Transcript: How the Media Failed the Palestinians

Author Adam Johnson’s new book argues that the media downplayed the brutality of the Israeli military offensive in 2023-24 and President Biden’s role in it.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined today by Adam Johnson, journalist and author. He has a book coming out next week that I think is one of the more important books about politics you’re going to read this year. It’s called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Adam, welcome.

Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me on.

Bacon: So talk about the general argument of the book. I think “the media’s complicity” gives some sense of it, but talk about what your book is about and the time period it’s in.

Johnson: I focus primarily on the first year, from October of 2023 to October of 2024, because when you write a book, you have to stop the clock somewhere, otherwise you’ll just keep updating it ad infinitum. But with a specific focus on what I argue as really the first three to six months, when the genocide I thought became codified and cemented—as Israelis would say, the facts on the ground were affirmed. And there was a moment early on—there were several moments early on—when there would have been an outrage or an upswell or an intervention to stop it, and the media had a critical role in dampening those, obscuring those, or downplaying those.

And then of course—it being a Democratic president meant that there was a different set of incentives, a different dynamic that required political and I guess PR attempts to dampen outrage from what people were seeing every day in their social media feeds, which was an endless stream of carnage specifically targeting children coming over their Twitter and TikTok feeds.

And the media—the media is defined in the context of this book as—it’s a very imperfect term, but we say center-left or liberal media, not in the Rush Limbaugh sense, but the sort of small-l liberal media, quote-unquote mainstream media, or media that historically, editorially, has endorsed Democrats—I think is one kind of objective [measure].

Bacon: CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Atlantic—those four were the most—maybe The Washington Post has all been included in some of that.

Johnson: Yeah. The Washington Post is central to it. And people say, why not Fox News or The Wall Street Journal? And what I say in the introduction is that the idea that those are genocidal publications—I don’t believe is really in dispute. I don’t think anyone disputes that.

I think if you probably asked them, they would effectively say they are—they wouldn’t probably put it in those terms—but they would not act like they care about the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, outside of some neocon conservative trap about freedom—or whatever, freedom from Hamas. So it’s not really a contested space. And as writers, we typically try to write in contested spaces.

And what I argue is that the center and “center-left” media was central to selling a genocide. And it’s not just a title that I picked to be provocative—I think in key ways it was a sales job. And that decisions were made—decisions were decided behind closed doors within the White House, and within and by elite foreign policy circles—and that the media’s job, largely, and specifically the outlets we studied in great quantitative detail, was to spin for, obfuscate, obscure, and to sell what was an indefensible position.

And the ways in which they did it changed over the first few weeks and ultimately the first few months. And so those really key, critical moments—when the genocide became, I thought, effectively fait accompli cemented based on the narrative and situational dynamic in Gaza—is really what I focus on.

Of course that isn’t to obscure the responsibility of the subsequent Trump administration and their role in the starvation campaign in 2025. And of course there are still—750 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire in October of last year. And that’s all important and perhaps worthy of another book. But that’s not what this book is about.

It’s about primarily the first six months—but really the first year—of not only the White House’s role in the genocide and their central role in the genocide, but also the media’s role in providing the moral and narrative collateral to sell that genocide.

Bacon: Let me zone in on a couple of things you said—so the idea is essentially that liberals—so it’s a Democratic president, so liberals purport to care about human rights more than conservatives. So the liberal president can’t just do something seen as evil without some kind of cover. And so that’s why Biden needs the media to explain the war in a way that liberals can feel okay with. And then also, secondly, the outlets you talk about tend to be consumed by a lot of liberal audiences, right?

Adam Johnson: Yeah. There’s a 2015 poll that shows that 30 percent of Republicans support bombing Agrabah, the fictional country from Aladdin. Republicans are broadly going to just be pro-war, pro-genocide as a rule—not categorically, and I know there are some divisions around that now that have emerged—but statistically speaking, they’re not a demographic you need to win over from a sales standpoint.

