When 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee Myanmar for Bangladesh amid widespread killings, sexual violence and village burnings in late 2017, an Age editorial pleaded for Australian government action:
“There is a genocide happening today in Myanmar. Our government should urgently, repeatedly and loudly call for international intervention, and lead in imposing sanctions. We should send bountiful aid to the victims, and halt economic and diplomatic relations with Myanmar unless and until the savagery is stopped. All of us, as Australians, should shun travel to Myanmar for tourism or business. And our government should, as it did with the Syrian refugee crisis a few years ago, rapidly engineer an intake of Rohingya refugees.”
The Age didn’t wait for an International Court of Justice ruling before issuing its dire warning. It repeatedly used the term “genocide” to describe the Myanmar state’s atrocities despite no case of genocide having been brought before the ICJ at the time (it wasn’t until late 2019 that Gambia brought such a case and the ICJ still hasn’t ruled on it).
After three years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, no similar editorial can be found in the Age, nor in any of the mainstream media in Australia. That is despite Israel having killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, including over 21,280 children who, according to a UN Commission of inquiry, have been targeted as “part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza”.
Indeed, “genocide” is a term that journalists—at the behest of their editors—routinely shun, despite the ICJ’s preliminary ruling back in January 2024 that there is a plausible case Israel is committing genocide. And when the term is used, we are reminded that Israel denies such claims, despite the UN Human Rights Council, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and numerous international human rights organisations having all concluded that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza.
It is not just that the media fail to acknowledge this simple fact. For the past three years, they have been accessories to Israel’s crimes: dehumanising Palestinians, sanitising Israel’s atrocities, and silencing its critics.
In his groundbreaking book How to Sell a Genocide, author Adam Johnson sets out to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheered by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting and sexual violence”.
Johnson’s approach is methodical and meticulous. His research draws on more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips from nine major outlets during the first year of the genocide, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC (now MSNOW). He focuses on the liberal media because “there was a Democratic president in office when the genocide began in earnest, and support from Democrats in Congress and in the think-tank and media world was dispositive [decisive] in continuing said genocide during the given time of my study”.
Johnson argues that the “centre-left” (i.e., liberal) media engaged in “an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards … to justify the White House’s lockstep support for producing carnage everyone could easily witness across their social media timeline on a daily basis”.
“The primary role of [US liberal] media”, he argues, “was to rationalise, negotiate, obscure and ultimately, deny the most inconvenient of truths: a genocide carried out, defended and authorised by elite liberals and liberal institutions”.
Johnson demonstrates how the media were willing accomplices to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to portray 7 October as Israel’s “9/11 moment”, and to equate Hamas violence with that of ISIS, despite the two Islamist groups being implacable enemies. They did so by repeating and perpetuating a series of lies that emanated from Israeli media spokespeople: that Hamas beheaded 40 babies on 7 October 2023, that they targeted children and that they systematically used rape as a weapon of war.
Johnson cites evidence that the first claim was repeated, “without evidence of skepticism”, by more than a dozen journalists from outlets such as CNN, the New York Post, CBS, Reuters, Sky News, MSNBC and NBC in the days following 7 October. The claim first appeared on an Israel-based i24NEWS report, having been made by Israeli military personnel, but was soon debunked as false. So pervasive was this lie that President Biden felt comfortable telling a meeting of Jewish community leaders four days later that he had seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children”.
A Biden spokesperson later walked back the claim, but only after footage of the meeting received global coverage.
Reviewing the first month of US print and online media after 7 October, Johnson observes that Hamas was equated with ISIS 149 times, frequently accompanied by uncritical quotes from Israeli and US officials. The same group of publications mentioned “beheadings” ten times. Cable news outlets went further: Hamas was equated with ISIS on air by CNN commentators 350 times and by MSNBC 369 times. CNN mentioned “beheadings”, including non-existent beheadings of babies and infants, 77 times, while MSNBC did so 82 times.
On 13 October 2023, NBC ran a nightly news report revealing “chilling new details on how Hamas terrorists deliberately targeted Israeli schools and youth centers in their hunt for hostages”. In total, 36 Israeli children were killed on 7 October, making up 3 percent of the 1,195 victims. While this was certainly a war crime, it contrasts with Israel’s deliberate targeting of schools and densely populated apartment blocks in Gaza, where 30 percent of Palestinian victims have been children.
Similarly, allegations of systematic rape as part of Hamas’ “terror strategy” were evoked ad nauseam by US media, and repeated by President Biden, without evidence. In contrast, when news broke in mid-2024 of Israeli sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners, there was a marked silence. In Johnson’s study of reporting during the first three months of the Gaza genocide, and again during three months in late 2024, he observes 502 on-air mentions of Palestinians engaging in mass rape of Israelis by CNN and MSNBC, compared with just two mentions of Israel committing acts of rape against Palestinians. Similarly, while the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and Axios made mention of Palestinian rapes of Israelis 128 times, the same mastheads mentioned Israelis sexually abusing Palestinians just nine times.
This coverage served a discrete purpose, argues Johnston. It bought time for Israel and took pressure off the Biden administration when demands were increasing for a ceasefire in Gaza. The above examples formed part of a broader picture in which Palestinian violence was held up as something different and more threatening than years of Israeli military occupation and bombardment of Gaza to justify an unprecedented “military response”.
