Joshua Scheer
“The word genocide has implications and obligations. It’s not just a buzzword.”
The bombs come from Washington. The justifications come through the news. As Israel devastated Gaza, leading U.S. media organizations repeatedly amplified official claims, minimized Palestinian suffering and presented the politicians supplying the weapons as concerned observers struggling to stop the killing. On FAIR’s CounterSpin, media analyst Adam Johnson joins host Janine Jackson to examine how that coverage helped make mass death politically acceptable.
Johnson, cohost of Citations Needed and author of How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, argues that this failure reaches beyond individual falsehoods or careless headlines.
It rests on a hierarchy of human worth: Israeli deaths demand outrage, while Palestinian deaths are explained away as the unfortunate consequences of military necessity. The language of news coverage, he argues, teaches audiences whose lives to mourn—and whose destruction to accept.
The conversation examines how sensational claims can retain their political power long after they unravel. Officials receive prominent platforms to spread allegations; subsequent challenges receive less attention, and the same sources return to shape the next story. Johnson describes a succession of propaganda claims that keep journalists and critics chasing corrections while the violence those claims helped justify continues.
He also challenges coverage that portrayed the Biden administration as powerless to restrain Israel while it continued supplying arms. In Johnson’s account, this framing obscured U.S. responsibility, turning material support for the destruction of Gaza into a story about frustrated diplomacy and good intentions.
For Johnson, accountability requires confronting the institutions and political figures that enabled the killing—including those who claim the language of liberalism and human rights. This CounterSpin discussion asks what journalism becomes when it grants power the authority to explain away its victims, and what meaningful accountability would demand from the media and politicians who helped sell the war.
Read The Transcript Below.
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Editor’s note: Edited from the supplied automated transcript for readability. Timestamps, fillers and repeated starts have been removed, and clear transcription errors corrected. Unclear passages are marked in brackets. This transcript has not been checked against the recording.
Janine Jackson: Welcome to CounterSpin, your weekly look behind the headlines. I’m Janine Jackson.
This week on CounterSpin: In the first weeks of Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza after the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas that killed some [1,200] people, Israeli officials released some clearly false information that media outlets pushed out to the public.
The official Israeli Twitter account stated that a man carrying his dead four-year-old son was actually holding a doll. The child was a human being named Omar al-Banna.
Israel bombed Gaza and Lebanon with white phosphorus supplied by the U.S., and then denied they’d used the agent. The Washington Post confirmed that was a lie.
CNN told its viewers that a calendar in a children’s hospital was “a guarding list, where every terrorist writes his name, and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.”
When native Arabic speakers explained that the calendar just showed days of the week, CNN quietly deleted the clip from their website. No explanation. No apology.
Disinformation has been a key part of Israel’s U.S.-supported war on Palestinians since before October 7, but has been amped up since. Yet, as various state and media claims are proven false, it hasn’t changed U.S. media’s respectful centering of the same sources. Israeli media actually provide a less contorted view.
Adam Johnson is a media analyst and cohost, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. He’s also written for us here at FAIR. His book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. We’ll hear from Adam Johnson this week on CounterSpin.
But first, a very quick look back at some recent press.
Janine Jackson: You may have heard the story about Republican congressional candidate Eric Pratt in Minnesota. His campaign website included what many thought was an AI prompt inadvertently left in the middle of the “Pratt Playbook.”
His site said: “The president is not popular, so all messaging should be focused on local politics and needs.”
That passage unaccountably disappeared.
In related news, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters that cover what he described as “fake polls.” He accused media of airing polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics.
It came with a threat about how the FCC takes these issues seriously, and broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in news distortion or promoting broadcast hoaxes.
When you stop laughing about a Trumpist pretending they care about distorted reporting or the public interest, you can note the comments of people like Steve Herman, White House reporter for Voice of America, who says that the FCC threatening broadcasters for airing specific political data is a chilling restriction on speech. The commission would almost certainly lose such cases, according to First Amendment scholars.
You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.
Janine Jackson: Winston Churchill did not, evidently, say, “History is written by the victors.” But we’re given to understand that Hermann Göring did say, “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”
I went looking for a concept to anchor our understanding of the existential importance of how things are reported and recorded and described, with particular reference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza—acknowledged as genocide, the intentional, systematic destruction of a people, by numerous international institutions whose job it is to study and define such things.
