A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering . . .
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
When the unspeakable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza finally grinds to a halt—after the rubble settles on shattered Gaza neighbourhoods, as the echoes of potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths fade, lost to bombings, snipers, starvation, and disease—there will be a reckoning not just for the perpetrators, but also for the enablers. There will be little mercy for the Western governments that funnelled billions in bullets and bombs to Israel, neither for the United States which vetoed UN ceasefires on their behalf, nor for the universities that silenced pro-Palestinian voices while doing the bidding of Zionist donors.
However, one of the sharpest blade of justice will need to carve deepest into the heart of Western news media—the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, CBC, CTV, The Daily Mail, and their ilk. These so-called pillars of “free press” have devolved into shameless Israeli propagandists, laundering their lies, dehumanizing Palestinians, and fuelling the very mass murder on which they pretend to report. For decades, they have peddled Israeli anti-Palestinian propaganda and racism as objective journalism, but since October 7, 2023, their complicity has escalated into active participation in an ongoing genocide. Yes, a reckoning is coming—one that will drag media executives, producers, and editors into courtrooms, force their corporations to pay Holocaust-level reparations to survivors, and shatter the myth of Western media’s moral authority forever.
This isn’t hyperbole, it’s historical inevitability. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, and over 800 genocide scholars have documented, Israel’s campaign in Gaza meets every criterion of genocide: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through killings, causing serious harm, and imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction. Yet Western media didn’t just fail to report this truth—they buried it under an avalanche of Israeli hasbara (propaganda). From the genocide’s outset, news outlets like CNN and the BBC instructed their staff to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or “war crimes” in their reporting, opting instead for mealy-mouthed euphemisms that absolve Israel while vilifying Palestinians as “terrorists” or “Hamas sympathizers.” This isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s a deliberate editorial choice, rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian prejudice and racism that predates October 2023.
Consider the pattern, etched in stone long before the current slaughter. For over 75 years, Western media has framed Palestinians through a lens of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy. During the 1948 Nakba—when Zionist militias forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and committed massacres butchering thousands, Western news outlets downplayed ethnic cleansing, portraying it as a “civil war” sparked by Arab aggression. Fast-forward to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces enabled Christian militias to slaughter 3,500 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, a tragedy where media coverage focused on Israeli “retaliation” against attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with scant mention of the victims’ humanity.
This historical amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. A 2023 analysis of news media coverage by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed that US media consistently omits the context of Israel’s brutal occupation, Jewish settlement expansion, dispossession of Palestinian lands, and Israeli apartheid, presenting their actions as defensive acts rather than colonial aggression. By 2023, this bias had metastasized to a point where there was a little sympathy shown for the victims of Israel’s genocide, with the vast majority of Western legacy news outlets favouring the Israeli narrative—the myth of “40 beheaded babies” or “Hamas rape epidemics” presented without evidence—even while social media was flooded with Palestinian testimonies of daily atrocities committed by Israel.
Now, amplify this to the Gaza genocide’s scale. Over 25 months, Israel has flattened 90% of Gaza’s buildings, poisoned its water, destroyed its hospitals, bulldozed agricultural lands, and engineered a famine that kills children by the hundreds weekly. What is the reaction of Western media? They platform Israeli officials to spew unchallenged falsehoods. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper, who in November 2023 reported on US intelligence claims that Al-Shifa Hospital was a “Hamas command center,” amplifying unverified Israeli assertions without immediate scrutiny or counter-evidence from Palestinian sources. In December 2023, BBC reporting allowed Israeli officials to suggest the Gaza death toll was inflated, with claims that one Hamas fighter was killed for every two civilians—figures later contradicted by UN data showing over 18,000 dead, including thousands of children. These aren’t isolated slips. They’re policy. Leaked internal memos from CNN reveal executives quashing stories on Palestinian suffering to avoid “inflaming” pro-Israel advertisers, while BBC guidelines mandate “balance” that equates one of the most powerful militaries in the world with a people who have neither an army, navy, nor air force.
