Robin Andersen
CounterPunch / December 20, 2024
Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, news coverage by the most prominent US outlets of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants has provided more propaganda than information, leaving the public bereft of even the most fundamental facts. Corporate media have eschewed narratives necessary for understanding the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians and the long genesis of the conflict, what historian Rashid Khalidi has called The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
Media bias in favour of Israel may have been obvious from the start, but how do we identify it and verify—or dispute—the claims made in corporate news coverage? Doing so involves examination of what Peter Phillips, in 2002, called News Abuse, news coverage of genuinely important stories that, nevertheless, obscures or distorts those stories’ most important points. As the director of Project Censored at the time, Phillips recognized the need to look closely at news about the most serious topics in order to identify specific ways that coverage of them deflects criticism of the status quo and ultimately reinforces systems of injustice. Tracking patterns of language use and framing in the corporate news media’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza exposes how that coverage exemplifies what Project Censored means by news abuse.
Examining three of the most influential US newspapers –The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—Adam Johnson and Othman Ali of The Intercept analysed more than 1,100 articles from the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza. They identified the key terms used by the papers to describe those killed. In addition, they recorded the context of those terms’ use. They found that the papers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths, which were reported sixteen times more frequently than those of Palestinians. Of course, this was a complete reversal of the actual proportions of Israeli and Palestinian casualties, with much larger numbers of Palestinians killed than Israelis. This slanted coverage also explains the public’s misunderstanding of the disproportionate nature of the killing.
Moreover, the papers reserved outrage and apathy for Israeli casualties. Israeli victims were “slaughtered” and “massacred” by Hamas, and their deaths were “horrific.” But Palestinian victims were reported without emotion, often in the language of abstract numbers, through body counts. In addition, Palestinians were rarely “killed” and certainly never “murdered.” Most often, they simply “died,” and journalists infrequently identified the Israeli military as the perpetrator.
These findings were confirmed in another content analysis done by University of California researcher Holly Jackson, who also cited the marked difference in newspaper language and tone. One murdered Palestinian was referred to as the “bloodied corpse of a presumed terrorist.” By contrast, Israeli victims were humanized, frequently named, and described in relationship to family members and professions, while Palestinians remained anonymous. Overall, research has found that newspaper reporting heavily favoured Israel.
Only later would evidence emerge that the double standard in coverage at the New York Times was produced by design. In April 2024, The Intercept published an internal memo leaked by a Times journalist that confirmed the paper had been directing journalists to blatantly skew reporting on Gaza. Written by Standards Editor Susan Wessling, with the help of International Editor Philip Pan and their deputies, The New York Times memo laid out rules listing which words were to be used and which were not acceptable. Staff frequently updated these directives. The words “carnage,” “slaughter,” and “massacre” were deemed too emotive for reporting on Palestinians deaths. Such terms, the memo advised, were used to “convey more emotion than information.”
Leadership at the New York Times couched the rules as the best way to present the conflict fairly, but what the list exposed, instead, was the paper’s lack of fairness and egregious imbalances in its coverage. Looking more closely at The Times’s reporting between October 7 and November 14, the newspaper used the word “massacre” fifty-three times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians but only once to refer to Palestinians killed by Israel. The word slaughter is another example, used to describe Palestinian attacks on Israelis, but not Palestinians killed by the IDF, by a ratio of 22 to 1. By that time, nearly fifteen thousand Palestinians had perished from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, Al-Jazeera reported. In the “Cruelty of Language,” journalist Ramzy Baroud lamented the lost “humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians” who did not figure in the “calculating” agendas of the US news media.
A separate study produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) examined bias in use of terms such as “brutal” and “terrorist” in coverage by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. For example, FAIR found that reporters overwhelmingly used “brutal” to describe violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. By doing so, FAIR reported, journalists at those prominent newspapers “helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism.”
Previously, in January 2024, a CNN directive had also been leaked to The Intercept. This one revealed the role Israel Defense Forces (IDF) played in shaping the US network’s coverage of the IDF’s war on Gaza. The internal CNN directive disclosed that all the network’s news on Gaza and Israel was being sent to CNN’s Jerusalem bureau, where it was being shaped by IDF personnel. Quoting a CNN staff member who called it “journalistic malpractice” (another term used for News Abuse), The Guardian wrote that CNN was “facing a backlash from its own staff ” over the policies that had led to “a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda” and the silencing of Palestinian voices and perspectives in the network’s coverage of Gaza. Pressure from the top had resulted in the uncritical acceptance of Israeli claims and a “pro-Israel slant” in coverage.
