Israel’s genocide in Gaza has undoubtedly become the most broadcasted atrocity in history. With massacre after massacre streamed daily to audiences in the billions, Israel’s crimes have now been witnessed as if firsthand by a huge portion of humanity. In spite of this, corporate news outlets have trafficked in coverage that all-too-often flouts a reality we can see before our eyes. This sort of unreliability evinces far more than a crisis of integrity in legacy media—it’s a sign of a deep political crisis that runs to the upper echelons of our system. Millions of US voters are turning against the Democrats over the carnage in Gaza, and rather than changing course, the powers that be are simply attempting to distort and pollute the narrative. Adam Johnson and Dan Boguslaw join The Real News to discuss the media’s blatant bias in reporting on Gaza.
Additional links:
CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor. Dan Boguslaw, The Intercept.
Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Before we get going today, I want to remind you all that The Real News is an independent viewer and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we don’t put our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but incredible team of folks here who are fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support, and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. So, just head on over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference.
Earlier this month at The Intercept, Journalist Daniel Bogusla published an explosive investigative report titled CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor. This report confirmed many of the suspicions US viewers and readers have long had about major media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7th, and its longstanding coverage of Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine, providing a smoking gun as it were, regarding the demonstrably pro-Israel slant to the network’s reporting.
As Bogusla writes, quote, “Whether reporting from the Middle East, the United States, or anywhere else across the globe, every CNN journalist covering Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the news organization’s bureau in Jerusalem prior to publication under a longstanding CNN policy.” While CNN says the policy is meant to ensure accuracy and reporting on a polarizing subject, it means that much of the network’s recent coverage of the war in Gaza and its reverberations around the world has been shaped by journalists who operate under the shadow of the country’s military censor. Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem Bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Force’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off limits for news organizations to cover and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print.
As The Intercept reported last month, “The military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor. CNN’s practice of routing coverage through the Jerusalem Bureau does not mean that the military censor directly reviews every story. Still, the policy stands in contrast to other major news outlets, which in the past have run sensitive stories through desks outside of Israel to avoid the pressure of the censor. On top of the official and unspoken rules for reporting from Israel, CNN recently issued directives to its staff on specific language to use and to avoid when reporting on violence in the Gaza Strip. The network also hired a former soldier from the IDF’s military spokesperson unit to serve as a reporter at the onset of the war,” end quote.
It’s been over three months since the October 7th Hamas-led attacks in Southern Israel designated as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, culminated in the brutal killing of over 1,100 people, including nearly 700 Israeli civilians, hundreds of security forces and dozens of foreigners. Hamas forces also captured around 250 hostages from Israel during the attack. Since then, however, over the past three months, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on the Gaza Strip has wrecked a kind of devastation unseen in the 21st century. And true to form, major Western media outlets have continued to provide cover for Israel’s crimes, regurgitating government and IDF-fed talking points, lies and half-truths, suppressing Palestinian voices, painting a lopsided picture of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as either entirely justified or too, quote, “complex or murky,” for people of conscience who are understandably horrified by what they’re seeing to take a position on.
At the same time though, something is clearly changing in the Western media sphere, with growing numbers of audiences, especially among the younger generations, getting their news from social media, independent media, and other sources beyond the umbrella of what, in years past, was called the mainstream media. The past three months have not only been distinct in terms of the level of devastation that Israel and its military have wrought on the Palestinian people, but this moment in history has also been defined by an intense battle over the truth, over the narrative about Israel, about Palestine, about October 7th, about the occupation and the lives and humanity of all involved.
As media critic Adam Johnson recently wrote in his monthly column for The Real News Network, quote, “As the staggering number of civilian deaths in Gaza grows every day, and as fresh reports of Israel’s brazen attacks on mosques, hospitals, churches, refugee camps, and other civilian targets come across our social media timelines every few hours, there’s a mounting urgency among Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups in the US, and the US media and political establishment that’s backing these manifest war crimes to downplay the horrific mass killing of Palestinian non-combatants. With polls showing that a majority of voters, including 80% of Democrats, back a ceasefire, putting the vast majority of Democratic politicians at odds with their own constituents, excuses are needed to justify and hand-wave away the reports of carnage coming out of Gaza every day,” end quote.
So, what is happening here? How have Western media outlets responded to the carnage over the past three months? Is it more of the same, or is something actually changing here? For The Real News Network podcast, I got to sit down with Daniel Bogusla and Adam Johnson to take stock of major media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza over the past three months. Adam Johnson hosts the Citations Needed podcasts and writes at The Column on Substack, as well as for publications like The Nation and The Real News Network. Daniel Bogusla is an investigative reporter based in Washington DC. His interests include corporate corruption, congressional and White House investigations, American influence overseas and organized labor. Prior to joining The Intercept, Daniel worked at the New Republic, The American Prospect, and as a firefighter in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s my conversation with Daniel and Adam recorded on Friday, January 13th. Well, Dan Bogusla, Adam Johnson, thank you both so much for joining me today on The Real News Podcast. I really appreciate it.
Dan Bogusla:
Thanks for having me, and us.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, thanks for having us, the collective us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. I’m a big, big fan of your guys’ respective work. And of course, Adam, I get the pleasure of working with you editing your fantastic media criticism column that we publish at The Real News Network every month. And Dan and I have bumped into each other at the Breaking Points Studio, and I’ve had my eye on his great work at The Intercept and beyond for a while now. So, it’s really exciting to get you both on the podcast today. And you two were the guys that I was thinking of when I wanted to talk about the subject that we’re going to talk about today, which is of course the mainstream media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, the October 7th Hamas-led attacks three months ago, and all the carnage that has unfolded ever since, because that’s really what y’all have been covering of late, analyzing the ways that our major media outlets are “reporting” on, and I use reporting in air quotes here, this horrifying war and genocidal assault on the people of Gaza that is happening half a world away.