Liberals—when you’re trying to sell a war—as anyone who remembers The New York Times’s essential and high-leverage role in selling the Iraq War knows—are essential to making wars, or in this case a genocide, bipartisan. It’s the thing that needs to be sold. It’s the high-leverage thing you need to have.

And so there’s more emphasis on selling liberals, or at least getting them off your back and ameliorating their cognitive dissonance and preventing them from going out in the streets or joining campus protests, because that becomes a critical fulcrum to apply pressure on the powers that be.

And so that’s why that’s the focus. It’s a baseball term, high-leverage. But if I’m a closer and I come in with the bases loaded, one out, ninth inning, that’s more meaningful than if I come into a baseball game up eight runs. So Democratic support, liberal support gets it from that 40 percent to that 60 percent, to that 65 percent that’s necessary. And that requires a sales job. It requires narratives, it requires convincing, it requires—

And obviously much of this predates October 7th—the broad dehumanization of Palestinians, the facile “human shields” narrative, all the—again, even the terrorist framework and epistemology is itself a racist double standard that had developed over decades. And then after October 7th, there was a lot of ad hoc interventions to effectively hand-wave away what was increasingly manifestly nihilistic violence and indefensible.

And then of course, once you get to December of 2023 and January 2024, no one even bothers defending it on the substance—then you pivot into the sort of meta-narrative around, oh, we’re working on a ceasefire, Biden can’t stop it even if he wants to. So really those—

Bacon: Let me come back to that meta-narrative in a minute, please. But let me ask one question, let me interrupt you. The story you’re telling is not one of President Biden or Ron Klain or whoever his senior advisors were, calling the head of CNN or the editors of the Times. As far as we know, that’s not, we don’t know that’s happened. You’re telling a story more of: Biden has a policy, and to some extent the media leadership agrees with it, essentially.

Johnson: Yeah. There’s broad consensus around the ideological premises around Zionism—that’s not really contestable, that’s largely bipartisan, especially with the older generation, especially with people in leadership roles. Yeah. The idea that—

Bacon: —in mainstream politics—

Johnson: Yeah. Again, there wasn’t a lot of salesmanship that went on, but they certainly worked with the White House to curate certain narratives without any skepticism. And these were tropes and modes of propaganda that had been developed prior to October 7th. And in fact I wrote about them with respect to, for example, Biden’s shift in support for Saudi Arabia—there were very similar dynamics with the helpless Biden and the angry Biden and the like. So all those things had antecedents outside the context of Israel, but they’re a necessary feature to liberal self-identification.

And this goes back to the liberal mythology surrounding liberal imperialism during the Victorian age in Britain, around civilizing missions, and so a lot of this stuff is not new. But it certainly becomes more acute and more adapted to the particulars of Zionism, and particularly this idea that “Hamas must go,” which became this kind of ideological dogma that was almost never contested in mainstream media—despite the fact that everybody knew, including Tony Blinken behind closed doors in January of 2024, that everyone knew that was impossible and in fact was a nonsensical premise.

Bacon: Let’s dive into some of the details here, because some of them are very telling. So talk about—there was some really important analysis of word choice. Talk about the words “slaughter” and “massacre” to start with, and how those were used in the coverage.

Johnson: So one way we approached the idea of bias, right—’cause you have to establish a double standard as an entry point to any allegation of media bias, and you have to do apples-to-apples comparisons. And so what we argue is that the emotive terms—in terms of loading and orienting the audience to solicit a certain emotional reaction to certain kinds of violence versus other kinds of violence—was one objective way you could tease out that double standard.

So when Israelis were killed on October 7th, primarily it was referred to as a massacre, as a slaughter, as barbaric, as savage. You had these very loaded terms—and in the context of “barbaric” and “savage,” racially charged, steeped in orientalist history. Not to get too grad school about it, but I do think it’s real and it matters.

Then when Palestinians were killed, it was obviously more likely to be in passive voice, it was more likely to not have these emotive terms—it was always framed as a bumbling mistake by Israeli and U.S. officials, pursuant to some noble and achievable military objective.

