The Dissenter, 6/8/26
Robin Andersen, a writer, media studies professor, and member of the board of directors for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, examines how the United States media covered Israel’s genocide in Gaza in her new book, “The Complicit Lens.”
Not only were certain frames utilized to downplay the violence, but editors, producers, and reporters were also silent as journalists fell victim to Israel’s “censorship by murder.”
Andersen discusses the coverage of Gaza within the context of recent developments with the war in Iran and Lebanon. She recalls how the establishment press developed a narrative around the October 7th attack by Hamas that over the next two years helped facilitate the whitewashing of atrocities by Israel.
Later in the interview, Andersen highlights the New York Times and CNN as key examples of media outlets that catered to Israel’s military censor and spread propaganda that served Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She also mentions a few of the journalists who deserve to be celebrated for sacrificing their lives to report the truth.
The book, “The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza,” is available for purchase from OR Books.
Andersen’s writing can be found at Counterpunch, LA Progressive, the Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, Scheer Post, and Truthout.
The following is a transcript of the conversation edited for publication.
KEVIN GOSZTOLA: [Let’s] start where we are in the present and work our way backwards into some of the patterns that you document through your book, which is to say that obviously every day, we still have Palestinians in Gaza being killed. They’re massacred. They’re bombed. And we see that Israel’s military violence has expanded into southern Lebanon.
And then meanwhile, it just seems like overshadowing all of this constant violence is this story, this tit for tat between the Iranian government and the Trump administration over whether there’s going to be a peace agreement or there’s going to be a ceasefire or a truce, and what will happen with the Strait of Hormuz. Even though that is important and the American people and even myself would like to know what’s happening, it just seems like that’s become this story that completely lets the media ignore the fact that Palestinians are being murdered or killed every single day.
ROBIN ANDERSEN: Right. I think we see a lot of the coverage to the extent that there is coverage about Lebanon in the US media. We see the same patterns going on in Lebanon now that did in Gaza. And all you have to do is substitute Hezbollah for Hamas or Hamas for Hezbollah.
And we see that they’re not in a strategic battle against Hezbollah, which is what the media always said about Hamas. They’re actually wiping out villages and engaging in genocide and ethnic cleansing for a greater Israel. That has never been said in the mainstream press.
I think that this genocide that has been the most documented of any genocide in history that we see, and we saw on our handheld devices. Well, a lot of us were watching every day, but we could see that, and we saw a very different reality on the ground in Gaza than we saw in establishment media. Establishment media would obscure the bombings saying, oh, it was an explosion. They wouldn’t identify Israel.
They would say, gosh, this came out of nowhere. These people just must be so brutal and awful terrorists that they do this only for their own bloodlust and pleasure, right? So the demonization right away of Hamas, of the Palestinians, the pro-Israel bias that did not identify Israel until Israel actually admitted, or until Israel made an official announcement that some leader of Hamas or some fighters of Hamas had some tunnel underneath something they were trying to get. Hamas, it was always Hamas and the media framed it as this battle between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Palestine. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t a war.
Hamas didn’t have an army. They didn’t have a navy. They didn’t have weapons from the most highly belligerent military. You know, uber weapons on the globe from the US. They had none of that. What the media should have been saying all along and is that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, plain and simple, but they simply wouldn’t admit that. And as we found out, these were coming out of the editorial offices of the main media.
Editorial Policies More Extreme Than During The Iraq War
GOSZTOLA: You wrote, this is a story about stories. There is a difference between a constructed new story and an authentic voice.
The lives and work of on the ground journalists, the things they told us, the ways they were killed and why along with the reactions from human rights and freedom of the press organizations and journalists, advocates in Gaza will reveal what is at stake in the case of the coverage of genocide in Gaza.
That is a good kind of summary of what you tackle in the book. And obviously, the stuff that I spend a lot of time on has been the killing of those who bear witness at something that I want to spend a little time with you.
But I think first, before we get to that, as you’re saying, there were these editorial policies. It wasn’t just that journalists were afraid because the U.S. government supports Israel and they recognized that they were gonna be antagonized by people in our government. No, the people who run their media organizations actually from the top down were imposing certain regimes of censorship, we could say, or saying that this was a particular type of coverage we were gonna seek out and do.
