13 August 2026

Two new books describe the corruption of the US mainstream media, which have systematically silenced the Palestinian voice amidst the Israelis’ ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank and genocide in Gaza, yet have signally failed to sustain public support for Israel. Here’s the report in the Electronic Intifada.

How complicit media tried to sell a genocide

Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 5 August 2026

The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, by Robin Andersen, OR Books (2026)

How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by Adam H. Johnson, Pluto Press (2026)

Nearly three years into the Gaza genocide, many consumers of mainstream media have been left reeling by flawed and one-sided coverage of the horrors meted out by the Israeli army. They have turned elsewhere for vital information.

Two recently published books – The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza by Robin Andersen and How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam H. Johnson – need to be widely read, recommended and referenced.

The two books present unique strengths and perspectives. When taken together, they provide a comprehensive, detailed and devastating critique of the dominant US media landscape. Known variously as the corporate, establishment, mainstream and more recently the legacy media, their heinous coverage of the ongoing US-Israeli genocide in Gaza has exposed far-reaching bias, propaganda and anti-Palestinian racism.

Both authors are known for their expertise and focus on US media coverage of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and serves on the board of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Johnson is a media analyst, contributor to FAIR and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed.

The introduction to Andersen’s The Complicit Lens, by the Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi, and the foreword to How to Sell a Genocide by the Palestinian American human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat, establish what is at stake in the findings of these two books.

Khalidi emphasizes the role played by editors and reporters for The New York Times, the so-called newspaper of record, in attempting to obfuscate the Gaza genocide and build support for Israel. Erakat carries it one step further by suggesting that corporate media executives could and should be held criminally liable under Article IV of the Genocide Convention, which calls out the role of private individuals, as well as government officials, in genocide culpability.

Readers of The Electronic Intifada will already be familiar with the atrocity fabrications promoted by the corporate media, such as the fake beheaded babies and mass rape stories of 7 October 2023. Both books shed new light on the media’s role and provide historical perspective. Andersen, for example, notes that baby killing is a longstanding propaganda trope dating to World War I and repeated as recently as the first Gulf War.

Taboo words

Less familiar but equally damaging to the credibility of the corporate media are the explicit instructions given to reporters and editors about how to frame the story, what words and phrasing are permitted and what is not allowed. Andersen and Johnson raise various repercussions, including intimidated or fired journalists and a poorly informed public.

Taboo words to be avoided included “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and even ”occupied territories,” according to an editorial directive at The New York Times. The words “carnage,” “slaughter” and “massacre” were not to be used in reference to Palestinian deaths, according to a Times memo written by its standards editor and international editor.

Andersen notes the word “massacre” was used 53 times between 7 October and 24 November 2023 in reference to Israelis killed by Palestinians, but only once in reference to Palestinians killed by the Israeli military.

Crucially, both Andersen and Johnson cite a CNN directive, first reported by The Intercept, requiring that all related copy be submitted to CNN’s Jerusalem bureau which was overseen by Israeli censors.

The BBC and other UK media outlets were similarly biased, to the point that it provoked a protest letter from eight journalists to the broadcaster. They noted that the BBC reserved the terms “massacre” and “atrocity” only for Hamas violence at a time when Israeli bombings had already killed more than 14,500 Palestinians, including at least 6,000 children. The eight journalists chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Equally important to the mainstream media was ensuring that background was ignored, with history seemingly beginning on 7 October 2023. By forbidding any reference to “occupied territories,” for example, The New York Times in effect eliminated any historical context for Hamas’ offensive.

Establishment media characterized the Hamas attack on 7 October as “unprecedented” and “unprovoked,” Andersen notes – as if a 17-year-long siege of Gaza did not precede it and did not still persist, as if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not recently appeared at the United Nations with a map of Israel that incorporated the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, as if Israel’s collective punishment massacres of Palestinians in Gaza had not occurred in winter 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 or during the Great March of Return protests beginning in 2018.

Rarely mentioned in mainstream coverage is the 1948 Nakba – the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland – despite most people in Gaza being among those uprooted as a result of the Zionist conquest and denied their right to return to their land.

Andersen demonstrates that the establishment media even applied historical amnesia to 7 October itself by failing to report on Israel’s Hannibal Directive. That military doctrine, which originated in 1986, gives Israeli commanders orders to use lethal force to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers.

An Al Jazeera English investigation concluded in March 2024 that the Hannibal Directive was used to prevent the taking of captives – soldiers and civilians – on 7 October, which could explain many of the Israeli civilian deaths on that day. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reached the same conclusion in a July 2024 report showing that Israel used the directive, ordering commanders to fire on any vehicles headed toward the Gaza boundary while also indiscriminately bombarding the area. Despite this, the US establishment media was silent about its invocation on 7 October.

Palestinian voices excluded

Obliterating history went hand in hand with the corporate media’s oversight of who is given “permission to narrate,” as the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said put it.

Andersen cites a FAIR study which examined guest appearances on Sunday news shows on American TV networks. From a total of 57 appearances between 15 October and 5 November 2023, 48 guests were US government or military officials while Israeli government or military officials appeared five times. Only one guest, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Authority ambassador to the United Kingdom, was Palestinian.

From October 2023 to October 2024, Johnson notes, NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNN’s State of the Union and CBS’s Face the Nation featured Israeli guests 20 times and White House officials 59 times, while Zomlot made the sole appearance by a Palestinian guest.