I went looking for it because, if there’s anything core to the work of media critics, it’s to counteract the idea that might makes right when it comes to knowledge: that our understanding of the world and other people and political possibilities should be utterly shaped by the people with the megaphone, just because they have the megaphone.
That’s what we wake up every day and contest.
The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. The author is Adam Johnson, a media analyst and cohost, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. He joins us now by phone from Chicago.
Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson: Thank you.
Janine Jackson: You can stick a pin in this book and spiral out and find the same coherent message. But it begins and ends, I think, with who we are told to see as human.
We’re influenced by news media. We can’t all have firsthand knowledge of everything. As much as we may gird ourselves and feel like we’re informing ourselves independently, you see a story in the paper and you give it some meaning.
But you literally can’t make sense of corporate news media’s conversation on Palestine and Israel unless you accept, at point of entry, that some lives just matter more than other lives.
That shows up in language. It shows up in what’s offered as acceptable ideas about what’s happened and what can happen now. But that seems core: that notion of humanity.
Adam Johnson: In theory, you would have these universal liberal principles and stick to them consistently.
What my book shows, I think, with pretty definitive quantitative data—indeed, the book’s critics haven’t even been able to dispute the data itself, and they’ve tried—is that there is simply a [tiering] of humanity.
That [tiering] is evident and, most importantly, necessary to the geopolitical interests of the U.S. ruling class and Zionism. Without that tiered moral standing, the whole system falls apart.
This has been a feature of liberal imperialism since liberal imperialism was invented, mostly by the British in the 18th century.
You have to have these high-minded, supposedly universalist, humanist ideals that exist in the same system as oppression, violence, dispossession and, in this case, obviously, mass killing.
How do you do that? That’s where the media comes in. That’s where liberal media in particular—with a lowercase “l”—comes in. That’s why that’s the focus of the book.
Janine Jackson: It’s so important to say that we’re not talking about Fox News necessarily. We’re not talking about Donald Trump necessarily.
We’re talking about folks who feel like they’re trying to do the right thing, trying to understand what’s happening in the world, and how those people can be massaged into an acceptance of genocide.
In the book, there are a lot of examples. But listeners will understand that October 7, 2023, and the “beheaded babies”—this is what we’re given to understand was the start of the conflict. This is what changed everything.
This is what changed us from saying this is some kind of liberal project to: “No, now it’s a fight about civilization.”
October 7 and those “beheaded babies” seem to be in the back of every news report that we’re reading now in 2026.
Adam Johnson: That was one of the first big lies.
Unlike Iraq—the Iraq War, which obviously was foundational for me, being a millennial—there wasn’t one big WMD lie. There were dozens of what I call “mini-WMDs,” mini-lies.
By the time you debunked them, we’d just moved on to another mini-WMD. Indeed, on some days, you would get several at once.
One of the early ones was this idea that there were 40 beheaded babies—this kind of biblical round number that anyone who knew anything about Hamas knew would make no sense. It had no precedent.
The goal, of course, was to [unclear] Hamas so it could be put into this War on Terror turnkey framework to justify a campaign of mass [unclear] and revenge.
I think it’s important to understand that the Israelis who promoted it, and their confederates here in the United States, knew it was not true—very much knew it was not true.
They’re not stupid. They know [unclear]. But they needed to promote atrocity propaganda to justify what was inevitably going to be a mass-slaughter event of Palestinians. The extent of that mass slaughter, I think, was still up in the air. But certainly that was the emerging consensus within hours of the attack.
One recalls Tony Blinken called for a ceasefire on October 8, because that was pro forma, and then immediately deleted the tweet.
Clearly, there was some decision made that this was not going to be like the normal “mowing the lawn,” which is what Israel called the bombing of Gaza, the killing in Gaza, [unclear] the civilian population—as they had in 2018, 2021, 2014, 2012 and 2009.
This was going to be something much more horrific, extensive and deadly, which, of course, it was.
Then, on October 13, Tony Blinken issues a memo banning the word “ceasefire” from the Biden White House and the State Department.
To maintain that level of raw carnage—if people recall, 300 or 400 people a day were being killed; some days, 600 or 700; and one day in late October had 1,000 being killed—that level of raw brutality and violence and mass killing needed correspondingly horrific atrocity propaganda to justify it.
