As Trump and Israel Escalate Genocide in Gaza, Popular Media Continues to Ignore It

Under Biden, Gaza was excused, downplayed and natural disaster-rized. Under Trump it’s simply not a priority at all.

On April 3, I documented for The Real News how popular news media—namely the Sunday morning news programs, nightly news, and The New York Times front page—were largely ignoring the escalated bombing, indiscriminate killing, and starvation campaign on Gaza that recommenced on March 18. 21 days later, the media blackout is even more jarring.

While American media does, of course, cover the humanitarian crisis and daily maiming and killings in Gaza below the fold and in a matter-of-fact war reporting manner, any urgency around the genocide, or focus on US’s support for it, is all but dead.

Nowhere is the absence of urgency any more glaring than the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda setting” Sunday morning news shows that both reflect and curate Washington political priorities for the week. In the 5 episodes each for the four Sunday News Shows—ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union—for the weeks of March 23, March 30, April 6, April 13 and April 20, Israeli’s assault on Gaza, and the Trump administration’s full-throated support for it, has not been discussed or mentioned once. That’s 880 minutes of “agenda setting” debate, discussing, and reporting that did not see fit to mention the US support for what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both call an ongoing genocide.

One would think the US backing what top human rights groups call an ongoing genocide—made even more acute by the US and Israel cutting off all aid on March 2—would rise to the level of something that ought to be discussed in the corridors of Washington, but alas support for the genocide is largely bipartisan and thus not worthy of mentioning beyond sterile dispatches and Oh, Dearism natural disaster reporting.

Despite Israel killing almost 2,000 Palestinians since they broke the ceasefire on March 18, the subject of Gaza has barely registered a blip in the nightly news coverage as well. In the 78 episodes the three major network nightly news shows have aired, there’s only been two segments about Gaza: one 4 minute 17 second segment I noted in The Real News from March 26 on CBS Evening News, and another 1 minute and 44 second segment about the IDF killing 15 medics that aired on ABC’s World News This Week on April 3. In over 1,500 minutes of evening news from the three major networks since March 19 only 6 minutes, or less 0.4 percent, has been reporting on Gaza. NBC Nightly News has not covered the suffering in Gaza at all since March 20, but it did take time out on April 13 to do a 1 minute 46 second profile on an Israeli captive still being held in Gaza.

Since March 20, The New York Times has run a total of three front page stories about Gaza out of roughly 220 total front page stories (two on April 6/April 8 about the IDF killing of medics in Gaza and one April 3 about Israel “Initiating Tactics to Hold Gaza Territory”) By way of comparison the Times has run 12 front page stories about Ukraine. “For Ukraine’s Sick Children, a War Within the War,” read one sympathetic front page headline from March 26. “Attack Devastates Ukrainian City,” read another on April 14. Front page coverage of Gaza, when it does exist, does not lead with Palestinian suffering or humanity but instead Israeli denials or sterile coverage of IDF “tactics”.

Whereas the approach to covering Gaza under Biden, and during the Harris campaign it logically implicated, was to cover campus protests (almost always disparagingly), “Muslim voter” outrage (always condescendingly), and the way the “war” was dividing Democrats, it no longer serves this function and is thus now just normal bipartisan background noise in Washington. To the extent it was prioritized briefly from time to time in late 2023 and throughout 2024, it was because protests forced the issue, but now that campus protests have been largely snuffed out thanks to mass arrests, police raids, hundreds of deportations and disappearings, and a parallel media effort to paint anti-genocide protests as quasi-terror attacks or proto-pogroms, this angle no longer presents itself. Instead, we have a steady state of mass death, cosigned by both parties and spearheaded by Trump, that everyone in power either supports or has chosen to ignore. A consensus popular news media is more than happy to go along with.