Be the first to read 'How to Sell a Genocide'
Posted: 9th April 2026
“They are deceiv’d that acquiesce to things which they have heard, and believe not what they have seen.”
—Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653)
In analyzing how American media helped create the political, ideological, and moral conditions for mass death in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2024, one must always make clear the stakes, situate the media criticism in the context of the actual humans who died—those who had limbs blown off, their children starved to death, watched loved ones waste away from preventable disease, saw their families torn apart. Lives upended, dreams snuffed out. Whole universes destroyed with the push of a button, the casual firing of a sniper rifle, the command to “remove a threat” from a faceless AI-assisted officer in an air-conditioned room. Death counts are abstractions: Numbers don’t register on a gut level, anything over what can be counted ceases to have significance in our mind’s eye, so it becomes cold, academic, numbing.
This is before the statistics detailing mass death on an unprecedented scale run through the normal Western cognitive dissonance filters that, of course, existed long before October 7, 2023: The Hollywood-curated heat ripple sunrise with the Islamic call to prayer in the background signaling a wholly different world, the soothing “they’ve been fighting for thousands of years” faux-savvy pseudo-history, the “War on Terror” framework that reduces all their violence to sadistic glee and ours to a reluctant, if messy, “Defense of Civilization.”
Center-Left mainstream news media in the US didn’t invent these initial prejudices but they certainly played to them, lent them fake intellectual credibility, built off of them, and constantly pandered to their corrosive and reductive version of history and present—all to create space for a Democratic president arming and funding what would end up being one of the worst, if not the worst, human rights crimes of the 21st century.
This book will argue that this process was neither inevitable nor self-sustaining: It took deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors—editors, reporters, bookers, producers, and TV personalities—who decided, early on in the so-called “Israel–Hamas war,” that defending the powerful and spinning a fictional narrative to soothe Western liberal audiences was more important than speaking plain truths, than defending a dispossessed people from a wholly asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians of Gaza.
Like any good media critic, my job is one of prosecutor. What this book seeks to do is not to make this case with polemic or ideological assertions, or selective examples of bad coverage, but with robust data. By pulling from over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips in nine major outlets, and showing all the work in open source format, by interviewing sources who were in the room, and using comparative analysis of other contemporary conflicts, I will attempt to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence.
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Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle.He is donating all royalties to the Middle East Children’s Alliance.