Expert: Robin Andersen, professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University, writer and member of the Board of Directors for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and author of The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
Question: In the Complicit Lens, you document in detail how many news organizations amplified Israeli propaganda, with little or no questioning, which was intended to manufacture support for Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This included incendiary claims of beheaded babies and mass, systematic sexual violence on October 7, which were later debunked by Israeli and other journalists. As you wrote, “The terrible irony is that in Gaza, these lies allowed Israel itself to perpetuate the type of [October 7] atrocities it had fabricated. Can you summarize your main conclusions as to how this largely uncritical reporting on dubious Israeli claims came about and how it manifested itself?
Robin Andersen: After October 7, establishment media repeated the bellicose statements being made by Israeli and US officials without pushback. They claimed the Hamas attacks were unprecedented, a surprise coming out of nowhere, and completely without cause. Human rights organizations responded to these assertions, explaining that Israel’s more than half-century-old military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank had created the equivalent of an “apartheid state,” and went so far as to call Gaza an “open-air prison camp” due to Israel’s illegal, 15-year-long siege. However, with the help of the media, Israel successfully established October 7 as the origin story, erasing the critical context of Israel’s long history of oppression and attacks on Palestinians.
Following Israel’s narrative of October 7 as the sole origin story, Israeli violence against Palestinians could then be presented as retaliatory, always defensive and justified. Empowered by the lack of international pressure to stop the killing, Israel began to openly target journalists with flimsy and transparently false accusations in order to silence them and hide the crimes the Israeli military was committing. Well-respected journalists, such as Ismail Al Ghoul and Hosam Shabbat, were killed, along with their colleagues, in targeted Israeli airstrikes.
Removing the ongoing violence from its larger context had another consequence. With no identifiable reason for the attacks of October 7, the violence was attributed to the inherent brutality of Hamas–they were simply blood-thirsty “terrorists” who had no reason to resist Israeli occupation. This is where the atrocity propaganda comes in. The claims of the beheading of babies, the burning of children, and “weaponizing of mass rape,” are all well-established war propaganda tropes that seasoned journalists should have recognized and identified as such, but failed to do so. They served to demonize a supposed enemy so depraved that any violence could be used against them, to justify the truly extreme nature of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza.
Q: Why did you decide to write the book and what do you hope to achieve with it?
RA: I had been working with my colleagues at Project Censored on their annual volume, State of the Free Press, as a media critic. In the first few days of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, we saw the willingness of big media outlets to accept, without question, Israeli statements that amounted to incitement to genocide. Threatening Gaza with no food, no water or aid, and to turn it into a “tent city,” are all violations of the laws of war.
Then the media’s use of vague language, referring to mysterious explosions without attributing the bombing of civilians to Israel, started to emerge. I noticed an identifiable pro-Israel frame that was coalescing into a pro-genocide news frame. The media’s failure to view Israel’s attacks on Gaza within a context of international law was evident within the first few weeks.
I was also writing critiques being published in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting that were picked up by other online outlets, and at some point along the way a book project was a natural progression.
I realized that a detailed analysis of a genocide unfolding so quickly would be hard to reconstruct in hindsight, so I saw the book as a documentation of the press strategies that were failing to report the nature of Israel’s violence or even use the word genocide. I also felt a real urgency to have a document that might in some way, help stop the slaughter of Palestinians. I was constantly feeling the suffering in Gaza while analyzing the coverage and it made me perpetually angry. But the process also provided a way for me to deal with the pain caused by what I was seeing.
Q: Have you gotten any feedback from journalists since the book was published, and do you have any advice for journalists who are trying to do their best to cover Palestine/Israel honestly and accurately within institutions and circumstances that make that difficult?
RA: Yes, I spoke recently to a journalist who was forced to quit her job in Canada. She has an advanced degree in genocide studies, and many times she knew that the Israelis were lying about what they were doing, but the outlet she worked for would not allow her to say that. So she felt she had to quit. I don’t think any establishment media would allow a journalist to report in completely honest and accurate terms about what the Israelis were and are continuing to do, even now.
The advice I would offer journalists who work in establishment media would be to try to address the incredible shifts in U.S. public opinion that demonstrate a near total collapse of support for Israel because of the genocide. This is finally beginning to hit home, and the Democratic Party establishment is increasingly aware that some 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view Israel unfavorably. Media coverage, to stay relevant, must also begin to reflect these changes.
It may be time for journalists to address the ways media language and framing have condoned the genocide. They could start using unambiguous language to describe Israeli attacks and cover international law more accurately. Some media literacy scholars have called for the Genocide Conventions to be taught in schools. I would add that journalism schools should teach not only about genocide, but the humanitarian principles that underly the laws and conventions, which seek to prioritize human life over weaponry and promote humanity over war.
Q: As you note, there has been a sea change in U.S. public opinion over the last few years, with a majority of Americans now seeing Israel in a negative light and increasingly sympathizing with the Palestinians. Do you think this has had, or will have, any impact on the media’s coverage of Palestine/Israel?
RA: The change in U.S. public opinion has been extraordinary, and I argue in my book that Israel’s loss of favorability in opinion polling worldwide must be attributed to the courage of Palestinian journalists who kept reporting the truth from Gaza, even though they were being targeted by Israel.
That said, establishment media have shown little willingness to provide the American public with more honest and accurate reporting of Israel’s expanding violence in the region. We see this in the coverage of Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Media outlets still refuse to use the terminology of international law. Instead of using terms such as “ethnic cleansing,” which is what Israel has been doing in southern Lebanon, they repeat Israeli euphemisms like “evacuation.” Most media still refuse to call Israel’s systematic attacks on civilians–wiping out entire villages, killing unarmed medics and journalists, including the use of so-called “double tap” strikes, bombing schools and hospitals–what they are, crimes against humanity.
As for Gaza, it has almost completely fallen out of the news cycle, even though Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing continues despite the supposed ceasefire that was announced in October.
A UN commission investigating the Israeli military’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children recently concluded that the killing of the young is a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinian people. The UN called it genocide. There has been some good coverage of that report, so possibly legacy media are beginning to realize the global lack of support for Israel’s brutal military expansionism and that continuing to whitewash Israel’s actions harms their own credibility, without which, at the end of the day, they have nothing.