Contrast this fawning deference to pro-Israel guests with the inquisition faced by pro-Palestinian voices. Palestinian analysts like Omar Baddar have appeared on CNN only to have their critiques framed amid accusations of one-sidedness, with segments often edited to emphasize Israeli perspectives over Palestinian context. Meanwhile, anti-genocide protesters—students, doctors, even Holocaust survivors—are branded as “terrorist sympathizers” in headlines from the US magazine The Atlantic to Canada’s National Post, their chants for ceasefires twisted into calls for Jewish extermination. This double standard isn’t bias. It’s a machine of suppression, mirroring the very propaganda tactics that enabled the Holocaust.
Yes, let’s confront the ugly parallel between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing. Western media’s role in Gaza echoes the Nazi press’s complicity in the destruction of Jews and other minorities. In 1930s Germany, outlets like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter didn’t just report; they incited. This fascist rags spewed caricatures of Jews as vermin, rapists, and economic saboteurs, dehumanizing them to justify Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass when the windows of Jewish businesses were destroyed—as well as the concentration camps. Editors faced no push back—indeed, they were rewarded—while Jewish voices were silenced, their pleas dismissed as “Bolshevik lies.” Sound familiar?
Fast-forward to 2023 and 2024 where The New York Times has run op-eds from current and former Israeli officials and their supporters in the US justifying the Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians, and labelling Palestinian resistance and anti-genocide protests as “terrorism”. These commentaries go largely unchallenged by editors who challenge critiques of Zionism and Israel by labelling them as “hate speech.” A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering through euphemisms like “collateral damage”, using terms like “died” rather than “killed”, and barring their journalists from using descriptors like “brutal” or “horrific”, that downplay or delegitimize Palestinian deaths.
The resemblance between the media during the Nazi era and today when we look at the promotion of racism. Nazi media normalized antisemitism by portraying Jews as an existential threat, their suffering as self-inflicted. Western coverage does the same for Palestinians. A report from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found that 2023-2024 coverage embedded anti-Palestinian racism through disproportionate focus on Israeli victims and minimization of Palestinian grief, implying inherent criminality in their deaths. Phrases like “human animals” (echoing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 2023 statement) seep into TV news scripts without quotation marks, embedding anti-Palestinian hate as fact. An analysis by Vox has labelled this “anti-Palestinian racism” as a structural prejudice that erases Palestinian agency, history, and grief, rendering their genocide palatable to Western audiences steeped in colonial myths. Protests against this slaughter? They are labelled “riots”, “anti-Jewish hate demonstrations”, or “antisemitic mobs,” fuelling arrests from US campuses to Canadian streets, amid broader crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.
This racism isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. By dehumanizing Palestinians—calling Rafah and other parts of Gaza “evacuated” rather than “ethnically cleansed”—Western news media executives justify Israeli violence against a defenceless people. They bear as much responsibility for mass murder in Gaza as did Nazi newspaper and radio owners did for dehumanizing the millions killed in concentration camps. And like the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials which saw dozens of Nazi officials sitting in the docks, accountability for those media executives who enabled the Gaza atrocities through their media coverage must follow by charges being laid. This can be done at the International Criminal Court or in nations with uncompromised legal systems under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” where international law allows national courts to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes—regardless of where the crimes were committed.
Media Watch International and Al-Shabaka Policy Center argue that under the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute, complicit propagandists can face war crimes charges. Will we see major media personalities from CNN or BBC or the CBC charged and tried? This remains to be seen. But if they chose political expediency and lies over truth, if they withheld footage sympathetic to Palestinians, or platformed pro-Israel voices while suppressing Palestinian narratives, to appease Zionist and Israeli interests, while Gaza’s journalists were murdered by the scores, then they need to stand trial.
The net must widen to catch all who were complicit. Producers who scripted so-called “balanced” segments equating occupier and occupied. Editors who buried or ignored UN reports on famine. Companies that supported Israel and ignored their crimes must pay a price, legally and financially. Once the trials are over the companies that employed them must be fined, and they must be forced to pay into a Palestinian Victims Fund, modelled on the Holocaust Claims Conference. In Canada, where CBC and CTV’s coverage rivals CNN’s or MSNBC’s in its unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian genocide, CRTC licenses should be reviews and executives hauled before the courts. This isn’t vengeance, it’s justice delayed by decades of Israeli impunity.
