How America’s media sanitises Gaza’s erasure

In Gaza, language does not merely describe destruction — it enables it. Each euphemism, each “balanced” headline, reorders atrocity into administration. As apartment blocks collapse and families starve, America’s most influential newspapers recast mass death as policy complexity and starvation as logistical failure. The consequence is a media vocabulary that transforms journalism from witness to collaborator.

This is not a question of simple bias or omission; it is the emergence of what might rightly be called genocidal journalism — reporting that flattens atrocity into neutral prose, moralises restraint while rationalising state violence, and rewrites annihilation as ambiguity.

The arithmetic of denial

The New York Times offers a prime example. In a November 2023 column titled “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” opinion writer Bret Stephens argued that “if the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal … why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?” The implication is chilling: genocide requires efficiency, not intent. Stephens later insisted, “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.”

This reasoning transforms legal inquiry into arithmetic. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, intent—not numerical magnitude—is the decisive test. And intent has been unmistakably articulated: Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed a “complete siege” of Gaza, vowing that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” He called the population “human animals.” President Isaac Herzog declared that “an entire nation is responsible.” These are statements of purpose, not miscommunication.

Yet the Times column distilled this chorus into a bureaucratic debate over proportionality, implying that extermination must be perfected before it can be named. Such linguistic sleight of hand turns journalism into the moral accountant of empire.

From self-defence to sanctification

The Wall Street Journal follows a similar logic, offering Israel near-theological absolution under the doctrine of self-defence. Its editorial board dismissed the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling — which found a “plausible risk of genocide” — as “a politicised attack on Israel.” In another editorial, the board framed the devastation in Gaza as a strategic necessity, writing that “Israel has a right and duty to eliminate Hamas’s war-making capability,” a formulation that folds civilian annihilation into the language of duty.

A senior WSJ columnist went further, suggesting that Israel had “allowed Hamas to fester in Gaza as a de facto authority” — a rhetorical inversion that transfers culpability from occupation to the occupied. The pattern is unmistakable: moral inversion disguised as analysis.

Such narratives do not emerge in isolation. They form part of a feedback circuit linking editorial policy, political lobbying, and arms-industry interests. When Boeing, Raytheon, or Lockheed Martin appear in the business pages as “defence contractors” rather than suppliers of weapons used in Rafah and Khan Younis, language completes the circuit of denial.

The manufacture of moral distance

The Washington Post provides perhaps the most complex case: a newsroom that documents a humanitarian catastrophe even as its framing drains agency from the perpetrators. One feature in early 2024 reported that “93 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza face crisis levels of hunger,” quoting a father who said his children were eating animal feed to survive. Another editorial warned that “the time for debate and hesitation has passed; starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”

Yet such pieces coexist with coverage that repeatedly hedges causality. Headlines describe “a worsening humanitarian situation” or “rising civilian tolls” — phrases that make devastation sound like weather. Even when the Post corrected a misattributed report on an aid-distribution massacre, it treated the retraction as procedural housekeeping rather than evidence of systemic imbalance.

According to media-ethics researchers at the Washington Institute, more than half the Post’s on-the-ground sources in early war coverage were anonymous, often without justification. The effect, intentional or not, is a hierarchy of credibility in which official Israeli statements bear names and titles, while Palestinian testimonies appear as unverifiable fragments.

The epistemic hierarchy of power

This hierarchy — who is believed, who is quoted, whose grief counts — reveals the deeper architecture of genocidal journalism. Editorial gatekeeping privileges state narration over subaltern witnessing. Military briefings are treated as credible by default; humanitarian agencies and medical workers are filtered through caveats: “claims that could not be independently verified.”

The repetition of this phrase performs ideological labour. It reassures the reader that distance equals objectivity, when in fact it reproduces the asymmetry of power. Gaza becomes a place that can only be seen through official lenses, its inhabitants reduced to statistical residue.

The politics of euphemism

Language here is not incidental; it is infrastructural. The substitution of “strike” for bombing, “evacuation” for expulsion, and “security operation” for siege sanitises moral outrage. The same newspapers that freely labelled Russian assaults on Ukrainian cities “genocide” now treat Gaza’s annihilation as geopolitics. The shift is not semantic but civilisational: it marks who is permitted to be a victim and who remains a suspect.

Euphemism becomes policy’s camouflage. When the Times describes Gaza’s destruction as “urban warfare” and the WSJ as “a necessary campaign,” they participate in what philosopher Judith Butler calls the “frames of grievability” — deciding whose deaths are grievable, whose are procedural.

Journalism as complicity

None of this requires conspiracy. It requires routine. Copy-editing conventions, editorial caution, and the cult of neutrality together create a linguistic order that makes atrocity narratable only as tragedy, never as crime.

The consequences are measurable. Public opinion surveys in the United States show majority opposition to a Gaza ceasefire correlating with periods of heightened “both-sides” coverage. The moral anesthesia works. Readers internalise the idea that suffering, if balanced by rhetoric, is tolerable.

Reclaiming moral clarity

There was a time when these same institutions prided themselves on confronting power: the Washington Post during Watergate, the New York Times with the Pentagon Papers. Today, those legacies are invoked as myth rather than mission. Jefferson imagined the press as the final defence against tyranny. In Gaza, that defence has collapsed into collaboration.

If journalism still claims a soul, it must lie in the refusal to make cruelty abstract. Reporters must name crimes as crimes, not as crises. Editors must reject the fetish of neutrality that mistakes silence for fairness. And readers — the moral constituency of journalism — must learn to recognise when language becomes lethal.

Toward accountability

The task now is not to balance narratives but to expose them. Journalism schools must train reporters to detect propaganda embedded in official phrasing. Media watchdogs must interrogate ownership structures that bind editorial independence to political interest. And international press bodies must articulate ethical standards for covering genocide in real time, not in retrospect.

For Gaza’s children, whose names vanish between datelines and death counts, moral hindsight will not suffice.

In this war, as in every war, words are weapons. The press has chosen its arsenal. Genocidal journalism does not simply fail to record genocide; it makes it legible as policy.

History will remember not only those who fired the bombs, but those who edited the sentences that justified them.

References
1. Bret Stephens, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” The New York Times, Nov 2023.
2. “Israel Has a Right and Duty to Eliminate Hamas’s War-Making Capability,” Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Jan 2024.
3. “In Gaza, 93 Percent Face Crisis Levels of Hunger,” The Washington Post, Jan 2024.
4. “Starvation Is Present and Rapidly Spreading,” The Washington Post Editorial, Feb 2025.
5. Washington Institute Report, “Anonymous Sources in Gaza War Reporting,” 2024.

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