Obviously, you had 250 or so captives who were taken by Hamas, most of whom were released in the first few days when they had the initial exchanges—or, rather, the first few weeks. But that ran out of gas, or was going to run out of gas, in terms of its moral justification.
You needed these stories about beheaded babies. By the time it’s debunked, three or four days later—and Biden falsely says he had seen pictures of it, and it’s reported somewhat politely, like, “Well, where are the pictures?”—there are none. But it had already served its purpose.
Of course, you get the atrocity propaganda with respect to the claims about Hamas having a policy of mass rape, to peel off women supporters—or, rather, female critics—of Israel’s so-called military response.
The New York Times lowers its editorial standards to publish that story in December 2023, which really does provide the propellant, the accelerant of genocide, regardless of whether one accepts it as manifest fact or believes the most maximalist claims, because the claims somewhat vary.
That kind of [unclear] was necessary to justify 20,000 children being killed, because that’s what ended up happening. Twenty thousand worlds. Twenty thousand universes. Again, 500 times more than were killed on October 7.
That level of brutality and murder needs to—like any good screenplay—raise the stakes.
Any journalist who pushed back on it, or tried to complicate it and provide context, was swiftly and severely disciplined and accused of Hamas apologism, downplaying atrocities or some other manipulative extortion that’s leveled against people for doing the basic job of reporting.
You’re not allowed to provide context. You’re not allowed to humanize. You’re not allowed to provide any kind of secular, political reasons why any of this happened. It just has to be mindless jihadist barbarism and one-note antisemitism.
This kind of [unclear] is pretty much what you got. You got a lot of “they hate us for our freedoms” claptrap, a lot of Orientalist claptrap about the “civilized world.”
My book mentions 150-plus mentions of the words “civilized” or “civilization.” “Barbaric” and “savage” are used, too, which are clearly meant to appeal to a certain Orientalist worldview.
The emotive words I document—for example, on CNN and MSNBC: CNN used the word “savage” 13 times and [“barbaric”] 56 times. MSNBC used the word “savage” 23 times and [“barbaric”] 46 times. These words were never once used for Israel.
The words “slaughter” and “massacre” were reserved exclusively for Palestinians killing Israelis. The New York Times used “massacre” 124 times and “slaughter” 53 times. They used neither word to describe the killing of Palestinians.
How can the New York Times accept that Israel managed to kill 21,000-plus children and somehow never once committed a massacre or slaughter?
I leave it to the listener: That is not mathematically possible. How can you commit such widespread death and carnage and killing and not once commit a massacre or slaughter, or behave barbarically or savagely?
These are obviously loaded terms meant to [unclear], humanize the victims of Palestinian violence while dehumanizing victims of Israeli violence, the description of which is always anodyne and medical and detached.
Janine Jackson: We see them trying to find a comfortable liberal stance for people who want to be on the right side of things. News media help them do that by saying, “Yeah, things are horrible, but…”
Part of the media critique is not just the one-sidedness—and I would encourage folks to understand how data-driven this book is—but also this conversation where, yes, you feel bad about it, but you don’t need to feel that bad about it.
Adam Johnson: This was done through what I call in the book “modes of rationalization.”
Very early on, in the first weeks, especially lowercase-“l” liberal institutions, media and, of course, the White House and President Biden didn’t really even defend the carnage on first principles.
What you saw was an excuse-making and deflection machine.
“Yes, it’s bad. Yes, it’s real. [Israel’s] overdoing it.”
They love this line: “Too many Palestinians have died.” The logical follow-up would be: “How many Palestinians do you think should die?”
That’s where you get all these elaborate interventions by liberal media.
The first, and probably the most impactful, is this idea of human shields. This is the Jake Tapper, New York Times, Washington Post editorial board line: Yes, the carnage is bad. Yes, you can see it on TikTok and YouTube and Twitter.
Obviously, you can’t deny the carnage. There are videos going viral every day—the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen in your life.
You do the next best thing. You can’t deny that there’s a murder, so you do what any good defense lawyer does: You try to plead down to manslaughter or some other minor infraction.
In this case: “Yes, Israel is perhaps being overzealous in its ‘military campaign,’ but Hamas uses human shields.”
It’s important to understand that absolutely no human rights group on Earth—even human rights groups that have been very critical of Hamas, like Human Rights Watch—has ever endorsed this definition of human shielding.
That is not what “human shield” means. It doesn’t mean a military actor in proximity to civilians.