Though one CNN spokesperson downplayed the revelations, asserting that CNN “does not share news copy with the censor” and that its interactions with the IDF were “minimal,” another CNN staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that “every single Israel-Palestine-related line” was subjected to approval from the Jerusalem bureau. In the aftermath of October 7, CNN also hired a soldier from the official IDF Spokesperson Unit to assist in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, The Intercept reported. The terms “war crime” and “genocide” were considered “taboo,” and reporters were under intense pressure to question anything they learned from Palestinian sources. As David Lindsay, CNN’s director of news standards and practices, told journalists in a November 2 memo, “Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda … We should be careful not to give it a platform.”
Additionally, as civilians were killed indiscriminately by Israeli saturation bombing, the IDF insisted that CNN report Israeli bombs as “blasts” attributed to nobody until the Israeli military weighed in “to either accept or deny responsibility.” Across the media spectrum, newspapers and broadcasters used the passive voice to conceal where the bombs were coming from and who was dropping them. These revelations confirmed what independent journalists and many others had noticed—that Israel was controlling the war’s narrative, especially as it was being presented to the American public by the nation’s most prominent news outlets. As Professor Sunny Singh at London Metropolitan University pointed out, “Western media—not just CNN—has been pushing Israeli propaganda all through” Israel’s attacks.
By sharp contrast, international and independent news outlets treated a wider range of sources as newsworthy. After Israeli forces bombed the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023, for example, Al-Jazeera and Common Dreams quoted Aicha Elbasri, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies, who said, “What we are watching today is one of the darkest hours of our time … We are watching genocide live.”
In late December, as South Africa was filing charges at the ICJ in the Hague, The New York Times bolstered its atrocity reporting, publishing a piece filled with lurid descriptions and what it called evidence of systematic, mass sexual violence by Hamas on October 7. The Times immediately came under intense scrutiny, which has developed into sustained criticism. In addition to its reliance on an organization called ZAKA, widely exposed as one of Israel’s official propaganda sources, the piece titled “Screams without Words …” was called a “disgraceful ‘investigation’” and shamed for claiming to provide readers with definitive evidence while actually offering no evidence at all of mass rape in a widely circulated petition issued by Speak Up, an Egyptian feminist organization. But when investigative journalists at The Intercept revealed that one of the three authors of The New York Times report, Anat Schwartz, was a former Israeli Air Force intelligence official with little journalistic experience who had liked a social media post calling for Israel to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse,” the piece was met with internal newsroom criticism at the Times that shook up its editorial staff.
Criticism of the story from internal and external sources soon reached a fever pitch, with critics high- lighting major discrepancies in the reporting. Even a Times editorial staffer admitted that “basic standards” had not been applied to the story and it “deserved more fact-checking.” With no public editor since 2017, the paper remained silent. But by April 30, 2024, scholars and professors across the country wrote an open letter demanding that The Times “immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”
A fundamental problem with The Times’s mass rape story—and, more generally, most corporate coverage of Gaza—was the unquestioned acceptance of the original Israeli narrative of October 7. But the narrative began to unravel soon after October 7, when investigative reporters uncovered evidence from victim testimony revealing that the Israeli army killed many of its own citizens. During the Hamas attack, the commander of the base at Erez called in an airstrike on his own position. Further, Yasmin Porat, the Kibbutz Be’eri survivor, told the Israeli state broadcaster Kan that when Israeli special forces arrived, “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages … There was very, very heavy crossfire.” As Hamas operatives fled with Israeli hostages, many Israelis were killed by fire from Israeli helicopters. As Gareth Porter wrote, “No one knows how many were killed by each side, but the 28 Israeli helicopters were firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to guide their shooting.”
Additionally, many of those killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7 were “soldiers or armed police on active duty, not civilians,” Mnar Adley reported for MintPress News. And as Ramzy Baroud pointed out, Western media rarely reported that many of those “slaughtered” by Hamas had been directly involved in the Israeli siege and previous massacres in Gaza. Such actions are consistent with an Israeli military practice termed the Hannibal Directive, which does not spare any Israeli who might be taken hostage by the enemy. As Colonel Nof Erez told Haaretz, the Hannibal Directive “was apparently applied,” and October 7 was “a mass Hannibal.”
Reviewing establishment media coverage, Chris Hedges observed in March 2024, “The start of Operation of Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 was accompanied by a deluge of Israeli propaganda.” Claims of beheaded babies, mass rape, and other heinous atrocities allegedly committed by Hamas “circulated far and wide,” Hedges noted. Months later, experts have debunked the most outrageous claims, but the damage has already been done. Israel’s propaganda campaign provided cover for Israel in Gaza, and US corporate media have done similarly, making them complicit in these crimes. The egregiously imbalanced coverage of the genocide stands as a major indictment of US establishment media.
Adapted from State of the Free Press 2025, edited by Mickey Huff, Shealeigh Voitl, and Andy Lee Roth, and published on December 3, 2024, by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
Robin Andersen is Professor Emerita of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University