And so of course people here in the United States are reliant on media to inform them on what is happening over there. And there’s a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of propaganda, there’s a lot of conditioning that can happen in that connection between people here and the carnage there. And this is what you guys have been reporting on. And before we dig into some of your more recent specific reports, looking at things like CNN’s pretty ridiculous policy, which Dan detailed in his most recent Intercept piece, which we’re going to talk about in a second.
But before we get there and talk about some of the specific pieces that y’all have been working on and topics you’ve been covering, I wanted to just take the opportunity, since I’m fortunate enough to have you both on this recording at the same time, I want to start and just ask you both as professionals in the media industry and people who analyze and report on that industry, what are some of your general takeaways from the past three months of major media coverage of October 7th and Israel’s war on Gaza? What seems markedly different about the coverage that’s been on offer compared to what we all grew up with, and what seems decidedly the same? Because there is something happening here.
I remember being in a hotel in Minnesota at the end of October watching PBS interviewed Tareq Baconi about his book on Hamas. And in a 40-minute interview, I heard more context about what Hamas is, the history of Hamas and the context around October 7th than before. I heard more information in that one segment than I feel like I had heard over the course of an entire lifetime of consuming corporate media coverage of Israel and Palestine here in the United States. So, like I said, something’s changing, but it’s not as if we’ve had a whole 180 here. So, yeah, let’s toss it to you guys, starting with Dan and then going to Adam. What feels markedly different about the coverage that we’re getting now and what feels decidedly the same as what we’ve been getting all these years?
Dan Bogusla:
I think it’s been said before by other people, because I think a number of people have noticed this shift that something feels different this time. I think the two most notable things for me have been obviously just the glut of horrifying images coming out on social media. I think that is a new force that hasn’t quite existed where you have a new scale of violence with this current conflict and you have a new scale of footage and image distribution. And I think that has led to this other shift where you can kind of feel a month by month shift where you can feel, once the public reaches a certain level of disbelief at the violence that they’re seeing, you can sometimes feel the major networks, whether it’s the New York Times or CNN, start to attempt to shift some of their coverage that way, whether it’s in the op-ed page, whether it’s just running photo spreads of the carnage in Gaza, or whether it’s having slightly more aggressive interviews with Israeli spokespeople on CNN.
Again, it’s not to say that it fully balances out the party line from these different organizations, but I think that it’s important to at least recognize when there is a shift happening, try to think through what’s causing it and to see that these places are capable of running that type of coverage. They’re capable of responding to a breakthrough, and it’s unfortunate that it takes the level of death and destruction and violence and imagery to get them there. But there’s also a hopeful element there, I think, which is that the public can still demand that the media shifts its coverage and supplies them with more information about something that they’re seeing on their social media accounts.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. Obviously, the big difference is that, in opposed to, I guess the second-closest most deadliest was 2014, Protective Edge, the death count is over 20 times greater. They reached the 2014 death count, I think in roughly the first week of this particular iteration of bombing Gaza. I believe the civilian death count was about 1,481 in 2014, and that has obviously been way surpassed. The number’s probably upwards of 24, 25,000 by now. I’m sure it’s even higher. I think it’s probably an under count. So, the numbers and the sheer scale of killing, a child has a leg or arm amputated every 106 minutes, roughly 10 times, 13-and-a-half times a day for almost 100 days straight, which again, boards can’t even begin to describe that. Obviously, thousands still live under rubble. In Northern Gaza, 90% of the buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged. Northern Gaza is entirely uninhabitable. Farms, greenhouses, all have been raised, cemeteries have been raised for no reason other than the erasure of the Palestinian people in those particular places.
And so the scale is so much different, and it’s so wanton. And there’s not even a set of liberal pretense. CNN, one of the few good things they did do is that report, although I think it was maybe duplicated also by the Washington Post, will show that 50% of the bombs dropped are dumb bombs. So, they’re not even faking this smart precision, which is always kind of bullshit anyway, but it’s like they’re not even faking the liberal interventionist targeted hunt for Hamas narrative. In many ways, Western media is kind of doing that heavy lifting for them. They don’t even bother with that.
Now, again, a lot of pro-Israel, Western-facing English language accounts will still hold onto that mythology. But the Israeli leadership itself say quite explicitly that the goal was, quote, “damage, not precision,” unquote. This was on October 10th, three days after October 7th. So, in 2014 and 2009 and 2021, these other kind of bombing raids into Gaza, obviously one big difference of course is that in those bombing raids, almost no Israelis ever died, and that’s one of the obviously major things that makes this different. In fact, about, I think it was six people, civilians died in 2014. I think one of them was of a heart attack. So, we’re not really talking about comparable numbers to the 1,139 that died on October 7th on the Israeli side, most of whom were Israeli, and then 1,000 additional Palestinian militants, I think roughly is the number Israel’s provided.
And of course, you have the ongoing hostage situation. So it’s so much different in those ways, and the carnage is so much worse that I think it’s hard to do the usual, to keep the script of the hunt for Hamas script. That isn’t to say they haven’t tried for the most part. I do think that the breaking off of the human shield, hunt for Hamas kind of zombie narrative is pretty rare, but it does happen. Again, you’ll get the occasional Christiane Amanpour or Evan Hill at the Washington Post has done some pretty good work. They debunked the Al-Shifa Hospital nonsense, which The New York Times has not had the courage to do yet, even though it’s very clear based on the tweets of their forensic reporters that they don’t believe it. But I think they’ve been very hesitant to pull the trigger on that. The New York Times has been much, much, much worse than the Washington Post.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And by which you’re referring to just the IDFs-like claim that Al-Shifa-
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. So, the IDF claim Al-Shifa was a, quote unquote, “Hamas command and control center,” and was, quote unquote, “the beating heart of Hamas.” They released this rather absurd 3D graphic that looked like it was made in blender by a YouTuber showing this bomb villain-like layer underneath Al-Shifa Hospital. And of course, they raid the hospital, kill a bunch of people, throw a bunch of NICU babies off their life support, and then they did what they thought they could do, because again, there’s some debate about whether or not they even believed their own bullshit. I think some probably did. I think some just knew they were fudging it. Similar to weapons of mass destruction, I think it was a combination of both. And then they get there and it’s like a tunnel that doesn’t even attach to the hospital with a few metal cots. It looks nothing like what was presented.