That the “military response” deliberately targeted schools, homes and hospitals did not matter, as a picture was well-established that Palestinians were less human, or “human animals” to use the pejorative terminology of Israeli spokespeople. Johnson cites examples of “Israeli children” versus “Palestinian minors” (sometimes in the same sentence), as well as emotive terminology such as “murderous,” “vicious” or “brutal” to describe the actions of Hamas, while such terminology was absent from reporting on Israel’s massive destruction of Palestinian lives, limbs and infrastructure.
Alongside Palestinians’ dehumanisation, the media portrayed the White House and the US President as unable to shape Israel’s actions, let alone stop the war on Gaza. In his 2023 biography of Biden, The Last Politician, Franklin Foer reported that, in May 2021, Biden put an end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza with a single phone call. Netanyahu was obliged to accept an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.
Israeli officials have been well aware of their dependence on US military hardware, which has flowed without interruption during the genocide. In a November 2023 interview, retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brik acknowledged:
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
So why couldn’t (or wouldn’t) Biden threaten to turn off the tap this time around? In part, because the media helped him get away with it. Johnson cites ten examples across US print media in which feature articles present Biden as “helpless” to effect a ceasefire, and another ten where Biden is painted as “secretly upset, outraged … or anguished about civilian casualties”.
As pressure mounted, the White House adopted another PR tactic: presenting Hamas as the obstacle to a ceasefire. Establishment media obligingly followed suit. Johnson cites eight New York Times headlines in which an intransigent Hamas is pitted against a willing and earnest Biden.
The White House’s definition of a ceasefire was deliberately vague. While expressing a desire to “end the war”, Biden insisted that Hamas could have no role in a post-conflict Gaza. This amounted to support for what Netanyahu termed a “total victory”, or a complete surrender by Hamas. At other times, a “ceasefire” meant a temporary pause in fighting to facilitate hostage exchanges, followed by Israel’s resumption of its war on Gaza.
Johnson also cites numerous cases of how the US media parroted Israeli propaganda. In October 2023, the Israeli military’s social media accounts shared a 3D-rendered video supposedly showing a “Hamas command and control center” underneath Al Shifa Hospital, connected via a series of tunnels.
At the time, Israel was determined to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza, and Al Shifa stood in its way. The Washington Post debunked the “command centre” myth on 21 December. However, not before Israel’s siege and raid of the hospital, which resulted in the deaths of at least 100 of the hospital’s 1,500 patients.
During the siege, the US media danced to Israel’s tune. On 10 November, five days before the raid, the New York Times reported that wounded patients and displaced people were “stranded on hospital grounds as intense, close-quarters combat between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters raged around them”.
This and other reports sought to create a false impression that heavily armed Hamas fighters were inside the hospital trying to repel Israeli troops. The New York Times did report Hamas denials that a command centre operated under the hospital, but it failed to report credible evidence from hospital doctors and medical staff that Israel’s claim did not stack up.
Much like Australian media, US media echoed and amplified Zionist claims that those who alleged Israel was committing genocide were antisemites. In late November 2023, as campus protests spread, a narrative developed that the primary victims were not bombed and starved Palestinians, but rather Jewish college students who were being made to “feel unsafe” by anti-genocide protests. That many of the protesters were Jewish did not warrant a mention.
While no comparable study has been undertaken of Australian media, the same bias has clearly been evident. The royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion has been nothing short of a show trial of Palestine solidarity activists, with the media joining the witch hunt.
Consider the sole occasion when a Palestine solidarity activist appeared before the commission. When Yasmine Johnson, a Jewish student, socialist and national co-coordinator of Students for Palestine, gave testimony, she was attacked not only by the Murdoch media but also by the Age.
“Violence a legitimate tactic in freedom movements, pro-Palestine student leader tells royal commission”, declared an Age headline, deliberately conflating Johnson’s reference to the tactics of anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements with the peaceful student encampments that took place across Australian campuses in 2024.
For journalists who stray from the path, there are consequences. Antoinette Lattouf’s contract as an ABC radio presenter was cut short for the crime of sharing a Human Rights Watch post that accused Israel of war crimes. Australian cricket reporter Peter Lalor was similarly dropped by the broadcaster SEN for reposts on X critical of Israel. And former SBS World News Australia presenter Mary Kostakidis was pursued through the courts for two years, accused by the Zionist Federation of Australia of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act for sharing allegedly “antisemitic” posts on X.
Despite three years of media lies, public support for Israel has collapsed. Seventy-nine percent of Australians have an unfavourable view of Israel, according to a recent Pew Research survey. Even among American Jews—historically a bulwark of support for Israel—a generational shift is occurring. A recent poll found a narrow majority favour cutting US military aid to Israel, while another found half of American Jews under 35 favour replacing apartheid Israel with a democratic binational state.
But a collapse in support for Israel hasn’t ended Israel’s crimes, nor curbed the flow of weapons from Western states. For that we need something much more profound: a revolutionary movement that can shake up the whole logic of capitalism’s drive to war.
Nick Everett chairs Friends of Palestine Western Australia.