And I wonder for someone who’s been looking at media coverage for a long time, how you compare those editorial policies the way that there were expectations of reporters to what was expected of reporters during something like the war and occupation of Iraq, for example. It seems even more extreme in my view, what has happened with the genocide in Gaza.
ANDERSEN: Yeah, it was more extreme, Kevin. And there’s been a long progression of war reporting. And yeah, I’ve been writing about this for a very long time. Let’s just talk about the Gaza media frame.
Everything has started on October 7th, right? That was the origin story. By opening with October 7th, that’s a kind of a news frame, our enemy did something horrible to us. And therefore the solution to this encapsulated narrative that becomes the war story.
The solution has to come from the powers that be. So it’s gonna come from the belligerency of the Israeli state. It’s only a military solution because it began with violence. And so the violence has to be stopped.
Just by framing it that way, Israel gets away with it because you pulled everything that Israel has done in Palestine out of its historical progression. And in that is a terrible imbalance of the way Israel as a settler colony went in to Palestinian lands and has been taking it over and ethnic cleansing them ever since.
This has been a very long war. So leading up, particularly leading up to October 7th, you had the Great March of Return. People say, oh, why did Hamas have to be so violent? Well, they had exhausted all nonviolent means. So the Great March of Return in 2018 from March to December, every week they went out. And every week the Israeli soldiers shot them and killed them. They wounded 33,000 people in Gaza.
Many children had to have their legs amputated because they pointed at their legs, they targeted their legs and things. And then there was taking out four apartment buildings in Gaza in 2021, in May, in retaliation for Hamas retaliating against Israel, attacking peaceful demonstrators in East Jerusalem, horrific acts that they were doing, kicking people out of their houses and then attacking the peaceful demonstrators. Every way that peaceful attempts by the Palestinians and their allies to the international community were thwarted by the United States and Israel. So when human rights groups said the March of Return was incredibly brutal and they had no reason to do that. And so it was taking out four apartment building. It was disproportionate violence.
It was punishing the Palestinians in Gaza for what Hamas did. That is collective punishment. These violations of international law throughout leading up to October 7th were the story. And it was the occupation and it was the apartheid system. That would have explained what was happening in Gaza all this time. But the directorships of the main media organizations, New York Times and CNN, which we found in the beginning of 2024, editorial directors of what they could and could not say.
They couldn’t use the word genocide. They couldn’t use any emotive language to write about Israel’s killing of Palestinians, but plenty of emotional and emotive language and humanization of Israel’s killed by Palestinians. But keep in mind that within the first 25 days, 5,000 Palestinians were killed.
And so what we’re talking about is a type of brutality that had been ongoing for years and continued for years and all peaceful means were blocked by Israel and the United States, including the BDS movement. They called that diplomatic terrorism. So no matter what the Palestinians did, they were getting this kind of treatment, and they were getting this kind of treatment for years in the press as well.
These are all constructed stories that misdirect, that pull everything out of the historical context. And it’s a kind of propaganda frame on propaganda frame right up to October 7th.
Collaborating With Israel’s Military Censor
GOSZTOLA: Another example would be CNN. I think you dig into the way in which, I mean, they’re not the only organization, but they’re a prominent organization that we know as the Israeli government bars any international journalists from accessing Gaza. It’s also my understanding based on an interview I did with Gideon Levy, who writes for Haaretz, that he’s been barred from traveling to Gaza. So Israelis are actually barred from going to Gaza.
In the meantime, you’ve got this cooperation with the military censor of the Israeli government over coverage of what is unfolding.
ANDERSEN: Right, U.S. media never told its readers or viewers or listeners that they had been barred from getting into Gaza. You know, they might make a little mention of it, you know, when they had some embedded troops there.
But for CNN, every piece of their copy they sent to the Jerusalem Bureau, and every piece the IDF had eyes on it and it was vetted by the military. So the same thing with the New York Times—we don’t have any evidence that they sent it through the Bureau—but they told journalists what they could and could not say. The New York Times journalists couldn’t use the word occupation or any of the language that has been developed over the latter half of the 20th century that identifies war crimes or the attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure or aid workers.
