As Genocide Rolls on, Gaza is Gone from the Front Page of NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, USA Today, CNN, and MSNBC
Measuring indifference is not a perfect science, but there are signs that ongoing ethnic cleansing and killing in Gaza has become the New Normal.
The primary criticism of US media’s coverage of Gaza isn’t that major outlets don’t cover it, it’s that they covered it with clear bias, contempt for Palestinians, casual racism, and a seemingly endless supply of new euphemisms and excuse-making regimes to obscure the US role in the horrors coming across people’s social media timelines. But increasingly, as the banality of ethnic cleansing begins to set in after 15 months of bombing, displacement, destruction, and deliberate starvation, US media has taken a new tack to the “Israel-Hamas war”: downplay and ignore it.
As of the morning of December 17, the topic of Gaza did not appear on the online front pages of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, CNN, or MSNBC.
The New York Times, while doing an in-depth piece on the suffering in Gaza every few weeks, in addition to the occasional “hoping for a ceasefire” nonstory, has largely ended its drumbeat of coverage. There was no mention of the Gaza conflict on the online front page of The New York Times the mornings of December 7, December 8, December 9, December 10, December 12, December 13, December 14, or December 15.
Thus far in the month of December, the New York Times has not run a single print front-page story on Gaza in 17 days. Amnesty International’s determination on December 5 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza did not get a blurb on the following day’s front page, much less a story. By way of comparison, in April 2022, Biden accusing Russia of genocide got a front-page story (“U.S. Debates Using Hague Court To Investigate Russian Atrocities”), as did Western countries’ claims of Russian war crimes two days later, complete with a 18-point font in its lead story (“GROWING HUNT FOR SIGNS OF WAR CRIMES”).
It’s not as if there haven’t been stories to highlight and put on front pages. In the past week:
Israel bombed another UN-run school killing over 20, including several children
The official death toll (likely much larger) surpassed 45,000
All of these are objectively horrific and newsworthy, all exterminated whole worlds with the push of a button, all of them are in direct violation of the International Court of Justice’s requirement Israel cease its military operations in Gaza. All of these crimes are being armed and funded by the US government. But, 437 days on, it’s now the new normal—barely worthy of mention, much less front page news.
The reason why the increased downplaying of Gaza should strike an ominous tone, in addition to the fact that it’s objectively dehumanizing, is that central to Israel's genocidal strategy was, no doubt, the assumption that eventually the horrors emanating from Gaza would simply be seen as routine and not worthy of sustained news coverage, much less outrage. That the starvation, displacement, bombing and destitution would be seen as “factored in” to the reality of the world. The same logic has animated Israel’s endless military occupation and apartheid system in the West Bank, and before October 7, its 17-year policy of sieging, starving and “mowing the grass” in Gaza. Israel can change the “facts on the ground,” withstand the global outrage, and—over time—create a new reality that simply is. The horrors in Gaza have not let up; indeed, in key ways they’ve gotten worse. Letting US media settle into a new reality where the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza is an unremarkable fact of life, worthy of an article here and there but not sustained coverage, would be both a moral outrage and, in every way that matters, exactly what Israeli media strategists were counting on.