And what we argue is that Israel killed upwards—the number now is roughly 20,000 children, it’s almost certainly double that—buried under rubble, kids who died of preventable disease, children who died of diabetes, children on dialysis, obviously birth defects—obviously tens of thousands of Palestinians have some kind of amputation. And what I argue is that it seems rather unlikely that you would have created such an unprecedented amount of slaughter, an unprecedented—the largest number of child amputees in modern warfare history—without committing a slaughter or a massacre at some point.

So statistically speaking, that feels very impossible. You’re welcome to believe that, but that feels highly unlikely, especially because we know about the myriad war crimes war crimes. We know about attacks on healthcare workers. We know about their openly genocidal statements—which we can get into—where they preview what they’re going to do in terms of collective punishment and killing of civilians.

The percentage of civilians who were killed is—in key ways—unprecedented. Certainly child death is unprecedented. And so let’s look at those emotive terms. And this is a timeline—this was all done manually for this particular count. And this is a timeline of just the first 60 days.

And what you have to understand is that within the first week—actually less than the first week—the death toll in Gaza had surpassed that of October 7th. So it wasn’t like there was—this asymmetry can be explained away by a numbers issue. In fact, it was triple by the end of the first 30 days, eventually quadrupled and quintupled by the end of the 60-day period.

So The New York Times described the killing of Israelis as a massacre 124 times—for Israelis, zero for Palestinians. The Washington Post described it as a massacre 50 times versus zero for Palestinians. AP News was 80 for Israelis, zero for Palestinians. CNN.com was 43 versus zero. Politico was 12 versus zero. And USA Today was 33 for Israelis and zero for Palestinians.

The term “slaughter” was used 53 times for The New York Times—you know what, I’ll just save you time: it’s always zero for Palestinians for the rest of these I’m reading out. And then it was 25 for The Washington Post, 18 for AP News. 14 for CNN. 3 for Politico. And 5 for USA Today.

And cable news was in many ways worse. Again, this is the first 60 days—177 times the word “massacre” was used for Israelis and only eight for Palestinians on CNN cable, rather than .com. It was 225 for “massacre” and only 16 for Palestinians—this is journalists, pundits, or rather anchors. And the word “slaughter” on MSNBC for Israelis was used 102 times and only four for Palestinians, and on CNN it was 72 versus two.

Similarly, the term “barbaric” was used in reference to Palestinians killing Israelis 46 times versus zero for Palestinians on MSNBC, and on CNN it was 56 versus zero. And “savage” was 23 versus zero, and 13 versus zero on MSNBC and CNN respectively.

So you had this entirely one-way emotive reaction. The idea was that—editorially speaking—and you can look at this quantifiably, this is not an assertion—obviously I don’t have access to some internal memos, although we do have access to some internal memos, which we go into. But there was clearly an editorial decision to paint Hamas’s attack—or PFLP or PIJ or militants on October 7th—as existing outside of history, existing outside—

Bacon: Actually, you said “editorial decision,” and I wanted to ask about that, because I think you described editorial decisions later on. But having worked at The Washington Post in that period, I want—an editorial decision on “massacre” and “slaughter”—I don’t—my perception was more that people were self-editing to some extent.

In some ways it’s not like, the climate was such that what Israel did was legitimized, what the Palestinians did was not. And I didn’t feel like anybody—it was—may have been more unconscious, in the water, than conscious in a certain way.

Johnson: Yeah, that’s—I’m saying “editorial decisions”—even if you don’t make those atomized editorial decisions, be that as it may, but at some point—either collectively or not—in the case of CNN, we do have a memo from Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, who literally says every time we mention Palestinian deaths, you have to frame it first with October 7th, and in that memo he uses these emotive terms and does frame it as mindless jihadist violence as a necessary condition of reporting on that. And so whether or not similar memos were sent to other organizations is obviously ontologically unknowable. But we can infer—either formally or informally—certain editorial policies that necessarily had to frame [the coverage].

And again, we can talk about MSNBC—how in the morning of October 7th they were attempting to editorially—or to contextualize the attack. And immediately Comcast corporate came down and said, never do that........

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