And then they tried to leak it selectively to show it. Then they blew it up, said, “Oh, we got to blow it up. You got to move on.” So, Washington Post debunked that, which again, I think that they do, there is some veering off the script. But for the most part, as we found in our analysis, the asymmetry of coverage and bias is still very much there. I think for the longest time Israel tried to, and I think for good reason on their part, they tried to play into this liberal interventionists war on terror, ostensibly humanitarian framework. And I think that over the last 10 years, as the right wing has become totally codified and began to kind of exist in its own Trumpian bubble, they really don’t give a shit about that anymore.
Dan Bogusla:
Yeah, I want to jump on that exact point too though, because I think that that brings up another key part of what’s different this time around, which is the fact that if you look at what members of Congress who were trying to find a way to press back without alienating the support of APAC or more conservative voters on this issue, the chief line over and over again, in every press release, is Netanyahu’s government. And so I think there has been a little bit of a break in suffocation around this issue because as people look for a way into this, who maybe haven’t been critical of Israel in the past, Netanyahu’s actions are, from a standpoint even of the liberal interventionist sense, counterproductive for US regional interests. His destabilization of Israeli politics and Israeli society actually makes it more difficult, I think, for the US to do business with Israel. And I think that’s created a small gap for certain criticism. Now, I think if you look at his, so-called political opponents in the Israeli center or center left, there’s not much daylight between their policies.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, it is a unity government.
Dan Bogusla:
Right. But I still think that there is an opening there that some people have tried to exploit, and you can make the argument either way that, okay, well, that opens up more critical coverage. You can also make the argument that it actually distracts from a pure critique of Israel’s longstanding human rights abuses in Gaza. But either way, I think there is more critical coverage, and maybe it’s a bad thing that some of it is purely directed at him. But again, I think that’s another change this time around.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. I know a lot of Palestinian activists have written that they prefer the Netanyahus of the world because they dispense with the pretense of liberal Zionism, and in many ways, which is not a position I necessarily endorsed, but one can understand it, because I think it’s more honest. And what’s made the last three months kind of joke-afying is that liberal Zionists in the United States and just liberals in general, are having a totally different conversation than what’s actually going on in the ground. They are imagining… You see this initially with people like Ro khanna, Elizabeth Warren. I know Ro Khanna has come around to a ceasefire position, but there was this obsession with like, “Okay.” And Bernie Sanders still has this position. Is it a totally immoral and untenable position, this idea that there’s some artisanal humanitarian bombing of Hamas they can do that they support in principle? So, they don’t want to call for a ceasefire, they just want them to change tactics. And it’s like, “Well, okay, but after-“
Maximillian Alvarez:
A bespoke bombing of Hamas.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah, basically, farm to table, and it’s like, at this point, you’d say, “Okay, well clearly that’s not going to happen.” So, at this point, you need to shit or get off the pot. Either you oppose the war that exists in reality, or you support the war that exists in reality. There’s not really a third option here, and certainly not one that’s going to reveal itself mysteriously. And you really saw this exposure of some of the tensions within liberal Zionism that have obviously existed for decades, and there was this desire to maintain this pretense that this was at all about Hamas. And I wrote this in The Nation, I guess about six weeks ago at this point. But this hunt for Hamas narrative, that existed entirely in American media, because it does not exist in Israeli media.
To be clear, I don’t speak Hebrew, but if you read… There’s a lot of people on social media who will translate for you if you read Israeli media, if you read English language Israeli media, of which of course there’s a lot, they’re not having this conversation about precision, artisanal missile firings to get the baddies. It is an almost agreed upon consensus. And in fact, the extent to which the government has been criticized, it’s been criticized for not being collective punishment enough. The collective punishment is the strategy, and that is that the response needs to be bronzes age in its character. And that is just not the narrative we get in the United States. And trying to reconcile these two totally different narratives, has led to some pretty, I think goofy, and it strains cognitive dissidence and it strains credulity, and it’s important that we be honest about that.
And I think over the last few weeks, we’ve seen official liberal voices, Michelle Goldberg has made this point. Peter Byard has made this point in the New York Times, that I don’t want to be like a hipster, but I think they’re a little late to the party, 25,000-plus debt. But it’s good that people are finally saying, “Look, this idea that liberal Zionism can reconcile with what’s going on in Israel is simply not true. It’s just based on a totally alternative facts,” as liberals used to criticize Trump for saying. And I think that that’s finally becoming at least a little bit more mainstream that people recognize that. Now to the extent to which they think they can kind of bifurcate Netanyahuism from the broader kind of project of Israeli occupation and siege of Gaza in the West Bank, I tend to think that that is a difference without much of a distinction.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. Well, and again, just because we live in the world, we’ve seen how this shit goes time and time again, we can see the writing on the wall that that is going to still be the option of first resort, which is to try to paint this humanitarian catastrophe as somehow more a product of Netanyahu’s government than the-
Adam Johnson:
But it’s 25,000 oopsies, right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… than the 75-year brutal occupation of Palestine, right?
Adam Johnson:
I think that’s where the genocidal rhetoric was hard to reconcile. I think that was really the thing that made it, where it was like every single time a minister would come out and say, “We’re doing Nakba 2023,” as the agriculture minister came out. The intelligence minister wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post on November 19th, are lobbying for forcible population transfers into the Sinai, into other, quote unquote, “Arab countries.” You saw obviously the defense minister talk about how, “We’re fighting human animals.” We saw the president talk about how there’s no distinction between civilian… Very overtly genocidal rhetoric. Every single time you’d bring that up, some savvy, cool foreign policy guy would come along and say, “Oh, that’s just locker room talk. That’s just rhetoric.”