All of that, there are rules of war developed, you know, and the ICC was also developed when the Rome Statutes were founded, and the ICC was the place that investigated war crimes. Human rights groups have been calling for the ICC to investigate Israel for years, and especially for the killing of journalists. Al Jazeera has filed many complaints to the ICC for the killing of their journalists.
All Israel had to do to get away with all of this is simply say, we’re fighting Hamas. Hamas started it so we’re fighting Hamas. They’re in the hospitals, they’re everywhere, and through this kind of strategic necessity, this frame of strategic necessity that claimed that none of this is about killing the civilians, wiping out healthcare, weaponizing starvation—all of it was about Hamas.
So what we saw was a very different story from on the ground in Israel. The U.S. press just didn’t use any of that footage. They didn’t call out Israel for murdering their colleagues.Then over the course of time, as Israel began to get away with all of this and realize that they had impunity, they started increasingly targeting journalists, their family, they would strike them in their cars.
Prominent journalists that I followed, amazing, he was an amazing guy, and I have great respect for Gideon Levy too, the Haaretz reporter. Ismail Al-Ghoul and Hossam Shabat, they were incredible and they were targeted [and killed] deliberately by Israel.
And finally the Society for Professional Journalists and other journalism advocates and researchers began to look into it and found that many, many of the journalists had been targeted by Israel.
GOSZTOLA: At this point, I think the Reporters Without Borders and even the Committee to Protect Journalists have done investigations. I know it’s difficult because you can’t actually be in the war zones and do the forensic investigations. And I know that they’re trying to make sure they can corroborate certain details.
But we’ve seen enough examples that we know that the Israeli government is targeting these journalists. Not only that, we also see, and this is not appreciated in media coverage ever, that these journalists get labeled as Hamas militants. They get this target painted on their back and then they’re walking around trying to do their job, knowing that at any moment they could be targeted by a drone or whatever other aircraft.
ANDERSEN: And they kept wearing their vests, even though that actually became a target, not a sign of protection anymore.
But Israel was very good also at distorting international law. So one of the Times journalists, who was responsible for the leaks to The Intercept, they said, we couldn’t say occupation, which takes the core of the reason for the conflict out of coverage. And then in CNN, another one pointed out that, CNN said, just start with October 7th.
And at some point there’s evidence that they actually knew what they were doing, how it was distorting things. And they were doing it really in complicity with Israel. And I think they have a lot to answer for.
I think establishment and mainstream media have a lot to answer for. At one point, one of the journalists that had been talking to The Intercept from CNN, went back in one meeting and said, a lot of us were disturbed at the time when we saw and when we heard Israeli officials on our network saying things like, these are animals instead of being appalled by the Hamas attacks, they’re celebrating. If they want hell, we’ll give them hell.
There will be no electricity. There will be no food. There will be a tent city. There will be no housing, right? All of that, that is incitement to genocide.
The rules of incitement to genocide are coming from an official over official outlet at a time of great tension, right? And that’s what they did. And one of the CNN journalists said, many of us felt uncomfortable, and that sounded a lot like incitement that comprised the first seven or eight pages of the South African case against genocide to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. So, you know, egregious stuff here.
The New York Times and Its Pro-Israel Coverage
GOSZTOLA: Now, let me ask you about something that’s developed since you published, but you can work in the research and the analysis that you did on The New York Times and what’s become colloquially known as the rape story.
You don’t even really have to describe what it is. People kind of like know that they had this scandalous publication and it did not meet the rigors of journalism, but to bring it up to the moment, what’s your reaction to what we’re seeing happen with Nicholas Kristof and the opinion piece? Well, it’s not really an opinion piece, but it was first labeled as an opinion.
It’s on sexual assault in Israeli prisons, and it’s documenting what’s happening to Palestinians in those facilities. And you’ve got this threat from the Israeli government, I actually think they’re gonna make good on that. They’re going to sue either Nicholas Kristof himself or they’re going to come after the entire New York Times media organization for publishing this reporting.
ANDERSEN: In my book, you know, after I summarized really all of the great material that was out there published by gosh, a whole bunch of people, a whole journalism professors, you know, an NGO in Egypt by a women’s organization called Speak Up. They were so interesting and cogent, but the Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, so many of the outlets, then of course the person who posts on X called Squirrel. Squirrel was a fantastic researcher, [and] still is. All of those people thoroughly debunked that story.