In international humanitarian law, it has a very specific definition with respect to [unclear]: Either at gunpoint or [unclear], you make them defend you from enemy fire in active combat, or go disarm booby traps in a room.
The IDF actually does use human shields, by the way. This was reported in the Washington Post, briefly.
This definition is purely a media concoction. It’s an ad hoc media invention. It is [promoted] by Zionist propaganda groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is, of course, [an AIPAC front group].
They invented this pseudo-academic, pseudo-human-rights framework of human shielding. It became conventional wisdom despite the fact that, again, it’s not endorsed by any objective, neutral third party at all. Certainly no international legal organization and no human rights group have endorsed this definition.
This definition has antecedents in other U.S. and imperial conquests. It was very popular during Vietnam. Whenever a village would be bombed, U.S. officials would repeatedly say, “The Vietnamese communists are using human shields.”
The first time it was used in earnest was during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, in 1898, 1899 and [unclear year]. They would repeatedly accuse the insurgents of using human shields.
What else are you going to say when you decide to indiscriminately bomb civilians? You’re not going to say, “We are attempting to extract concessions from a military actor by disciplining the civilian population,” which, of course, is what they’re doing. [Unclear passage] was called the “moral effect.”
It’s the same principle. That sounds bad, so you say, “They are keeping human shields.”
It becomes what I call a “liberal SSRI.” It sedates you into going, “Oh, okay. I guess they have no choice. Human shields.” Then you flip the channel to watch The Masked Singer or whatever. It’s a way to avoid the issue.
Janine Jackson: It feeds into the idea that they are so craven. It takes me back to Golda Meir saying, “We wish they would love their children enough to stop”—the idea that these people are so craven that they are offering up their children to be murdered because they hate us so much.
Adam Johnson: Hamas maintains roughly 40 or 50 percent support in Gaza. We know it varies depending on how the poll asks the question, but that’s roughly their support. They have a base of support.
Obviously, you can’t maintain that level of popular support [unclear passage about hospitals and command-and-control centers]. It’s obviously absurd.
But it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense, because it’s premised on a bunch of global racist assumptions about them having a kind of “Arab brain disease,” where they just love to die.
Then you have the second mode I detail: this idea that Biden was helpless or, correspondingly, that he was working hard on getting a ceasefire.
This goes in conjunction with the fake ceasefire talks, beginning in March 2024, which were always a complete fiction.
They’re completely belied by the fact that the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Michael Herzog, later told Israeli media in April 2025 that Biden “never asked for a ceasefire, not once.” They were largely there to get pressure off the White House.
We know that because the most powerful country in the world can unilaterally [unclear] whenever it wishes, more or less. They can probably function for a few more weeks, but not really. It was confirmed by the Israeli ambassador later.
Anyone with two brain cells could see that Biden was not sincere about ending the bombing, because he repeatedly said he would not use the one tool in his arsenal that would have actually ended it: a genuine arms embargo, or the credible threat thereof.
The media completely went along, hook, line and sinker. I mean the media in the most general sense. There aren’t really any exceptions at all. [Unclear passage.]
They went along with the fiction that there were ceasefire talks, despite the fact that they were premised on a completely nonsensical contradiction.
Indeed, they redefined the word “ceasefire.” In 5,000 years of human warfare, it means both sides cease firing. But then, roughly on March 2, 2024, it’s redefined to mean Hamas’s surrender.
You would get these Orwellian statements where Biden, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Kamala Harris would say phrases like, “We need a ceasefire in Gaza, and to rebuild it without Hamas in power.”
Wait a second. You just skipped a step. Is Hamas going to magically surrender? What does that even mean?
Clearly, any postwar Gaza would have to involve Hamas and the other militant groups, whether it be PIJ or PFLP or others, because that’s how ceasefires work.
You don’t just say, “I want a ceasefire,” when [you mean] the other side completely capitulates and surrenders.
Janine Jackson: It’s interesting that media actually scurry to try to make an argument, because at the same time we’re seeing a total shutdown on criticism of the genocide.
It’s wild, the way people are being told: “Don’t even say the word. You will be kicked off campus if you say ‘genocide.’ You will lose your job if you say ‘genocide.’”
We’re pretending we’re having a conversation about it. We’re pretending that politicians are fighting something or trying to have a conversation about something.