And it’s like, I don’t know, maybe one or two would be, even though it’s still genocidal rhetoric, because again, in 2011, Muammar Gaddafi referred to his enemies as cockroaches. And that line, in and of itself was seen as evidence of genocidal intent in the Western media by Samantha Power, by Susan Rice, that line and that line alone. Now, whether or not he had genocidal intent, we can debate that, but that line was the evidence used to say that Libya was about to commit genocide and justify NATO airstrikes. Israel has done that a 100X at this point, and yet we all sit around. Bomb falls, we’re like, “Ah, maybe they’re being ironical.” And it always reminds me of that sketch. I forget where the guy says, “This controversy is absurd. Those murders were obviously ironic.”
And I think it’s some gangster rapper parity or whatever. And it’s like, at some point, it’s not ironic. At some point, it’s not locker room talk. At some point, it’s clear, especially when you combine it with the actual killing of 20-fucking-5,000 people and the displacement of 2 million people living in tent cities, all of which again, they said they were going to do, and of course, them actively lobbying for forcible population transfers, which is also known as ethnic cleansing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and there’s like an echo there too of, I’m sure folks listening to this can hear it themselves, there’s an echo of how the media dealt with Donald Trump. And I want to be very clear, I’m not equating these two things, but the trope that is being used here is very similar to what you’re describing, Adam.
Adam Johnson:
Take them seriously, don’t take them literally. Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Take them seriously, don’t take them literally. That was-
Adam Johnson:
You probably should do both.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That was exactly like what the media was saying and what Trump supporters were sort of saying. And then what happens when those two things converge? Then you no longer have this sort of rhetorical netherworld to hide in when it runs up against the hard reality of the real. And I want to circle back to that at the end, because I do want to ask about what you pointed out there, both of you, about the position that Israel is in as it tries to talk out of both sides of its mouth, or as the US and pundits here in the US try to be the other side of Israel’s mouth while Israel’s own officials, and even its own media, is saying another thing. What happens when you create that sort of fractured reality, one that is meant to placate the citizens of the imperial US here in the West, and the Israeli population over in Israel? I do think that there’s something really crucial there that I want us to talk about as we close out this conversation.
But before we get there, I want to follow up on the flip side of the first question I asked where we were talking about what feels markedly different about this moment and what feels decidedly the same. And so you both laid out some really crucial points that do signal that we have entered a new era of sorts in the way that we talk about Israel Palestine, US, the United States and its role in the world, and even the ways that we relate to our own media organizations, institutions and publications in this country.
But that’s all to say that there still is a lot that is the same. This is what you guys write about a lot of the times like, “Here come the New York Times, CNN, USA Today. Here come all the usual suspects trotting out the usual talking points and arguments that try to justify the crimes of Israeli occupation that have worked in the past that are not working as much now.” Because this is the substance of some of your recent pieces, including this really bombshell piece that Dan published in The Intercept on January 4th of this year with the headline, CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow Of IDF Censor. So, I want to focus on that, what this story and what some of the analysis that you’ve been doing, Adam, tells us about how and where the major media apparatus in this country is still doing the work of laundering Israeli crimes and manufacturing consent for supporting Israel while this genocidal assault on Gaza is literally happening as we speak.
Dan Bogusla:
Yeah. Well, I can speak to the interesting timeline and the things I learned in reporting that story and other stories about the Israeli military censor before that one. But I think what was fascinating was, one, the policy that we reported on, which is that every line of reporting about Israel or Palestine from reporters in Israel, reporters outside of Israel, has to be basically passed through either the Jerusalem Bureau or when the bureau is asleep, a team of editors who is basically in line with the Jerusalem Bureau. But this was not a policy that was implemented after October 7th, after there was a shift to heightened interest in the region. This was a longstanding policy that CNN told me had been in place for a long time, and it was slightly modified when the judicial overhaul started taking place in July to try to bring on these other external editors to aid with the amount of coverage that was happening.
But it kind of tells a story about how we got to this place. And something that has been covered by reporters before about the Israeli military censor 972 has done excellent work documenting this year after year and trying to educate the public about the number of articles that are directly censored. But they say that it’s a protocol to try to make sure that the editors who are closest to the news are the ones with the hands on it, but at the same time, it also means that those editors and any reporters in Israel are subject to very strict and explicit directives that are laid out by the Israeli military censor that talk and convey exactly what reporters can and can’t cover. They can’t cover certain aspects of security cabinet meetings. They can’t cover certain things about hostages being held in Gaza. They can’t cover weapon systems captured by Hamas or certain details about Israeli weapon systems that are being used in the war in Gaza.
So, each news organization has their own way of trying to navigate this censor because it is like, I think bureaus all over the world in one sense, where you have to navigate the burdens of the government in the country under which you’re operating and trying to get news out of with your responsibility to readers about actually relaying the truth and the facts on the ground to them. And again, through the course of this story and other stories, it’s become clear that it is not a situation where CNN is submitting every single one of their articles to the Israeli military for review. Instead, it’s kind of a longstanding practice where reporters know where the lines are. In some cases, news outlets will run extremely sensitive stories that break the guidelines of the censor through bureaus outside of Israel. So, it’s shocking to hear that CNN policy is to run everything through Israel, but it really shows the way that news coverage, for a long time, has been shaped according, at least in part, to the official IDF line and the interests of the Israeli government.
And I think it kind of educates readers who can then go back and look at CNN’s coverage and see what internal leakers said to me, which is that these protocols have baked into their system a way of expediting the IDF spokesperson’s line into articles and towards the top of articles, and it’s all set up under the name of due diligence, but this is the practical effect and the real world effect of this highly technical system. And I think that kind of folds into your work and the pieces that you’ve been putting out the past week, but it definitely was an inside look at a longstanding practice that’s becoming accelerated and aggravated under more scrutiny now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just before we toss it to Adam, just to even drive that point further home, I read a chunk of your article in the intro to this podcast, Dan, but I just wanted to read one more part that I thought was pretty striking, a pretty striking detail in your Intercept report, which we will of course link to in the show notes for this episode.