But the rot runs deeper, demanding a cultural purge. Western media’s failure isn’t mere negligence, it’s a betrayal of the ideals which they claim to uphold—truth, accountability, humanity. For years, they’ve normalized Israel’s apartheid regime, from the blockade of Gaza starting in 2007 to the 2014 onslaught that killed more than 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The coverage back then included sympathetic profiles of Israeli “fear,” while there were perfunctory tallies of Palestinian “casualties.” The same pattern persists today. A 2025 study in Third World Quarterly details how outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Times and The Washington Post employ “ethical collapse” in silencing Gaza’s voices, prioritizing Israeli-friendly narratives over journalistic integrity. This isn’t journalism. It’s complicity in genocidal violence, a modern echo of the British Palestine Mandate press that greased the wheels for Zionist settlement.
Imagine the trials with media executives and editors in the docks, their memos banning the use of the words “genocide”, “occupation” or “Palestine” projected onto screens for the court to see, proving they chose complicity or silence over humanity. Paying reparations cannot be optional. There must be a global fund established, seeded by fines for those who were complicit and seized assets, to rebuild Gaza’s soul. This would be in addition to reparations paid to Palestinians by nations like the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.
One of the lessons from this is that media can’t be left free to push ugly and dehumanizing narratives. There must be a legal mechanism to ensure that the ideals of truth in news media are upheld, along with mandatory fact-checking, diverse sourcing, and penalties for stories that attack the very humanity of an oppressed and subjugated people. Until then, every broadcast, every news story is a potential bullet for vulnerable peoples like the Palestinians.
Western media’s facade of neutrality and balanced news coverage of this Palestinian Holocaust has crumbled in Gaza’s rubble. They didn’t report a genocide, they enabled one, their screens stained with Palestinian blood. When trials loom and reparations flow, let the producers, editors and executives tremble. The world watched as Western news media gave Israel a pass as it destroyed a society, deliberately killed tens of thousands, and demonstrated a level of evil not seen since World War Two. They streamed Gaza’s slaughter live, yet tuned out the screams. No more. The reckoning is coming, and it will be as merciless as the crimes it avenges.
However, one of the sharpest blade of justice will need to carve deepest into the heart of Western news media—the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, CBC, CTV, The Daily Mail, and their ilk. These so-called pillars of “free press” have devolved into shameless Israeli propagandists, laundering their lies, dehumanizing Palestinians, and fuelling the very mass murder on which they pretend to report. For decades, they have peddled Israeli anti-Palestinian propaganda and racism as objective journalism, but since October 7, 2023, their complicity has escalated into active participation in an ongoing genocide. Yes, a reckoning is coming—one that will drag media executives, producers, and editors into courtrooms, force their corporations to pay Holocaust-level reparations to survivors, and shatter the myth of Western media’s moral authority forever.
This isn’t hyperbole, it’s historical inevitability. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, and over 800 genocide scholars have documented, Israel’s campaign in Gaza meets every criterion of genocide: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through killings, causing serious harm, and imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction. Yet Western media didn’t just fail to report this truth—they buried it under an avalanche of Israeli hasbara (propaganda). From the genocide’s outset, news outlets like CNN and the BBC instructed their staff to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or “war crimes” in their reporting, opting instead for mealy-mouthed euphemisms that absolve Israel while vilifying Palestinians as “terrorists” or “Hamas sympathizers.” This isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s a deliberate editorial choice, rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian prejudice and racism that predates October 2023.
Consider the pattern, etched in stone long before the current slaughter. For over 75 years, Western media has framed Palestinians through a lens of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy. During the 1948 Nakba—when Zionist militias forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and committed massacres butchering thousands, Western news outlets downplayed ethnic cleansing, portraying it as a “civil war” sparked by Arab aggression. Fast-forward to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces enabled Christian militias to slaughter 3,500 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, a tragedy where media coverage focused on Israeli “retaliation” against attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with scant mention of the victims’ humanity.
