u/MayorEbert

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/12/gaza-media-coverage-israel-bias/

>Ask anyone who has followed news about Gaza with even a smidgen of critical thinking, and they will tell you: Media organizations are biased against Palestinians — and systematically favor Israel.

>It’s easy to say but harder to prove. Doing empirical analysis that shows these biases is time-consuming and complex, full of pitfalls and nuances that can muddy the picture. Yet the double standards are everywhere — and there are ways to do sober, qualitative work that elucidates not only the differences in how Israeli and Palestinian life are covered, but also also in how other recent conflicts are covered.

>For my new book “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” I attempt to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that U.S. media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement.

>I examined over 12,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC. The focus is on center-left media outlets influential with the Biden administration during the first year of the conflict — with an emphasis on the first few months, when Israel firmly established its narrative justifying the genocide, rendering mass death inevitable.

The always amazing Adam Johnson has a new book out about the complicity of mainstream media in the destruction of Gaza. Lots of data and analysis as I know there are wonks here. This article appears to show some of that data. Cant wait to read the book myself!

https://www.amazon.com/How-Sell-Genocide-Complicity-Destruction/dp/0745351654

>But the question itself is a fair one. Where are the protests? The real answer isn’t that students decided to shut up. It’s that universities, and a hostile federal government, have expended massive resources trying to ensure they do.

>Between spring and fall of 2024—before Donald Trump’s reelection, let alone his return to office—the total number of campus protests dropped a staggering 64 percent.

>Then came Trump’s second term. Universities were terrorized and cuts dished out—but administrators who had been pulling their hair out in 2024 could now say their hands were tied. Soon after Trump’s election, dozens of schools fell over themselves to institute even more speech-suppressing policies, banning things like megaphones and musical instruments from outdoor areas of campus except with permits or during specified hours.

>Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of joining protests. University presidents dragged before Congress to prove their compliance with Trump’s half-dozen executive orders on education testified endlessly about why they’d allowed such chaos in their fiefdoms. In response to allegations of antisemitism—and threats to revoke federal funding—some schools, like the University of California, Berkeley, even turned over students’ personal information to the federal government.

>Others simply turned the other cheek as the federal government bore down on their students. Some students who spoke in support of the Palestinian cause, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, were kidnapped by ICE. Others, like Momodou Taal, were pressured into leaving the country to avoid the same fate. Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of participating in the encampments.

>Schools like the City University of New York and New York University still aren’t allowing student commencement speakers out of fear that those speakers might criticize Israel. At Swarthmore College, a student is busy preparing for a criminal trial over their participation in an encampment last year, when they should be preparing for finals. Immigrant students, now as in 2024, face the highest stakes: say too much about Israel or Palestine or genocide online, and your green card might be revoked.

This is a video of Tucker Carlson articulating that Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump are responsible for genocide. Transcript at bottom if you'd understandably rather not listen to two and a half minutes of an interview with Tucker Carlson.

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80 percent of Democratic party voters have an unfavorable opinion of Israel. Biden and Harris' unyielding support and protection of Israel and Netanyahu as they carried out crimes against humanity helped Harris lose the election, as the suspiciously unreleased 2024 autopsy confirmed.

You cannot paint this as a "fringe loony left" position anymore. Stop being a boomer and blaming it on tiktok (which has now been fixed, thank you Congress and the Ellison family!) Being anti-Israel is the mainstream Democratic party voter position. If you are a democratic politician and you support Israel, you are taking an unpopular position from the jump, and yes, you will be asked about it. It feels like a slam dunk to say the obvious, but it still seems very hard for a lot of Democratic politicians to just tell the unvarnished truth about the US and Israel and what Israel is doing to the region with our full backing. You can see this in real time on how Newsom is "evolving" rapidly on the issue during the early primary season.

So, what happens when you have a political party where the vast majority of its voters feel one way about human rights and international law, and the vast majority of its politicians seem to feel differently? You open a lane for the worst people in the world to seem reasonable.

Unfortunately, 2028 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Tucker Carlson is doing just that. Here he points out that he's more concerned about Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, who have actual real and substantial government power and are using biblical prophecy to justify Greater Israel and the genocide of Palestine, than he is about Nick Fuentes, a far right white supremacist with a podcast. He actually accurately labels it genocide as well, which almost all democratic politicians can't bring themselves to say. Usually, they flounder and blame Netanyahu as some singular figure and say "oh it's horrible sure but I dunno about a genocide I'm not a lawyer", which literally no one likes except for donors and consultants maybe.

This is horrifying for two obvious reasons:

1. It normalizes Nick Fuentes and makes him seem harmless instead of insidious.
2. It makes Tucker Carlson seem like he has empathy whereas democratic politicians have none, inverting what should be the actual dynamic. He is humanizing Palestinians here in a way that most dem politicians are afraid to do and as the dem autopsy pointed out, helped cost them the election.

This just feels like a canary in the coal mine moment. If democrats continue to allow themselves to be outflanked by the far right on basic human rights and decency, I don't feel very good about their prospects when they can't lean on people hating Trump anymore to win.

Former Republicans, newer entrants to the big tent: You're just going to have to get it through your head that most democrats don't like Israel and think we are helping them carry out crimes against humanity/war, and that supporting them is a losing position. Trying to appeal to your electoral pragmatism, here. Democratic voters would love if Democratic politicians also condemned and opposed genocide and apartheid instead of leaving it up to ghouls like Tucker Carlson.

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Transcript for the interview:

>Interviewer [throwing Carlson's question back at him]: Who do you think is more morally repulsive, Nick Fuentes or Ted Cruz?

>Carlson: Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is a sitting US senator who has called for the killing of people who have done nothing wrong, whole populations, who advocated for this war. Nick Fuentes is like a kid. He's like 26 or 27. He has no power except his words. Here you have a public official who we pay, who has actual power, who's voting for things, who's making policy decisions, and those decisions are focused on the murder of people who did nothing wrong. And yet no one thinks it's a big deal. "Well it's just totally fine." I mean if there's tape of Nick Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their parents, or it's ok to kill children, I would love to see the tape, because that's disgusting and that's basically what the entire U.S. Senate does every day and no one notices. Nick Fuentes said something naughty that I disagree with, that I wouldn't make fun of things, I'd never make fun of them-

>Interviewer: He's a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust, and what I would say-

>Carlson: Okay but is that worse than killing kids?

>Interviewer: From my understanding of my own, you know I was just in Germany recently and it was such a good reminder that the Holocaust didn't start with the gassing of Jews, it started with the dehumanization of Jews, it was language that was used, and that is what concerns people-

>Carlson: I couldn't agree more, and that's why when you have a U.S. senator, a member of Congress, a U.S. ambassador waving away civilian deaths as if they don't matter, that's the language of genocide, which results, and this is the lesson of the holocaust, in genocide itself, and it has.

>Interviewer: I can imagine people hearing this and thinking you are soft pedaling Nick Fuentes, you are apologizing for Nick Fuentes-

>Carlson: I'm hardly soft pedaling Nick Fuentes, I'm trying to awaken people to killing of innocents in our midst which we are not only encouraged to ignore but really told to ignore on the pain of being denounced, and I'm just saying "no, I'm not doing that." And Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee are two of the main people making this moment possible, and President Trump. But Nick Fuentes is the problem? "Okay." It's not a defense of Nick Fuentes, it's merely a reality check for the rest of us, like what are we doing?"

If a national Democratic party politician said this without the Nick Fuentes glazing, she would win eight hundred billion votes.