But just to build on what Dan just said, to really drive that home for people listening, Dan writes, and I quote, “Early in the war, on October 26, CNN’s News Standards and Practices division sent an email to staff outlining how they should write about the war.” Quote, “Hamas controls the government in Gaza, and we should describe the ministry of health as, quote ‘Hamas controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict. If the underlying statistics have been derived from the ministry of health in Gaza, we should note the fact that this part of the ministry is, quote ‘Hamas controlled, even if the statistics are released by the West Bank part of the ministry or elsewhere,’ end quote. The email goes on to acknowledge CNN’s responsibility to cover the human cost of the war, but couches that responsibility in the need to, quote, ‘cover the broader current geopolitical and historical context of the story while continuing to remind our audiences of the immediate causes of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of Israeli civilians,’ end quote.”
So, just even in the standards that are being disseminated, like to other people working at CNN, you can see how just these standards are shaping a very particular view of reality right now.
Dan Bogusla:
Yeah. And I would just add onto to that, I also included in that piece the fact that in 2001, the onset of the war in Afghanistan, the chairman of CNN sent out a very similar memo to staff and to reporters advising them to remind readers at all times that no matter what type of pictures of civilian carnage they see coming out of Afghanistan, especially from Taliban controlled areas, it was critical to remind them that all that violence was a direct result of the attacks on September 11th. So again, similar language of trying to tie mass scale civilian casualty to the root, so-called justification for that violence.
Adam Johnson:
Right. Yeah, and of course the root cause only goes back three months, so-called root cause. Let me talk about the Hamas-controlled smear that they throw around. It fucking drives me up the wall. It is one of these great kind of front row kid, technically accurate things you throw out when you really know what the purpose of it is. Everybody knows what the purpose of it is. Everyone thinks, “Well, it’s Hamas controlled.” Yeah, okay. Hamas, quote unquote, “controlled figures” have been verified and vouched for by Human Rights Watch, by the United Nations, and by the US State Department for years, including by the way, until after their weird attempt in October to deny them, later Biden supposedly apologized for that in private and has yet to do it in public, but these are not figures that anyone historically has ever actually get credibly doubted.
In fact, they were within a 7% margin of error in all previous conflicts with the Israeli’s own numbers. No one actually thinks these numbers are not accurate. So, in the same breath, they say Hamas controlled. What they ought to say is Hamas-controlled numbers that are vouched for by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations and the UN, and the goddam United States State Department. So, when they do the Hamas controlled, well, clearly what they’re doing is they’re doing denialism. They’re putting a little kernel of doubt in the brain of the reader. They go, “Oh well, that’s just terrorists. That can’t be accurate. That’s obviously not true.” And this of course serves one purpose and one purpose only, and it’s to sanitize the mass slaughter that’s going on. And if you’re going to say Hamas controlled because you want to somehow be technically accurate, okay, fine, but you have to say, “Hamas controlled, but vouched for by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations,” because they have vouched for them, because they’ve generally historically been proven to be accurate. In fact, in certain cases, have been pretty big under count.
So, that’s the first thing. The second thing is, and Daniel, I really, really like to report, because you indicated a lot of things people had thought, because censorship typically is not a direct thing. It is kind of self-censorship or more ideological, but then sometimes, it is a direct thing, and it’s important to say that. And CNN, for years, it’s taken millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates. They run puff pieces on United Arab Emirates all the time. I’ve reached out to them responsible statecraft. Others have reached out to them. They refused to very rarely do reporting, but actually do reporting on this. Daniel, of course, actually did reporting here, that they rarely acknowledge that they have all these embedded conflicts of interests, and they have obviously a lot of ideological blinders that have very little to do with direct finality, but are part of this broad chauvinist Western brand they’ve built.
But their coverage in particular, again, with rare exceptions, has been pretty cartoonishly one-sided and has been for some time. Everything is filtered through this human shields’ narrative. Everything is filtered through this never-forget-October-7th narrative. There’s this obsession with constantly bringing it up in every single context in which we see a dead Palestinian with the obvious implication being that this response is somehow proportionate and justified. There’s this sort of Jake Tapper smarm where he’s so fucking smug, and he’s like, “Well, yeah. But Hamas doesn’t care about the Israelis.” Okay, well great. But Hamas doesn’t control fucking Gaza. I know they nominally run the fucking dogcatcher department, but the air, the water, the food, the fuel, the electricity is all controlled by the fucking Israelis because it’s an occupation. And if you don’t believe that Gaza’s part of the occupation, you can again reference the US State Department, which refers to Gaza as part of the Occupy Territories.
So, this has been CNN’s MO for a very long time. And again, in our analysis, we found that CNN was the worst offender at this kind of asymmetry of language. One of the things we studied was the asymmetry of a motive language. When Israelis are killed, it’s massacre, horrific, slaughter, brutal. When Palestinians are killed, this term is almost never used. I think we counted about six total out of the three major cable networks over a month period. Meanwhile, we had hundreds of examples of that in reference to the October 7th attacks. This is just sort of one example of asymmetry. Interestingly, there’s a Canadian publication called The Breach, which asks, because they did a study showing the CBC did the exact same thing, they only used slaughter and brutal and murder in the context of October 7th, but never did it for the 23, 24,000, 25,000 people killed in Palestine, subsequently in Gaza.
