congress, but it has become untenable to continue parroting the absurd claim that US weapons transfers to the state are remotely connected to legitimate “security” objectives. The underlying ambitions of the Zionist project become harder to conceal with every noose pin worn, every land grab and expulsion openly celebrated, and every new Kushner-Witkoff contract signed or verbal slip exposing the true agenda.
Many Democrats also fail to recognize another political shift unfolding among their own base: the growing tendency to connect the Trump administration’s expanding authoritarian “immigration crackdown” and investment in DHS ‘detention’ infrastructure with Israel’s militarized apparatus of surveillance, occupation, and control.
As public outrage has intensified over the unfathomably cruel separation of families, disappearances, deaths, and systemic abuse and neglect inside DHS concentration camps, along with the targeting and killing of US citizens standing in peaceful solidarity against ICE operations, more communities, civil liberties advocates, and grassroots movements have begun drawing direct connections to Israel.
In particular, many have pointed to Israeli surveillance technology, along with longstanding institutional relationships and tactical training involving the Israeli military, US policing and ‘immigration enforcement’ agencies.
So while Democrats position themselves against Trump’s masked “secret police,” many still fail to recognize how deeply these systems have been shaped by the broader US-Israeli “security” relationship itself.
It is the very same political culture that normalizes Israeli military occupation—including the systematic torture, abduction, imprisonment, and repression of Palestinian men, women, and children—that helps legitimize and operationalize hardline state violence in the United States. For many younger voters, immigrant rights advocates, civil liberties groups, and grassroots organizers, these issues can no longer be viewed as separate.
Palestine has thus become a broader test of moral clarity and political corruption. At this point, continued support for arming Israel signals not only complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and mass destruction on a scale that will take generations to repair, but alignment with the same predatory billionaire political class that profits from state violence and racist repression domestically.
Arming genocide has never been political realism. It is moral collapse and structural rot elevated for decades as inevitability—a party consensus built around unwavering support for the United States’ supposed ‘greatest ally.’ It is the delusion of a political class profoundly removed from the violence it defends and facilitates.
Democrats who continue clinging to that collapsing consensus increasingly stand in direct opposition to both the consciousness of their own base and the political reality taking shape around them.
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'A Voice That Upholds the Conscience of the World': Spain Honors Francesca Albanese for Efforts to Stop Gaza Genocide
The UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine has said nations seeking to punish her for documenting atrocities committed by Israel “want to silence everyone who demands an end to genocide.”
May 07, 2026
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez honored Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, on Thursday, in a display of solidarity as she faces sanctions from the United States over her outspoken advocacy against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Citing her work to document human rights violations over more than two years of conflict, Sánchez awarded Albanese the Order of Civil Merit, a knighthood granted to Spanish and foreign citizens for extraordinary services benefiting the state or society.
"Public responsibility... entails the moral obligation not to look the other way," Sánchez said in a social media post. "It is an honor to award the Order of Civil Merit to a voice that upholds the conscience of the world: Francesca Albanese."
Earlier this week, Sánchez petitioned the European Commission to intervene to stop compliance with the Trump administration's efforts to punish Albanese, as well as members of the International Criminal Court who have brought arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, has held the role of special rapporteur since 2022, a year before Israel launched a war in Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. Human rights organizations and UN experts have described Israel's assault as a genocide.
In March 2024, Albanese released the UN's first major public report, making the legal case that there are "reasonable grounds" to believe a genocide was being committed, referring to a litany of statements by Israeli officials establishing intent to destroy the Palestinian population.
In addition to documenting Israel's actions, she has published research demonstrating the "complicity" of nations that supply weapons and other support to Israel in what she has called a “collective crime" that they should also face responsibility for.
According to official estimates, at least 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, many of them women and children, while independent analyses suggest the death toll is much higher, in part due to the near-total destruction of health and other public infrastructure.
Many of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed by over two years of relentless bombings, leaving most of its 2.1 million people displaced and living in tent cities.
Albanese told a Spanish broadcaster that the US and other nations attempting to punish her and other international authorities for speaking out against atrocities in Gaza were "like an international mafia."
"They want to silence everyone who demands an end to genocide, an end to the crimes,” she said.
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