Seventy professors, you know, Amy Goodman had Deepa Kumar on Democracy Now! and she talked about the letters that they wrote to the New York Times of university journalism professors that were so disturbed by this baseless, unverified piece of, and what I write in my book is that it really sounded like trauma porn.
And it was probably the worst, particularly since they were apparently invented stories, the worst descriptive horrifying tales, I think ever in print journalism with no justification because there was no credible eyewitnesses, no actual witness testimony. There was no visual evidence. And the sources had been around since October 7th.
They were the main sources that had promoted all of the atrocity propaganda right from the start, this organization called ZAKA, which the New York Times presents as a legitimate organization. They were tied to the Netanyahu government. They were part of the hasbara machine.
In November 2023, they meet with Netanyahu and he tells them your work is really important in shaping public opinion of world leaders. And you’ve been doing a great job, so keep it up. Yossi Landau, Haaretz identified Yossi Landau as one of the worst propagandists and probably one of the most important individual sources for some of the worst false tales. And you can see him on tape. You can see him presenting to international journalists. He’s very good on the camera.
[Yossi] knows when to pause and kind of start crying a little bit because what he saw was so horrible. And he completely invents this story of a pregnant woman who Hamas, apparently, oh, they cut the baby out and then they stabbed the baby and they stabbed the woman and, you know. And so Haaretz went to Kibbutz Be’eri and the people told him, no, there was no woman who was pregnant at Kibbutz Be’eri.
They said, this was invented. And Yossi Landau was one of the worst purveyors of these kinds of story. The New York Times in the rape piece puts Yossi Landau up to confirm the reason or to rationalize why there’s no visual evidence. He says, you know, he’s got a big picture on the face. And then underneath it, it says, we were going by so fast. We were going through the bodies so fast that we were so disturbed. We just didn’t take pictures. I wish I had taken pictures now. So Zaka members kept promising the press that indeed they had pictures.
When the Times of Israel wanted the pictures, they were never forthcoming. There have never been pictures. So do you think that the New York Times could have balanced their coverage then about the well-documented for years and years sexual torture at the hands of Israelis, excuse me, of Palestinian men, women, and children. That’s what Nicholas Kristof’s piece was about.
GOSZTOLA: Yeah, it is. And that’s the backlash from the Israeli government is that they really don’t want this reality and these truths to be confronted. And also we’re seeing as we speak right now, the way that European leaders are responding to how the flotilla activists have been abused and tortured while in custody, when they’ve been detained and been kidnapped off of their boats that are trying to deliver aid.
These are connections that just don’t get made in the U.S. media between what you see happening and then the consistent actions of this government backed by the United States for the last decades.
ANDERSEN: So Kristof’s piece was, it’s in the op-ed pages, but it’s based on real documentation and his own interviews and in a piece that I actually I just wrote charging the New York Times with false balance with Kristof’s piece.
Kristof wrote his piece on May 10. The following day, a piece by a very pro-Israeli Jerusalem-based journalist Isabel Kershner, who I write about in chapter four called “The Compromised Media Landscape,” [appears]. Isabel Kershner [at the Times] is key to a lot of media reporting that was always dismissing the Palestinian point of view, dehumanizing Palestinians, and always presenting military and Israeli talking points. So Kershner comes up with yet another two-year investigation into the Hamas rape story, where there’s thousands of videotapes and photographs that she doesn’t see and nobody can see because as the Israeli military said, it’s too sensitive according to our standards.
Once again, they simply repeated this and put it in the pages of the Times to balance Kristof’s well-documented story that has been confirmed by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, just all kinds of human rights groups that have documented the systematic torture. In fact, Euromed Monitor really called this out and talked about the purposes of it, not only to destroy the body, but to destroy a sense of identity and resistance. They talked about the complicity in this report of the actually built-in denial and systemization of this kind of activity within the court system and through Israeli supposedly democratic institutions.