And the CBC’s answer, which I guess they actually answered, which people rarely do, they gave this incredibly tortured and tautological response of like, “Well, that’s different.” Well, why is it different?” “Because it’s just different.” “Well, I know, but why is it different? Why is raining a bomb down in an apartment complex where you know 30 children are, and killing 30 children, why is it any different than shooting them with a gun?” And they’re like, “Well, it’s just different. They’re raining bombs.” And you say, “Well, what about the Israeli soldiers that have killed people, snipe people on video? We’ve seen it. We’ve seen them shoot down people in the West Bank. So, why is that not called brutal?” “Well…” And then they don’t have any answer. And so again, there are many ways one can study and interpret this kind of bias. Again, I think showing that they directly work with censors in Israel, is I think a more explicit, what we would generally view as a traditional form of censorship and bias.
And the one thing you touched on in your report, which I think is something that’s actually very impactful, is the idea that CNN doesn’t ascribe any agency to Israeli airstrikes until the Israeli military themselves confirmed. Now, anecdotally, I don’t have the smoking gun like you do, Daniel, but if you observe, ever since the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 16th, 17th, that bombed a parking lot, killed 200 or 300 people, that’s the kind of United States estimate. Again, 12 people have been killed by PIJ and Hamas Rockets in the last 90 days. But one PIJ Rocket, I guess, killed 250 people in one go. So, I guess that was really bad luck on their part. But let’s set that aside for now. Ever since that cry bully campaign by pro-Israel groups, I’m pretty certain, and I don’t know if we’re 100% sure, but the New York Times and AP never ascribe Israeli airstrikes to Israel.
By the way, this is the first time they’ve done this. They didn’t do that in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They didn’t do that in previous conflicts. But ever since the October 17th cry bully effort by pro-Israel groups calling it blood libel and whatnot, for assuming the country that dropped fucking 30,000 munitions on a plot of land that’s 141 square miles in 45 days, God forbid, we assume that the explosion that kills 250 people was done by that party. 99.9% of bombs are dropped by Israel. And then, “How dare you accuse Israel of doing that?” And then now they don’t do it. They don’t ascribe Israeli guilt to any of that. So, the New York Times, AP, CNN, I’m pretty sure, again, I’ve looked at dozens of examples, it’s a mysterious blast. As you know, Daniel, it is a strike, but they don’t ascribe any guilt, and that guilt matters.
And they saw the outrage in multiple capitals, and especially Muslim majority countries where people are ready to burn down the fucking Israeli embassies and American embassies after that bombing. And I think at that moment, they said, “Okay, we don’t want to upset those people. So, we are now going to avoid the tabloid and everything is going to be put in the most anodyne and medical terminology you could possibly imagine.” Not for October 7th.
Dan Bogusla:
But it really shows the breakdown. It belies the fact that they have kind of taken everything at service level from the idea from the past. And it shows you how all this coverage, in the past, has just been routed basically through the official line. And it reminds me of one thing I wanted to add about my piece with one other piece of reporting, which is that CNN hired a former soldier from the IDF spokesperson unit into the Jerusalem Bureau to work on reporting and to work on translation. And in at least one case, as I found it in my piece, basically literally acting as a stenographer for the spokesperson unit and just conveying press releases.
Adam Johnson:
Jim Sciutto worked for the Obama State Department for three years between stents at ABC and CNN. It’s just a revolving door to the extent to which it even is a revolving door.
Dan Bogusla:
Right. And they’ve created a smart system, which is that, “Okay, fine, we’re going to put…” Says according to the IDF at the top of every article. But a big component that employees of CNN said to me is that this affects speed of reporting. If the IDF spokesperson unit is the first person who has access to your breaking news update and everything has to be vetted that comes out of Gaza by someone else, and there’s no equivalent effort to try to verify social media or Hamas statements or anything, then just from a technical standpoint, you’re going to get lopsided news and the directives that they sent out don’t seem to adequately correct for them.
Adam Johnson:
Well, because the goal is to keep the temperature down. That’s the goal. The goal is to make sure it’s not too tabloid, it’s not too salacious. It doesn’t provoke outrage. And so everything is to strike, it’s impassive voice. Passive Palestinians have died. I really think that the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17th, really, I think up to that point, they were saying Israel’s bombing them, because that was obvious to fucking even paying attention. And then the New York Times said, “Says Palestinian authorities.” And so you took Hamas at their word? It’s like, fucking, you dropped 30,000… What are you talking about? Why is everyone so fucking small beans about this? Again, you’re constantly just being gaslit into thinking that, by assuming that this was an Israeli shell, which again, I think it probably was rather than an airstrike, right, I think has turned everyone into this hyper lawyer, hyper scared, because again, it’s sort of Noam Chomsky 101, it’s flack, that they got so much flack for that, and they don’t want to get that flack again, whereas there’s no flack on the other side.
It’s not like they’re going to get in trouble for erroneously ascribing guilt to Hamas. It’s not like the Hamas fucking… Despite what Israeli leaders tell you, there’s no Hamas lobby in the United States who’s going to call them and piss and moan about it. And so again, it’s totally asymmetrical, and the fact that they no longer ascribe to agency in the headlines, and there’s just these mysterious blasts that emerge out of nowhere, until the IDF confirms it days later, but again, by that point, the temperature’s much lower.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to actually pick up on that point as a way of rounding out, because I think this brings us nicely back to the question of what has changed and what hasn’t, and where is all of this heading? What is the purpose of all this? As major media outlets kind of adapt their coverage to this new moment while still trying to kind of achieve a lot of the same goals as before when they could do it more brazenly, there is a point to be said there about how we are changing, the public is changing. And that is entering and changing the dynamics here in ways that I don’t think certainly Israeli government officials or even a lot of folks in the media anticipated before October 7th, or in the immediate aftermath of it.
But even just what you just said, Adam, how in, whether it’s The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, we are seeing that same recognizable trope of passive language instead of, “IDF shoots and kills grandma waving white flag crossing the street,” it’s, “Clashes break out and grandma ends up dead,” kind of shit. And the thing is that along with everything that we laid out in the beginning, like Dan was saying, the influence of social media, the younger generations that have not been raised-
Adam Johnson:
They don’t watch cable, they don’t read The New York Times.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They have not been raised on these things like we have.