At the same time, people are being literally silenced from expressing one point of what we could consider to be an argument about this.
Adam Johnson: It’s too big to fail. Liberal imperialism is too big to fail.
Obviously, there are efforts at accountability. I’m helping work on one called “Drop the Genocide 20,” which you can check out.
Fundamentally, I think the extent to which people think there was some accountability for Iraq has been way overindexed. That is not actually what happened.
One of its primary promoters of conspiracy theories, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, is, of course, one of the main promoters of the Gaza genocide. He promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Now he has probably the single most important job in liberal media.
I think everyone who promoted genocidal propaganda is going to be promoted. They already are being promoted. They’re going to move up the ranks.
As you know, you’re not promoted and moved up the ranks of media by being truthful or accurate or adversarial to power. You’re there to sell whatever power decides to skeptical liberals. [Unclear passage] is really where you make your money.
That’s what we’re seeing now. There’s no accountability because this was bipartisan. This was supported by liberal institutions.
The essential way they’re going to try to wiggle off the hook is to blame Netanyahu, making Netanyahu the omnipotent force that compels every liberal to get behind this—a sort of “he manipulated Biden” narrative or other self-serving scapegoating.
He is, of course, very much responsible for the genocide. He is chiefly responsible. But he’s not the only person involved.
Biden wasn’t forced to do anything. He wasn’t manipulated. He knew what he was doing, and he never called for a ceasefire.
They’re hoping [Netanyahu] can lose the election so they can pin it on him, put it in a neat little box with a bow on it, and we can all move on and act like it was some fundamentally justified but ultimately excessive overcorrection or overreaction.
I think that’s the go-to narrative now, because the people who supported it are too big to fail.
Janine Jackson: Where do we go?
Adam Johnson: There’s obviously much one can do. I think one should get involved in local BDS organizing and other such interventions.
I’m personally working on this “Drop the Genocide” campaign that’s been organized by [organization unclear], Track AIPAC and Just Foreign Policy, and supported by others. It’s been signed on to by Rashida Tlaib and Chris Rabb.
That is basically a pledge to drop the Genocide 20—the 20 most influential, most responsible people in the Biden White House. Obviously, the list is much longer, but it’s a place to start.
It’s making a bare-minimum pledge not to work with them, promote them or otherwise boost them.
[Brief unclear passage.] It’s been pulling teeth getting so-called progressives like Ro Khanna and AOC to agree with it.
What we’re doing is trying to heighten those contradictions by beginning a campaign to lobby Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Chris Van Hollen—these people who I think are running for president in 2028 and are very much [unclear].
We’re saying: Will you commit, at the very least, not to hire the administration officials who had a hand in [unclear passage concerning propaganda and internal State Department reports showing genocide]?
That’s a good place to start, because a lot of people are going to want to be “good on Gaza” without really committing to anything.
If you pay attention to what a lot of these progressives have said on this issue, whether it be Ro Khanna, AOC, Van Hollen or others, unlike Rashida Tlaib, they have actually not made the ideological leap from “genocide” to blaming Biden for genocide.
They have said it’s a genocide. But if you look carefully at what they say, they’ve never actually formally blamed the Biden White House or any Democrats for their support for it.
I think that’s a really important distinction. Blaming Israel for genocide is obviously going to give you a lot of flak, but it’s fundamentally easy to do. It doesn’t create any contradictions or cognitive dissonance or tensions within one’s own party, especially because they all told people to vote for Biden.
We need to get people who are supposedly good on this issue to be firm and clear about what the implications of the word “genocide” are.
They’ve all used the word. Chris Van Hollen uses “ethnic cleansing,” but [unclear].
The word “genocide” has implications and obligations. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s not just meant to convey maximum outrage. It actually compels the speaker to do something about it.
Thus far, many of the people who have used that word—and, I think, are trafficking in the goodwill and the political capital of that word—have not actually followed through on what it means.
Janine Jackson: We’ve been speaking with Adam Johnson. The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. It’s out now from Pluto Press.
Adam Johnson has written for a number of respectable places, and also at FAIR.org.
Thank you, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Adam Johnson: Thank you so much.
Janine Jackson: That’s it for CounterSpin for this week.
CounterSpin is produced by FAIR, the national media watch group based in New York. The show is engineered by Michael Cherry.
I’m Janine Jackson. Thanks for listening to CounterSpin.