This is like comparing reality, well-documented reality, again with invented stories, and that’s no way to balance your news frame. So you balance the truth with some inventions about the country that you have been choosing to condone and promote and justify everything that they do, actually over and above your own readers and actually over and above, far more duplicitous and positive to the Israeli military than actually they’ve been to Trump and the war in Iran. If you compare those two frames, it’s actually astonishing.
Avoiding The Word Massacre When Palestinians Are Killed
GOSZTOLA: Right, and so part of the analysis that you do extends into examining how we’ve had multiple massacres committed by the Israeli military. I mean, it seems like at one point it was almost every couple of days you had one that was being reported out. And then I would just say as a news consumer that I would follow the live updates that Al Jazeera English would run, and you could get a sense of the carnage and you would see some of the perspectives about what happened and what was unfolding in parts of Gaza.
If you put that alongside the coverage from the U.S. media as you document, what we see is extensive malpractice. Can you get into the way that they, you know, try to deflect attention from these crimes that are being committed?
ANDERSEN: Right, right. The first one was the Jabalia refugee camp. What I tried to do in the book too is kind of create some continuity. I think the third chapter is on the content analysis of newspapers and how you can tell from the coverage that they religiously, if you will, follow the dictates of the Israeli military and the idea of talking points, where they don’t humanize the Palestinians. All you have to do is count the number of times they said massacre about Palestinians’ killings of the Israelis and only one time did they use that word for Israel’s killing of Palestinians.
And when we say Hamas is killing of Israelis, we will never know how many people Hamas killed because the other total distortion and absolute use of this media mantra of this started on October 7th when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians. That was not true right from the start. Israel had pilots in Apache helicopters dropping bombs all along the rave grounds when Hamas was attempting to get back into Gaza with hostages.
They killed them all. There’s a testimony, all of this is reported in the Israeli media, but not in U.S. legacy media or establishment media. So then you have a young woman named Yasmin Porat, who was a hostage in Kibbutz Be’eri, and they were trying to negotiate.
Ten hours they wait, all of a sudden here comes the Israeli military. They open fire and there was about 12 hostages, she reports, she’s the only one left. They killed everybody. And she saw that. That was a witness, and they reported that all over Israeli media, really, in numerous outlets and radio, and of course, Haaretz.
So that right there was the standard frame that was never corrected. But to constantly claim that the killing of, in all of these massacres, the direct targeting of civilians at the Jabalia refugee camp, and say they were trying to get Hamas; that was actively repeated and promoted by the New York Times and others in establishment media. And it’s horrific.
As I mentioned, the way they accomplished this was that pretend they didn’t know where these big bombs came from and you couldn’t say Israel. Then they went into the reporting other of these massacres. They would do these verbal gymnastics, right? So when they were starving the Palestinians in Gaza in spring of 2024, they said it’s a food aid massacre.
As if these trucks just, you know, they just had some bad luck and they got kind of blown up. And somehow all of these hungry Palestinians that were waiting for food, they got killed. Oh, well, gosh, it was lawlessness.
It was this, it was that. Ismail Al-Ghoul, who I mentioned a little while ago, was on the ground. And he said exactly what happened. He said they started opening fire on Palestinians as they approached the aid trucks carrying flour. That’s why it was called the Flour Massacre.
You’ve got Euromed Monitor also documenting in the hospital nearby that the bodies that were brought to the hospital, the bodies in the morgue, the wounded people were wounded, not for being trampled by this lawlessness, of all these rushing, hungry people. No, they were shot. They had bullet holes in their bodies. So even in the face of ground truth that completely exposes their constructed media frames, they would go on to the next one and repeat what Netanyahu said after he deliberately bombed a humanitarian site, which the Israelis had told the Palestinians to go to.
Many of them [were] displaced up to 10 times already. And then they bombed the tents and said a whole string of explanations. Oh, this must have been about Hamas. So this kind of gradual moving through a whole bunch of Israeli talking points. And then in the end saying, oh, this was a tragic mistake.
What that did was normalize Israel’s ability to carry out these massacres. And then the next one, and then the news framing, as you say, they were coming at us on a daily basis. So then, okay, well, we didn’t solve that one.
We didn’t really claim that Israel did that. But let’s go on to another one and follow some more of their talking points of justification. And over and over again, all of that became normalized by the way the media dealt with the idea of talking points.
