By: Majid Maqbool -
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- In his book How to Sell a Genocide (Pluto Press), media analyst Adam H. Johnson, who clearly delivers from the left side of the political spectrum, delivers a scathing critique of how U.S. corporate media not only enabled but at times outright incited one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in recent history—the destruction of Gaza. Johnson’s media and political analysis frequently appear in progressive publications like In These Times , The Nation and The Intercept .
Through rigorous, data-driven research analyzing thousands of news stories, broadcasts, and social media posts, Johnson reveals how major outlets, including The New York Times , CNN , and MSNBC , systematically whitewashed Israel’s war crimes, concealed America’s pivotal role as Israel’s primary military and diplomatic backer, and stripped Palestinian lives of their humanity by portraying them as unworthy of grief or protection.
The author exposes how propaganda machinery operated through selective empathy by centering Israeli suffering while erasing Palestinian deaths, hiding the scale of civilian casualties and destruction and the relentless circulation of state-approved falsehoods. He also documents the vilification of humanitarian aid workers and dishonest coverage of pro-Palestinian campus protests. Johnson argues that the genocide could never have continued for as long as it did without the active, unwavering complicity of the US media establishment, which spun a sanitized narrative of “self-defense” and made political settlement seem impossible.
In this interview with Asia Sentinel, the author talks about how US media actively enabled the killings in Gaza, how emotive, racialized words like “massacre,” “barbaric,” and “savage” were selectively applied to Israeli victims while Palestinian deaths were rendered in sterile, medical terms, despite Gaza’s civilian toll surpassing Israel’s within weeks.
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Edited excerpts: Your book analyzes over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments to document U.S. media complicity in Gaza. Were there some specific patterns in your research, findings that convinced you that establishment media didn’t just report on but actively enabled, facilitated, and cheered on the genocide in Gaza? The first and most obvious is the asymmetry of language in how they describe deaths. How death is covered is necessarily a proxy for humanity. And in our findings, we found that the killing of Israelis was routinely put in emotive and tabloid language, whereas the killing of Palestinians was put in sterile, almost medical terms. Our analyses of cable networks and print media found a consistent double standard in the usage of the emotive terms “massacre,” “barbaric,” “savage,” and “slaughter” to describe the killing of civilians. By October 11, 2023, the civilian death toll in Gaza had passed that of the October 7 attack, but the rising death count and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza did not get the sympathetic, emotive treatment afforded to the victims of the October 7 attack. By the end of our 100-day survey sample for print media on January 14, 2024, the official Palestinian death toll was roughly 24,000—with an estimated 70 percent of the victims being women and children. Nevertheless, over that 100-day survey period, the use of emotive words was almost entirely one-sided in favor of Israel. -
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- You describe the pernicious role of Center-Left media as “moats of rationalization” in their coverage of the war in Gaza. Can you elaborate on what this means and how it played out in practice? The basic concept for this model is the nonstop destruction of Gaza for months on end, the sheer brutality and one-sidedness of which was obvious from the onset, and that was impossible for any otherwise moral person to ignore outright. So an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards emerged to justify the Biden White House’s lockstep support for producing carnage everyone could easily witness across their social media timelines on a daily basis. Living in a world where our government, especially a Democratic president, could not possibly be supportive of such manifest cruelty, Moats of Rationalization emerged to allow the average media consumer—and media worker—to cope with the undeniable and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes. These Moats of Rationalization ran the spectrum from outright support for mass death to desperate liberal-left argument by Non Sequitur and argument by Trolly Problem The two most popular Moats of Rationalization, and most effective were, “Yes it’s Sad So Many Palestinians Are Dying But It’s Hamas’ Fault Because They Use Human Shields” and “Biden Is Helpless and Can’t Stop Israel Even Though He Wants To,” both which are thoroughly detailed—and debunked—in the book. You note that loaded terms like “barbaric” and “savage”—which carry racialized connotations—were frequently used by US media when reporting on Hamas attacks. Why do you believe this loaded language was no accident, and how did it contribute to the dehumanization of Palestinians? As Stafford Beer famously said, the purpose of the system is what it does. If racialized terms like “barbaric” and “savage” are exclusively used for racialized subjects like Palestinians and never for the military that slaughtered—at a minimum—20,000 children, then it’s fair to say the media is racist. What’s in their hearts is unknowable, but the outcome, the actual coverage, is quantifiably racist. You also analyze some false narratives and fake news, such as the viral claim that Hamas was “beheading 40 Israeli babies,” which entered public consciousness and was repeated by American presidents. How did such false claims function as part of a broader PR campaign to obscure the antecedents of Palestinian violence? The “beheaded babies” lie served a crucial, high-leverage function in the early weeks of the genocide. The primary goal in Washington and Tel Aviv was the removal of demands for a ceasefire from the realm of political seriousness. To do this, Hamas had to be indexed as a cartoon “terrorist” organization that kills solely for sadistic, antisemitic glee rather than being a militant group with any secular or political demands. Regardless of what one thought of their actual tactics, obviously, beheading dozens of babies would be an act of gratuitous sadism. But this story was, of course, not true, which anyone who knew anything about Hamas, and their own years-long battle against ISIS gangs in Gaza (many of which we now know were armed and backed by Israel), knew at the time. But it appealed to racist tropes about barbaric, asiatic hordes so it spread like wildfire then quietly walked back after it had served its primary, genocidal purpose. You observe in the book that the consequences of widespread media complicity in the Gaza genocide are still not fully appreciated. Why do you think this is the case? Because the liberal institutions that either explicitly supported the genocide or looked the other way in the first year—the Democratic Party, most universities, most nonprofits and cultural groups, The New York Times and CNN —are simply too big to fail. The genocide was bipartisan and the worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus in Washington. The only counter force pushing back against the bipartisan Zionist consensus is grassroots activists and, frankly, people’s common moral sense that the slaughter was wrong. But it had little to no institutional support, little to no money and so it could not stop the genocide. It failed, and those who backed and, in the context of the US State Department, expressly covered up the genocide, have since pivoted back into liberal think tanks, academia, and media as if nothing happened. My conclusion, which predicted this, is proving to be correctly cynical. But large swaths of the West, as it were, see the insanity, the barbarism, the racism and remain very angry and frustrated over this. This frustration will be channeled into some type of political project; it’ll either be Tucker Carlson-type fascism or a coherent, non-sectarian left anti-imperialism. I fear, given the total impotence and nonprofit capture of the so-called “left” leaders in the US, the former is winning the moment and will, unfortunately, shape the outrage over the genocide in the coming years. This, of course, will do nothing to build long-term solidarity for Palestine and combat imperialism or Zionism but it will help sheepdog voters for JD Vance 2028 so there’s that. Basically, it’s playing out just like Jonathan Greenblatt wants it to play out. How has the response been since the book’s publication, particularly from the mainstream press whose coverage of the Gaza genocide and Israeli actions you critique extensively in the book? Mainstream press has entirely ignored the book and will likely continue to do so.