Adam Johnson:
And this makes people fucking panic.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But at the same time, what has really been intriguing to me, especially here in the West, again, we’re all media professionals, we all swim in these waters. We all deal with this shit every day. I was literally standing in the rain down the road covering a Palestine march here in Baltimore a while back. I was talking to folks, younger folks who were there, and even some older folks from Baltimoreans who were using the same arguments against Israel and the media’s coverage of the destruction of Gaza that I’ve seen and heard Baltimorean use against the police department here, and the media that runs cover for the crimes of the Baltimore PD.
In the same way that younger generations, over time, have been trained and have trained themselves to see through the copaganda bullshit that you and Nima on Citations Needed have been breaking down for years, Adam, that is becoming more general knowledge to the point that when the IDF… The IDF was doing the exact same thing that local police departments here in the United States do, posing for social media photos in front of a, quote unquote, “drug bust,” where there’s a pipe that hasn’t been used in five years and maybe $200-
Adam Johnson:
You mean the miscellaneous ammo inside of the incubator? You didn’t believe that?
Maximillian Alvarez:
The miscellaneous ammo. They did the exact… The IDF, after destroying Al-Shifa Hospital and all the people in it, or a lot of the people in it, and while others had to flee, the IDF is literally using those same media-manufactured tropes that police departments here in the United States do. And of course, there are actually historical and connective reasons for why that would be the case. But the reason I’m pointing that out is just I think that those kinds of tropes that people here in the States have learned to become suspicious of for good reason, that has actually, I think we’re seeing a delayed effect here where people are applying those same media-critical ways of understanding what they’re being told to what they’re hearing coming out of Israel, and the main major coverage that they’re getting of the war on Gaza.
And so, I wanted to bring that into the conversation here, and we can’t have this conversation. I could talk to you guys for three more hours, but we got to close it up soon, but we can’t have this conversation without bringing in the OG, George Orwell, because throughout all of this, I keep thinking about Orwell’s legendary essay politics in the English language, which I would make all of my students, when I was still teaching at the University of Michigan, I would make all my writing students read this article and we would talk about it. Because I think for as old as it is, it still has a lot that’s very relevant to our day and age now, and it also is really important as a form of media criticism, training us to have a sharper eye when it comes to the ways that the powers that are presenting reality to us. And so if listeners will permit me, I just want to read this quote from Orwell’s essay, and then I want to toss this back to Dan and Adam to close this out.
But in politics in the English language, Orwell famously wrote, quote, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”
“Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air. The inhabitants driven out into the countryside. The cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets. This is called, quote ‘pacification.’ Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry. This is called, quote, ‘transfer of population or rectification of frontiers,’ end quote. People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy and arctic lumber camps. This is called, quote, ‘elimination of unreliable elements,’ end quote. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them,” end quote.
Now, I want to toss that big juicy quote back to you guys and ask if you think that Orwell’s assessment holds here for everything that we’re discussing, and if this, I think really sharp and important analysis that he offered back in the middle of the 20th century, sufficiently explains what Israel propaganda is accomplishing here in the United States’ media market, or if the functions of this propaganda and these language tropes that we’ve been discussing for the past 45 minutes, if there are other and equally sinister ends that are being accomplished here. So, Dan, Adam, I wanted to, with that softball question, just wanted to toss it to you to get some of your bigger thoughts on this before we close out.
Dan Bogusla:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I’ll just say I think it’s an interesting question, I think, when he was writing that in immediate post-war period. Media was still constrained. It was still constrained by medium to radio, TV, newspapers, and a handful of Fourth Estate overseers. And I think some people want to go all in on the argument that with social media and the democratization of footage that were freed from that in some degree. I think, as I said earlier, there’s obviously some truth to that. At the same time, those platforms are still controlled by people with specific agendas, which we saw this week with my colleague being permanently banned at the flick of a button on Twitter. But I do think that we’re entering a new period where those new mechanisms of power have not fully solidified yet.
Obviously, we can see their shapes. We know who owns these different companies. At the same time, I think there exists a moment when the populace is still relatively powerful and they know that their platforms are, there’s going to be mass migration off them if they try to shape popular sentiment too harshly too quickly. But the thing that quote makes me think of is the Bush era, New York Times op-ed page writers, which is what, I think a lot of people associate with the sort of hegemons of the Fourth Estate. And if you give a zoomer, a David Brooks’s column, they’re going to immediately recognize that it reads like it was written by a fifth grader who got hit in the head with a baseball.
So, I think that it’s like, okay, that old medium is dying. That old control system is dying. People will always try to constrain the news and shape it to their will and for their profit motives. But I do think that it’s worth holding this moment, however fleeting it might be, in the light and appreciating the uniqueness of it. Maybe it’s like the advent of the internet when there was this leading moment of belief in a utopian democratizing force. And I think if we can appreciate it, then there’s a better chance of safeguarding it and trying to extract the useful and positive elements of it, even if it’s doomed to go the way of the Time’s op-ed page as well.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. Again, I share your thoughts that one wants to be hesitant to put too much liberatory purchase to social media, because again, we know governments, the Israeli government, I’m sure the United States government and bady countries, Russia, et cetera, they try to manipulate social media, and I think to some extent they do. But I do think it’s still not as much as it is for the traditional media. And when you look at the generational splits, there are splits on news source information in terms of pro-Palestinian sentiment. And if you just watch an hour of CNN, if you just go home and you watch an hour CNN, the amount of sheer racist ideology you ingest, the human shields’ tropes, the hiding behind incubator babies while spraying machine gun fire, which has been built over decades and decades, this kind of war on terror and dehumanization narratives, you just don’t really get that as much for obvious reasons in a TikTok or Twitter context. And the generational splits, I think, largely reflect that that ideology is dying.
