How the Corporate Media Is Desensitizing Americans to the Tragedy in Gaza

by Norman Solomon

As the war in Gaza enters its 12th month with no end in sight, the ongoing horrors continue to be normalized in American media and politics. The process has become so routine that we may not recognize how omission and distortion have continually shaped the narrative of events since the war began in October.

The war in Gaza received a huge amount of attention from the American media, but how much the media actually communicated about human reality was another story. The easy assumption was that the news allowed media consumers to see what was really going on. But the words and images that reached listeners, readers and viewers were far removed from the experiences of being in the war zone. The belief or unconscious idea that the news media conveyed the reality of war only served to obscure that reality. And the inherent limitations of journalism were exacerbated by media bias.

A woman mourns victims at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, August 13, 2024. (Photo by Khaled Omar/Xinhua)

An in-depth content analysis by The Intercept found that coverage of the first six weeks of the war by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times “showed a consistent bias against Palestinians.” Those highly influential news organizations “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis but not Palestinians.” For example, “The term ‘massacre’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians at a ratio of 60 to 1, and ‘mass murder’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians at a ratio of 125 to 2. ‘Horrible’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians at a ratio of 36 to 4.”

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post used the word “brutal” or its variations far more often for actions by Palestinians (77 percent) than for Israelis (23 percent). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), indicated an imbalance that occurred “despite the fact that Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as many lives lost.” News articles and op-eds were strikingly in the same groove; “the skewed ratio of use of ‘brutal’ in op-eds to characterize Palestinians versus Israelis was exactly the same as in supposedly fair news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profound about the war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, slaughtered, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely unseen. Gradually, the superficial accounts that reached the American public became repetitive and normalized. As the death toll continued to mount and the months passed, the war in Gaza became less of a news topic, with most interview programs rarely mentioning it.

The gap between standard media reporting and the worsening situation in human terms has widened. “Gazans now account for 80 percent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger globally, marking an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege,” the United Nations reported in mid-January 2024. The UN statement quoted experts as saying: “Currently, every person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population is hungry and struggling to find food and drinking water, and famine is imminent.”

President Biden dramatized the divide between war-torn Gaza and the U.S. political zone in late February when he spoke to reporters about the prospects for a “ceasefire” (which never happened) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone in his right hand. “My national security adviser tells me we’re almost there, we’re almost there, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before walking away. On the same day as Biden’s photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where he had just taped an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night” show with comedian Seth Meyers, the U.N. lamented that “very little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month, down 50 percent from January.” Israel blocked aid convoys waiting to enter Gaza at border crossings. More than 10 police officers guarding the aid trucks were deliberately killed by the Israeli army. The disastrous consequences were clear.

“The amount of aid brought into Gaza has plummeted in recent weeks as Israeli airstrikes targeted police officers guarding the convoys, U.N. officials say, leaving them open to looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians,” the Washington Post reported. “On average, just 62 trucks a day have entered Gaza over the past two weeks, according to figures from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — well below the 200 trucks a day that Israel has pledged to facilitate. Only four trucks crossed the border on two separate days this week. Aid agencies, which have warned of a looming famine, estimate that about 500 trucks are needed each day to meet people’s basic needs.”

While such numbers peppered the news, there were countless real horrors that fell outside the media’s purview, plunging people into private anguish and grief. Major media coverage did include some commendable human-interest reporting and investigative articles about individual tragedies in Gaza. But even at their best, such journalism did little to convey the scale, scope, and depth of the mounting disaster. And the stories about the catastrophe were not very diligent in investigating causality, especially when the trail led to the American “national security” establishment. American media framings around heartbreaking portraits of Palestinian victims rarely included their perpetrators in Washington. Top government officials readily expressed regret over the tragic loss of life, while continuing to lay out giant welcome mats for the Grim Reaper.

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Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This text, distributed in partnership with Globetrotter, is an excerpt from Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023). All rights reserved.