By Serving as Stenographers to Power, Corporate Media Abetted Israel’s Genocide

News stories vie for our attention, our agreement, our understanding, and our view of what is real, and possibly most importantly, what is just. Journalists, reporters, and editors at the major US news outlets narrated the war for us, they imposed meaning, included evaluation, interpretations, and judgment. They also hid much of the truth of the violence. Interpretations and judgments arrive through the way a story is told. Visual and narrative scaffolding shape our views of events in ways that invite us to come to particular conclusions. It begins through a process of decision-making: Where does the story start? The camera’s point of view matters; whose story is being told, and whose isn’t? What information is considered relevant, and what is not? Which sources are cited, and which are not? By late October 2023, the Palestinian American writer Hala Alyan lamented how, each time the rare Palestinian activist, lawyer, or professor actually appeared on media, they were “baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job.” This would still be the case by May 2025, when NPR’s Steve Inskeep interviewed a starving Palestinian writer, who with his wife and four children, was living in a tent on the rubble of his home in northern Gaza. After he explained there was no water and talked about the meager bread portions his family must share, Inskeep asked, “What is your feeling now about Hamas.” The journalist was not interested in hearing more about his story of struggle and survival, why it was happening, or how Netanyahu blocked all aid into Gaza on March 3, 2025, using starvation as a strategy of war, a crime against humanity — he wanted him to denounce Hamas.

Repeating Constructed Pseudo-Evidence

Telling Israel’s side of the story often included repeating claims based on constructed or manipulated pseudo-evidence and audio-visual propaganda that was easily identifiable as such. The posting of such evidence was not new to the IDF. Eighteen months before October 7, a sniper from Israel’s occupation forces assassinated Al Jazeera journalist and Palestinian American, Shireen Abu Akleh. The IDF posted a video online that depicted a lone Palestinian resistance fighter shooting down an alleyway, purportedly at the Al Jazeera crew. A series of statements on X from the office of Naftali Bennett, Israeli prime minister at the time, said: “According to the information we have gathered, it appears likely that armed Palestinians — who were firing indiscriminately at the time — were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist.”

However, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem traced the position of the Palestinian to a completely different location. He was too far away, his view blocked by alleyways and buildings. B’Tselem recognized the propaganda strategy as a familiar trick often used for the “blanket impunity that Israel provides for itself.” The group explained the “impossible logistics” of the Israeli scenario was based “on a false narrative designed to protect the perpetrators.”

When reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, particularly during massacres, establishment media often featured such pseudo-evidence. In a prelude to the attacks on the Al-Shifa Hospital Complex in November 2023 — an early indication that Israel planned to destroy Gaza’s health care system — Israel used a slick three-dimensional video that imagined a Hamas headquarters underneath the hospital complex.

Of course, after the IDF completed its destruction of what was once called the “beating heart” of Gaza, no such stronghold was found. As we will discover in this book, subsequent so-called evidence of Hamas fighters below the complex was so unbelievable that it was roundly ridiculed on social media and independent outlets. There are many more examples of audio tapes purported to be terrorist conversations, which didn’t hold up to scrutiny, or videotapes that had been altered, such as the aerial footage of the flour massacre that BBC Verify found to be edited in four different places.

Though exposed in most cases, the initial news reports of such inventions would serve to muddy the waters of understanding and delay judgment, permitting time for Israel to continue killing, and the media to move on to a different news cycle, in what amounted to a process of normalization.

How is information made legitimate, and when is it appropriate for journalists to introduce skepticism? What happens when only one side of a conflict is given the legitimate voice, always repeated and rarely questioned, even when those sources have proven many times to have promulgated lies? Military studies scholars and analysts understand that there is always a long genesis of historical, political, and economic factors that can eventually erupt into conflict. In many ways, US establishment media seemed unwilling or unable (but likely both) to narrate a more complex, historically accurate account of the war on Gaza. The Intercept reported that editorial directives at The New York Times and CNN, two of the most important news sources in the US, advised reporters to avoid certain “taboo” words, such as “genocide” and “massacre.” Yet between October 7 and November 24, the Times used the word “massacre” fifty-three times — referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians, but only once to refer to a Palestinian killed by Israel.

As deaths in Gaza piled up, the Times habitually avoided using emotionally fraught terms for Palestinians. Another term, “ethnic cleansing” was also barred from use, along with “refugee camps” and “occupied territories.” As the Times’ source responsible for the leak said, “You are basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.”

US news outlets were crippled by these verbal restrictions, incapable of offering an accurate explanation of what was happening in Gaza by imposing such constraints on humanitarian language and international principles and laws.

Mythic Media Tropes

Media frames are based on underlying assumptions, articulated through familiar tropes that appear unquestioned in language and representation. Some stories are recognizable as reflections of beliefs and myths, and others are accurate renderings when accompanied by on-the-ground documentation. Seasoned journalists entrusted to cover such a monumental conflict seemed not to be schooled in the differences. They failed to identify the history and uses of atrocity stories as propaganda and showed no awareness of the use of Islamophobic tropes such as the “brutish knife-wielding Arab terrorist,” or the West’s long history of Orientalism and the hypersexualized Arab male, as identified by Edward Said. Establishment media applied a “lawlessness” trope, identified by Rebecca Solnit as a dictate of convention to blame the victims of humanitarian disasters, when in fact, in such crises she argued, communities come together to help one another.

The lawlessness frame was used to direct the causes of starvation away from Israel’s engineered famine and point the finger of blame at starving Palestinians, who were being shot by IDF snipers as they looked for food.

By April 2024, when police were called to break up student encampments, media relied on another powerful framing device, complete with its attendant language, to condone police violence against students at colleges and universities, first at Columbia, then at other campuses around the country. Campuses, they said, had been infiltrated by “outside agitators.”

Yet, the critical debate articulated by student protests was part of American public discourse at the time. Though students were violently attacked by pro-Israel protesters and US law enforcement, students helped move American sentiment about the genocide to the center of cultural and political debate. By the fall of 2024, students would be hit by a wave of repression and attacks on their civil liberties and rights to freedom of expression.

Were these stereotypes taken into consideration when deciding which stories would be told, which talking points would be followed, and which perspectives would be ignored? Many of the narratives we are left with, used to explain this so-called “Israel-Palestine conflict,” are familiar media constructs and simply cannot explain a genocide.

In so many ways, big media failed to provide accurate information about Israel’s bombing attacks and their consequences on the people in Gaza. They improvised a language of confusion, denial, and justification. In this book, we find a combination of media tropes and frames, together with verbal inventions for downplaying Israel’s increasingly brutal genocidal violence, along with the hollow echoes that explained away every military act of violence, as the media served as “stenographers to power.” These strategies facilitated the continuation of a genocide. The failure to accurately cover the destruction of Gaza was inimical to the basic professional canons of journalism.