The Destruction Of Gaza’s Healthcare System
GOSZTOLA: It just seems like our conversation should not be completed without at least passively mentioning or just being clear that this was one of the more incredible examples of malpractice. The Hamas command center, the whole idea that this existed underneath a hospital and so Israel could bomb a hospital, and just the way that was all manufactured.
And I think to me that it did have a lasting effect. It did undermine people’s sympathy for Palestinians. But I also think there’s a huge segment that saw it fall apart. It exposed the way that propaganda works. And just how the Israeli government at different stages of this genocide hasn’t had to work very hard, hasn’t put a lot of effort into their propaganda. And sometimes when it backfired, it truly changed the opinions of people, I believe, that had fully supported the Israeli government.
ANDERSEN: Yeah, you know, the destruction of the healthcare system was one of the hardest chapters for me to write, because it was so extensive, and it was so very outrageous. And I was going back and forth from just being angry, to having to sit, you know, you start to feel this way when there’s doctors and there’s patients and there’s nurses, and they’re calling out, they’re saying, they’re going to surround us, they’re going to attack us, they’re going to kill us and our patients to the international community. And you’ve got the US media claiming that there is a Hamas infrastructure, equivalent of a “Hamas Pentagon” under Al-Shifa Hospital, with this elaborately slick 3D, like, going, you know, three or four stories underground, in the fantasy of the Israeli imagination, Hamas would never be able to do anything like that.
It was absolutely like the fellow in The Nation [Jeet Heer] called it, you know, it looks like a James Bond lair out of a movie. And then, in this story, particularly, which was the first one that really allowed it, was the first time they attacked the hospital, and they allowed Israel to get away with it. And they completely destroyed every hospital subsequently until today.
The United States State Department confirmed the intelligence, though they never revealed their sources or named any names. They said, yes, we have intelligence information that that point that that confirms that Hamas is under Al-Shifa Hospital. So, then the media would say, well, it’s against international law to attack a hospital, unless there are Hamas fighters in it, right? That is absolutely not true.
Israel throughout this has been very good at, and you don’t have to be very good to have the US media go along with it, right? So, but at distorting and twisting international law, that the New York Times, particularly, just always fell for. Now, keep in mind, Kevin, this is the most, this organization, the New York Times employs 3000 journalists. They employ 7% of all the journalists in the United States. They’re very wealthy. They have research institutions, why, you and I can look up on the internet, and find easily defined international laws about the destruction of civilian infrastructure, about the rules against harming civilian doctors, medical workers, medical professionals, aid givers, and their patients.
Even if there was a Hamas, even if Hamas was functioning out of Al Shifa Hospital, Israel was still obliged to protect every doctor and every patient in that hospital. It was absolutely not okay with international law that Israel devastated that entire hospital and killed patients. And even the second time, where the media was even worse than the first time, particularly since afterwards, the BBC did a report that in the aftermath of the destruction of Al Shifa, Israel claimed that it had evidence that they had been down there.
All of it, it was clownish. It was, do you remember the day Daniel Hagari, one of the IDF spokesmen, pointing to down in a tunnel and said, these were the names of the terrorists that were guarding the hostages. He’s pointing to the calendar. Do you know what it was? It was a calendar. It wasn’t the names. It was days of the week and the months. It wasn’t the names of terrorists and their hostages. They claimed to have found a whole stockpile. The BBC showed how that videotape was faked.
There was nothing. The Washington Post, by December, did an investigation with a lot of visual evidence and determined that in fact, even the places where the Israelis had said Hamas was hiding had not been occupied. And all of the tunnels that they kept saying were, were, were connected to Al Shifa were actually not connected to Al Shifa.
All of it was made up and a lie, and of course that didn’t get the play that it, only the Rolling Stones seemed to be the one that, that reported on the Washington Post investigation. So that’s how they got away with it.
Now they’ve got a wonderful doctor that they’re still torturing in an Israeli dungeon and they won’t let him go out, even though humanitarian and, and hospitals and doctors all over the world have been appealing for his release from the Israeli torture chambers and they won’t let him go. And I think that’s the only way we can talk about their detention, their prison system. These are torture chambers systematically designed to brutalize Palestinians in the worst ways possible in a country that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong.
