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Norman Solomon, Co-Founder Roots Action and Executive Director Public Integrity Institute Partner and distribute An economy for allExcerpted from the paperback edition by Norman Solomon The Invisibility of War: How America Conceals the Human Costs of Military Force (The New Press, 2024)
As the Gaza war enters its 12th month with no end in sight, the ongoing horror has become normalized in U.S. media and politics, a process so routine that we may not recognize how omissions and distortions have shaped our view of events since the war began in October.
The Gaza war attracted a great deal of U.S. media attention, but how well the media actually conveyed the human reality was another matter entirely. There was a naive assumption that news would allow media consumers to know what was really going on. But the words and images that reached listeners, readers, and viewers were far removed from the experience of being on the battlefield. The belief or unconscious notion that the news media was conveying the reality of war further obscured that reality. And journalism’s inherent limitations were exacerbated by media bias.
An in-depth content analysis by the Intercept found that coverage by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times in the first six weeks of the war “consistently displayed bias against Palestinians.” These highly influential outlets “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killing of Israelis but not Palestinians.” For example, “editors and reporters called a ‘massacre’ when 60 Israelis were killed to 1 Palestinian, a ‘massacre’ when 125 Israelis were killed to 2 Palestinians, and a ‘horrific’ when 36 Israelis were killed to 4 Palestinians.”
During the first five months of the war, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post used “brutal” or variants far more often to describe Palestinian actions (77%) than to describe Israelis (23%). The disparity comes despite “more than 20 times as many deaths from Israeli violence,” a Fair and Accurate Reporting (FAIR) study found. News articles and opinion pieces showed a strikingly similar pattern: “A disproportionate share of editorials characterizing Palestinians more than Israelis used ‘brutal’ in exactly the same way as respectable news articles.”
Despite the exceptional coverage, the most crucial parts of the Gaza war — what it means to be terrorized, massacred, injured, and traumatized — were largely ignored. Increasingly, the surface-level accounts that reached the American public began to seem repetitive and ordinary. As the death toll continued to rise and the months passed, the Gaza war became a smaller news topic, barely featured in most interview shows.
The gap between standard media coverage and the worsening situation from a humanitarian perspective has widened: “Gaza residents currently account for 80 percent of those facing hunger or catastrophic hunger worldwide, and the ongoing Israeli bombardment and siege have created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip,” the UN reported in mid-January 2024. The UN statement quoted experts as saying that “everyone in Gaza is now hungry, a quarter of the population is hungry and struggling to find food and drinking water, and famine is imminent.”
In late February, President Biden, holding a vanilla ice cream cone in his right hand, spoke to reporters about the prospect of a “ceasefire” (that never came), dramatizing the disconnect between the Gaza conflict zone and the U.S. political sphere. “My national security adviser says we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before leisurely walking away. On the same day that Biden posed for a photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, he appeared on NBC’s “Late Night” show with comedian Seth Meyers and lamented that the United Nations had “only received a small amount of humanitarian aid this month into besieged Gaza, down 50 percent from January.” Israel had stopped a convoy of aid ready to enter Gaza at a border checkpoint. More than 10 police officers guarding the convoy had been deliberately killed by Israeli forces. The dire consequences were clear.
“The amount of aid being delivered to Gaza has plummeted in recent weeks, U.N. officials say, as Israeli airstrikes have targeted police officers guarding convoys, leaving them at risk of looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians,” The Washington Post reported. “An average of 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, far below the 200 trucks a day Israel has pledged to provide. Just four trucks passed through Gaza over two days this week. Aid groups warning of impending famine estimate that about 500 trucks a day are needed to meet people’s basic needs.”
While these figures filled the news, hidden from the media coverage were the personal anguish and countless real horrors that befell the grieving people. Major media coverage included laudable human interest reports and investigative journalism about individual tragedies in Gaza. But even at its best, such journalism did little to convey the scale, scope, and severity of the unfolding disaster. And the narrative of catastrophe lacked any enthusiasm for exploring causation, especially when its trail led to the US “national security” establishment. The US media framing, centered on heartbreaking depictions of Palestinian casualties, rarely included the perpetrators in Washington either. Senior administration officials expressed facile regret for the tragic deaths while continuing to roll out giant welcome mats for the Grim Reaper.
