Media’s Role in Gaza Coverage: How Center-Left Outlets Failed Palestinians

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following the show on YouTube or Substack.

Introduction and Guest Introduction

Perry Bacon: I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined today by Adam Johnson, journalist and author. He has a book coming out next week that I think is one of the more important books about politics you’re going to read this year. It’s called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Adam, welcome.

Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me on.

The Book’s Core Argument

Bacon: So talk about the general argument of the book. I think “the media’s complicity” gives some sense of it, but talk about what your book is about and the time period it’s in.

Johnson: I focus primarily on the first year, from October of 2023 to October of 2024, because when you write a book, you have to stop the clock somewhere, otherwise you’ll just keep updating it ad infinitum. But with a specific focus on what I argue as really the first three to six months, when the genocide I thought became codified and cemented—as Israelis would say, the facts on the ground were affirmed. And there was a moment early on—there were several moments early on—when there would have been an outrage or an upswell or an intervention to stop it, and the media had a critical role in dampening those, obscuring those, or downplaying those.

And then of course—it being a Democratic president meant that there was a different set of incentives, a different dynamic that required political and I guess PR attempts to dampen outrage from what people were seeing every day in their social media feeds, which was an endless stream of carnage specifically targeting children coming over their Twitter and TikTok feeds.

Defining the Media in Context

The media—the media is defined in the context of this book as—it’s a very imperfect term, but we say center-left or liberal media, not in the Rush Limbaugh sense, but the sort of small-l liberal media, quote-unquote mainstream media, or media that historically, editorially, has endorsed Democrats—I think is one kind of objective [measure].

Bacon: CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Atlantic—those four were the most—maybe The Washington Post has all been included in some of that.

Johnson: Yeah. The Washington Post is central to it. And people say, why not Fox News or The Wall Street Journal? And what I say in the introduction is that the idea that those are genocidal publications—I don’t believe is really in dispute. I don’t think anyone disputes that. I think if you probably asked them, they would effectively say they are—they wouldn’t probably put it in those terms—but they would not act like they care about the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, outside of some neocon conservative trap about freedom—or whatever, freedom from Hamas. So it’s not really a contested space. And as writers, we typically try to write in contested spaces.

What I argue