GOSZTOLA: And with a system that spares those soldiers that engage in torture and, and do this brutality, if I’m correct, there were riots that they had charged these soldiers with crimes.
ANDERSEN: Yes, when they charged the soldiers with crimes, there were riots, the pro-rape riots in Israel. [People] were mad at the government for charging the soldiers that engaged in rape for charging.
GOSZTOLA: That’s where this country is that, you know, gets held up as, oh, if this democracy didn’t exist in the Middle East, what would the Middle East be without Israel? It’s baffling after everything that we have observed collectively, that we still pursue this fiction, but obviously there’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of entrenched interests that push this, that’s part of your book.
But then on the other side, I think this is a good way to end is, as you mentioned, and we’ve spoken a little bit about it, but I don’t think you could say enough, the censorship by murder, the risks that are being taken by journalists daily who continue, I mean, if there’s even a handful that are still able to go out there and do work today, I know they are, they’re stringers or freelancers, they get work through Al Jazeera English or some of the other Arab news publications and media networks that are there in the region.
And usually only learn about them because they’ve been executed by Israel. Unfortunately, I don’t see their work. And obviously they’re probably putting it out in Arabic, and I can’t read that.
So I don’t get a chance to appreciate what they’re doing. But that being said, something should be stated about how little the United States press has shown solidarity with these journalists that are over there, that are providing, some of them do work, actually, some of them we find do contribute to the Associated Press, they contribute to Reuters, their work does surface in the media. Maybe they’re not actually doing the framing of the stories, but they’re capturing photos and videos that are being used by these networks.
And while they put their lives on the line and starve, they are not supported adequately, while they are being targeted and assassinated by the Israeli government. Is there anybody you wanted to celebrate here before we conclude?
ANDERSEN: Oh, there’s so many journalists. You know, Al Jazeera worked very hard when it first came online, and it first started being the kind of premier outlet and network that reported on wars in the Middle East, beginning in about 2001, with Afghanistan. They have a lot of rules and precautionary measures that they train their journalists. They have been very, very careful not to allow their journalists to get killed over time. And they have largely succeeded, but Israel’s brutality was so over the top that they lost journalist after journalist.
But I think Karen Attiah, I think, is her name. I think I might have pronounced it wrong, but she was an op-ed contributor to the Washington Post. And the Washington Post, maybe because of Jamal Khashoggi, their reporter getting killed, and the Saudis getting away with it. I think the Washington Post was a tiny bit more sensitive to the killing of journalists, and they did do a story where they featured some of them. But they would never call out Israel really.
They would never kind of say, this guy was targeted, particularly Hamza Al-Dahdouh, who was the son of the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza, Wael al-Dahdouh. And Wael left in January, and his son was killed in February, and they killed his entire family. But some of the stuff, I used a lot of some of the things that journalists said, and the editors at Al Jazeera said, and they’re so aware of the role they play in what they did, the journalists on the ground.
They were so articulate. And they said, you know, the ones that would get ready to be killed after Hamza was killed, and some of the early ones were killed. And they said, we’re going to keep doing this because we can’t stop.
GOSZTOLA: Wael had to remove himself because of the physical injuries he had suffered.
ANDERSEN: Well, the physical injuries and the emotional injuries, he had to stand over his son’s grave and say, we’re doing a job, this job for humanity, under the rules of humanitarian law. He knew that stuff, right? And most of them also knew that.
So I put a lot of their words and their testimony in. And also of Max Alvarez from the Real News Network, who wrote some very moving pieces. He’s also a great writer about his colleagues and how brave and essential their work has been to us. And I think we all owe a huge debt to them and will for years.
GOSZTOLA: Well, thank you, Robin. It’s been good talking to you about this book. And you put a lot of research and analysis and time into it. And everyone, if you can, go find a copy of “The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza,” especially if you like digging into the media and their coverage and, you know, getting a sense of media malpractice.
We all like have a pretty good idea that we’re not getting the truth. But you bring out the specifics, you show the documentation of it. And thank you for your work on it, Robin.
ANDERSEN: You can buy the book at the OR Books website. And it’ll be in bookstores at the beginning of June.
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