This historical amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. A 2023 analysis of news media coverage by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed that US media consistently omits the context of Israel’s brutal occupation, Jewish settlement expansion, dispossession of Palestinian lands, and Israeli apartheid, presenting their actions as defensive acts rather than colonial aggression. By 2023, this bias had metastasized to a point where there was a little sympathy shown for the victims of Israel’s genocide, with the vast majority of Western legacy news outlets favouring the Israeli narrative—the myth of “40 beheaded babies” or “Hamas rape epidemics” presented without evidence—even while social media was flooded with Palestinian testimonies of daily atrocities committed by Israel.
Now, amplify this to the Gaza genocide’s scale. Over 25 months, Israel has flattened 90% of Gaza’s buildings, poisoned its water, destroyed its hospitals, bulldozed agricultural lands, and engineered a famine that kills children by the hundreds weekly. What is the reaction of Western media? They platform Israeli officials to spew unchallenged falsehoods. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper, who in November 2023 reported on US intelligence claims that Al-Shifa Hospital was a “Hamas command center,” amplifying unverified Israeli assertions without immediate scrutiny or counter-evidence from Palestinian sources. In December 2023, BBC reporting allowed Israeli officials to suggest the Gaza death toll was inflated, with claims that one Hamas fighter was killed for every two civilians—figures later contradicted by UN data showing over 18,000 dead, including thousands of children. These aren’t isolated slips. They’re policy. Leaked internal memos from CNN reveal executives quashing stories on Palestinian suffering to avoid “inflaming” pro-Israel advertisers, while BBC guidelines mandate “balance” that equates one of the most powerful militaries in the world with a people who have neither an army, navy, nor air force.
Contrast this fawning deference to pro-Israel guests with the inquisition faced by pro-Palestinian voices. Palestinian analysts like Omar Baddar have appeared on CNN only to have their critiques framed amid accusations of one-sidedness, with segments often edited to emphasize Israeli perspectives over Palestinian context. Meanwhile, anti-genocide protesters—students, doctors, even Holocaust survivors—are branded as “terrorist sympathizers” in headlines from the US magazine The Atlantic to Canada’s National Post, their chants for ceasefires twisted into calls for Jewish extermination. This double standard isn’t bias. It’s a machine of suppression, mirroring the very propaganda tactics that enabled the Holocaust.
Yes, let’s confront the ugly parallel between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing. Western media’s role in Gaza echoes the Nazi press’s complicity in the destruction of Jews and other minorities. In 1930s Germany, outlets like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter didn’t just report; they incited. This fascist rags spewed caricatures of Jews as vermin, rapists, and economic saboteurs, dehumanizing them to justify Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass when the windows of Jewish businesses were destroyed—as well as the concentration camps. Editors faced no push back—indeed, they were rewarded—while Jewish voices were silenced, their pleas dismissed as “Bolshevik lies.” Sound familiar?
Fast-forward to 2023 and 2024 where The New York Times has run op-eds from current and former Israeli officials and their supporters in the US justifying the Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians, and labelling Palestinian resistance and anti-genocide protests as “terrorism”. These commentaries go largely unchallenged by editors who challenge critiques of Zionism and Israel by labelling them as “hate speech.” A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering through euphemisms like “collateral damage”, using terms like “died” rather than “killed”, and barring their journalists from using descriptors like “brutal” or “horrific”, that downplay or delegitimize Palestinian deaths.
The resemblance between the media during the Nazi era and today when we look at the promotion of racism. Nazi media normalized antisemitism by portraying Jews as an existential threat, their suffering as self-inflicted. Western coverage does the same for Palestinians. A report from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found that 2023-2024 coverage embedded anti-Palestinian racism through disproportionate focus on Israeli victims and minimization of Palestinian grief, implying inherent criminality in their deaths. Phrases like “human animals” (echoing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 2023 statement) seep into TV news scripts without quotation marks, embedding anti-Palestinian hate as fact. An analysis by Vox has labelled this “anti-Palestinian racism” as a structural prejudice that erases Palestinian agency, history, and grief, rendering their genocide palatable to Western audiences steeped in colonial myths. Protests against this slaughter? They are labelled “riots”, “anti-Jewish hate demonstrations”, or “antisemitic mobs,” fuelling arrests from US campuses to Canadian streets, amid broader crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.