Johnson also singles out MSNBC’s Morning Joe for not featuring a single Palestinian between October 2023 and October 2024, even though the TV program covered Gaza frequently. A study of the show’s coverage during the first six months following 7 October 2023 found that the word “massacre” was used to describe Palestinians killing Israelis 81 times, the word “savage” to describe the killing of Israelis 38 times, and the word “barbaric” to describe the killing of Israelis 22 times. Those three words were used exactly zero times to describe the killing of Palestinians. Palestinians were referenced only once when using the word “slaughter,” compared with 119 times for Israelis.

Similar empirical scrutiny is applied rigorously by Johnson to the double standards that establishment media routinely display. His analysis of the Sunday morning news shows on US networks NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN from October 2023 to October 2024, for example, found that the phrase “right to defend itself” was used 149 times during a one-year period to describe Israel’s actions but was never used to describe Palestinian actions.

The term “Israeli hostages” was used 835 times and “Palestinian prisoners” was used 52 times, but only in the context of a prisoner exchange – Palestinian prisoners were never reported on independently. Johnson notes that “there was no reporting on, interviewing families of, or acknowledging the thousands of Palestinian hostages inside Israeli detention facilities, languishing for years without trial.”

Likewise, “anti-Semitism” was used 65 times while “Islamophobia” or anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Palestinian racism were mentioned only four times.

Johnson pays particular attention to the weaponizing of anti-Semitism. His review of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Politico and Axios in the first six months after 7 October 2023 found that 372 articles focused either mostly or completely on anti-Semitism, while only five were similarly focused on bigotry against Muslims.

“This dynamic,” he writes, “is even more apparent when focusing, as the media increasingly did in late 2023, on American college campuses.” The media’s outsized focus on anti-Semitism served to present the Israeli military as though it was merely “fighting on behalf of an oppressed minority under siege around the globe,” according to Johnson.

Meanwhile, coverage of the Gaza solidarity encampments that sprang up on campuses across the country totally ignored the participation and leadership of Jewish students.

Both Andersen and Johnson pay tribute to and highlight the work of Palestinian journalists and writers who reported directly from Gaza. Andersen, in particular, credits Palestinian journalists with enabling the rest of the world to see the war for the genocide that it is.

She references Al Jazeera’s figure of 278 journalists and media workers, nearly all of them Palestinians, killed by Israel between 7 October 2023 and August 2025. Andersen notes such attacks “frequently killed the journalist’s family members too.” In the first two months of the war, Israel killed on average one media worker per day, leading the Committee to Protect Journalists to conclude that there was an “apparent pattern” of Israel targeting journalists.

More than 100 journalists were arrested by Israel in the early months of the war and roughly half of those were imprisoned. Israel has prohibited foreign journalists from entering Gaza, a fact most US media concealed until some entered Gaza embedded with the Israeli military.

Media fail to curry favor for genocide

In their introductions to these two books, Khalidi and Erakat indirectly reference the seminal 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky and the economist and media scholar Edward S. Herman.

With impeccable factual dissection, Manufacturing Consent demonstrates that the corporate media knowingly act as a propaganda tool for the US empire, uniting behind a singular narrative. The propaganda model is meant to ensure consent among the electorate for the ruling elite’s foreign policy objectives, particularly those objectives that involve military intervention.

The corporate media’s attempt to manufacture consent for the Israeli genocide in Gaza failed, and utterly so.

Over the last two years, opinion polls in the US show that there is now greater sympathy for the Palestinians than for the Israelis. A February 2026 Gallup Poll reported by the Associated Press found 41 percent of Americans sympathized more with Palestinians while 36 percent sympathized with Israelis. Among Democrats the divide was even larger, with two-thirds saying their concern is with the Palestinians, compared to 20 percent for Israelis.

And Andersen notes that polling by the Pew Research Center as early as March 2025 showed that 53 percent of US adults expressed an unfavorable view of Israel. In June 2025, a Quinnipiac University poll showed support had even dropped among Republicans by 14 percentage points from May 2024, Andersen adds.

What happened? This is not discussed in detail by Johnson or Andersen. Seemingly, all the biased corporate media narratives could not counter the fact that the genocide was being livestreamed in real time, thanks to Palestinian media workers. As Andersen points out, “social media platforms … showed footage directly from Gaza, bringing the true horrors of the violence to global publics and sparking global protests.”

Both Andersen and Johnson credit alternative media outlets such as The Electronic Intifada, Drop Site, Truthout and Mondoweiss, among others. Social media and Al Jazeera (available via the internet as many US cable TV providers block it) are cited by both and clearly played a part in undermining corporate media with its ever greater monopolization.

Both authors highlight MSNBC anchor Joy Reid for raising questions few other TV anchors would dare ask and for which Reid was fired and her show canceled in February 2025. As noted by Andersen, Reid asked: “How does bombing a densely populated land strip filled 50 percent with children constitute self-defense? How does bombing hospitals, churches, mosques and UN schools constitute self-defense?”

Khalidi observes in his introduction to The Complicit Lens that university students increasingly ignore the mainstream media. During a discussion about the findings of Andersen’s book, Khalidi stated that legacy media are “dying a very swift death.”

None of this guarantees an ongoing shift away from the corporate media. Johnson points to the dangers of an increasingly consolidated American media ownership, particularly in the hands of ardent Zionists such as David Ellison, who may soon control not only CBS News but also CNN.

Legacy media – the media that existed prior to the widespread use of the internet – will undoubtedly continue to manufacture consent for atrocities when it serves the interest of US foreign policy. Popular movements and alternative media will continue to expose this harmful role so thoroughly documented by Johnson and Andersen.

Rod Such is the author of Digging Deeper into the Meaning of Palestine (Changemaker Publications, 2025).