Now, the problem is, and the reason why I still criticize traditional media, and as Daniel still reports on them, is that a lot of people do still consume it, and they are more likely to vote, and they’re more likely to be in power, and they’re more likely to shape legislation and shape policy. So, young people are on the streets more, and they’re obviously more skeptical, which is great, but they’re not necessarily as politically impactful relative to their proportionate society. Now, we can debate whether or not that’ll change or whether or not they’ll just become moral and more conservative and start flipping on MSNBC to find out their latest conspiracy theory about Trump or whatever kind of thing that poses as liberal news.
And I think that that’s the thing that makes people panic and why you see such an upsurge in talking about banning TikTok, and they bring in the heads of Facebook and Twitter and they dress them down in front of Congress and tell them they got to read from the script and that script, and they have to ban this and ban that. They’ll put it in terms of fighting disinformation or whatever kind of non-authoritarian thing you want to frame it as, but they’ve been doing that obviously for many years from both the right and the left. And I think the coalescing around the anti-TikTok stuff as if it’s sort of this mysterious thing from The Orient affecting zoomer kids’ minds and planting the seeds of pro-Palestinian sentiment, is I think going to continue to increase. Because I do think there’s a sense that they are losing the narrative.
It’s not so much right now that it matters. I think if it costs the Democrats 2024, I think we may see more urgency around that in terms of TikTok disinformation or whatever. But it is a profound difference when you get your news from a source that is more raw videos and is more kind of basic information versus the official guy in a suit behind a desk telling you… And what you said about Orwell and not wanting to drop images, I have some criticisms of that essay. But I think that that is the kind of essence of what media criticism is. It is pinpointing those things where you’re getting language in phraseology and ideological conceit that are designed to prevent you from drawing images in your head that make things anodyne, that make them sanitized.
And that’s why when you see these charged emotive terms like massacre and brutal and murder used asymmetrically, I think it gives the game away, and terrorists, because these are not terms that describe anything… They’re emotive terms. They’re designed to telegraph your emotions for you. It’s like a didactic film score and a kind of Steven Spielberg film. It’s telling you where to go emotionally. Not to criticize John Williams, I think he’s mostly good, but instead of telling you how to feel, whereas when Palestinians die, it is presented in that kind of cop speak, the sort of, “Bullet enters the torso of a juvenile,” kind of language. The most dark example that we cited in our first piece was David Ignacio of the Washington Post who said… I’m not giving exactly a quote here, but it’s something effect of, “Terrorists brutally murdered children on October 7th.” And then he contrasted it with, “Palestinian children left to die under Israeli bombardment,” left to die implying that the Israeli parents, I guess left them there.
And so you have left to die versus massacred, brutal by terrorist, and one draws up an image and one doesn’t. And that is pretty much how the game works. And that’s why I think trying to pin down those moments where there is an asymmetry, especially when the body counts, not to put it crudely, but the body counts are 20 to one at this point. For every dead Israeli, you have over 20 dead Palestinians. Again, you have, I think, more people under the age of seven that have died in Gaza than you have in totality of October 7th, and I think that exposes the double standard.
All one can really do, at least from my perspective as a media critic, is to kind of complain. Whether or not that impacts reporting in general at these places… I think it does around the margins, at least I hope it does. Otherwise, my whole life has been a waste, but one thinks you can kind of shame people because I do think that people fall into these safe ideological grooves where you don’t create any problems, you don’t get calls from the ADL, you don’t get calls from the US military, and you kind of go with, “This official said, that official said.” And I think when you show them like, “Hey, here’s this data that says you guys are a bunch of fucking chumps,” it can, at least around the margins, create a change. Now, hopefully reforming CNN is not really the broader political project, but it is, in a world where these things seem overwhelming and insuperable, I think it can be one thing one can do to kind of push back.
Dan Bogusla:
Well, yeah. And I think also your piece, my piece, these are concrete examples. This is not media criticism from 10,000 feet. This is, “Okay, you want to talk numbers? You want to talk facts? Here are the facts about your organization’s reporting practices. Here they are in bar graphs. Here are the raw numbers.” And I think that gives people on the inside… I think the other thing to say is there are great reporters at The Times or great reporters at CNN who are straining against the institutional bureaucracy. And I think when you give people something hard that they can hold in their hands, it gives those people on the inside a tool for trying to push for more.
Adam Johnson:
Yeah. I think it’s more effective than the kind of glib Jimmy Dore like, “Oh, the corporate media.” It’s like, well, yeah, okay. But again, you have to explain it more, not just assert it, because then I think it becomes you’re just preaching to the choir.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So, that is the great Adam Johnson and Dan Bogusla. Adam hosts the Citations Needed podcast and writes at The Column on Substack as well as for other publications like The Nation and The Real News Network. Dan is an investigative reporter based in Washington DC. His interests include corporate corruption, congressional and White House investigations, American influence overseas and organized labor. Prior to joining The Intercept, Daniel worked at The New Republic, the American Prospect, and as a firefighter in the Pacific Northwest. Daniel, Adam, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it. We got to have you guys back on soon.
Adam Johnson:
Thank you.
Dan Bogusla:
Yeah, thanks.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And thank you all so much for listening. Thank you for caring. And please, before you go, I hope that you take away from this conversation that we here working in independent media need your support too, so we can keep doing the important work of holding major media networks accountable and doing the kind of reporting and asking the kinds of questions and providing the kind of analysis that they will not. This is what Adam does with his work. So, please go support that Citations Needed. Subscribe at The column. This is what Daniel does with his incredible work. Please go subscribe to The Intercept and give them both follows on social media.
And please, please, please support the work that we are doing here at The Real News Network. We need it. We don’t have ads, we don’t take corporate cash. We don’t put our reporting behind paywalls. We need you guys to be our supporters so we can stay independent. So, head on over to therealnews.com/donate and support our work today, it really makes a difference. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
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