This racism isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. By dehumanizing Palestinians—calling Rafah and other parts of Gaza “evacuated” rather than “ethnically cleansed”—Western news media executives justify Israeli violence against a defenceless people. They bear as much responsibility for mass murder in Gaza as did Nazi newspaper and radio owners did for dehumanizing the millions killed in concentration camps. And like the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials which saw dozens of Nazi officials sitting in the docks, accountability for those media executives who enabled the Gaza atrocities through their media coverage must follow by charges being laid. This can be done at the International Criminal Court or in nations with uncompromised legal systems under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” where international law allows national courts to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes—regardless of where the crimes were committed.
Media Watch International and Al-Shabaka Policy Center argue that under the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute, complicit propagandists can face war crimes charges. Will we see major media personalities from CNN or BBC or the CBC charged and tried? This remains to be seen. But if they chose political expediency and lies over truth, if they withheld footage sympathetic to Palestinians, or platformed pro-Israel voices while suppressing Palestinian narratives, to appease Zionist and Israeli interests, while Gaza’s journalists were murdered by the scores, then they need to stand trial.
The net must widen to catch all who were complicit. Producers who scripted so-called “balanced” segments equating occupier and occupied. Editors who buried or ignored UN reports on famine. Companies that supported Israel and ignored their crimes must pay a price, legally and financially. Once the trials are over the companies that employed them must be fined, and they must be forced to pay into a Palestinian Victims Fund, modelled on the Holocaust Claims Conference. In Canada, where CBC and CTV’s coverage rivals CNN’s or MSNBC’s in its unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian genocide, CRTC licenses should be reviews and executives hauled before the courts. This isn’t vengeance, it’s justice delayed by decades of Israeli impunity.
But the rot runs deeper, demanding a cultural purge. Western media’s failure isn’t mere negligence, it’s a betrayal of the ideals which they claim to uphold—truth, accountability, humanity. For years, they’ve normalized Israel’s apartheid regime, from the blockade of Gaza starting in 2007 to the 2014 onslaught that killed more than 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The coverage back then included sympathetic profiles of Israeli “fear,” while there were perfunctory tallies of Palestinian “casualties.” The same pattern persists today. A 2025 study in Third World Quarterly details how outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Times and The Washington Post employ “ethical collapse” in silencing Gaza’s voices, prioritizing Israeli-friendly narratives over journalistic integrity. This isn’t journalism. It’s complicity in genocidal violence, a modern echo of the British Palestine Mandate press that greased the wheels for Zionist settlement.
Imagine the trials with media executives and editors in the docks, their memos banning the use of the words “genocide”, “occupation” or “Palestine” projected onto screens for the court to see, proving they chose complicity or silence over humanity. Paying reparations cannot be optional. There must be a global fund established, seeded by fines for those who were complicit and seized assets, to rebuild Gaza’s soul. This would be in addition to reparations paid to Palestinians by nations like the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.
One of the lessons from this is that media can’t be left free to push ugly and dehumanizing narratives. There must be a legal mechanism to ensure that the ideals of truth in news media are upheld, along with mandatory fact-checking, diverse sourcing, and penalties for stories that attack the very humanity of an oppressed and subjugated people. Until then, every broadcast, every news story is a potential bullet for vulnerable peoples like the Palestinians.
Western media’s facade of neutrality and balanced news coverage of this Palestinian Holocaust has crumbled in Gaza’s rubble. They didn’t report a genocide, they enabled one, their screens stained with Palestinian blood. When trials loom and reparations flow, let the producers, editors and executives tremble. The world watched as Western news media gave Israel a pass as it destroyed a society, deliberately killed tens of thousands, and demonstrated a level of evil not seen since World War Two. They streamed Gaza’s slaughter live, yet tuned out the screams. No more. The reckoning is coming, and it will be as merciless as the crimes it avenges.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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