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- [00:00]
A
My name is Mackenzie, and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about 10, $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.
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B
GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe. All right. Have you noticed that not only does Benjamin Netanyahu dog walk Donald Trump, it appears he also dog walks Barry Weiss of CBS News. She allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to pick his own person to interview him. Pop this up. Dylan Byers has scooped paramount leadership, has had informal discussions about changing Barry Weiss's mandate at CBS News and eventually CNN in ways that would give her less control over tv. And joining me to discuss this is Adam Johnson. He is the co host of the Citations Needed podcast and author of how to Sell a Genocide, the Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Adam, thank you for joining me today.
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C
Thank you so much for having me on.
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B
Yes. What is your response to this Bari Weiss news?
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C
I'm a little skeptical of it. Bari Weiss was brought in for the explicit purposes of being an ideological enforcer for the Ellison family. So the idea that they would withdraw her power, it could be because of pushback from internally from reporters. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of the people there, they just lost Anderson Cooper over this, view it as illegitimate that they've completely destroyed the firewall between ownership and editorial independence, such as that it existed under Sherry Redstone, who herself intervened three separate times because they thought 60 Minutes as coverage was too critical of Israel. And then she sold it to the Ellison family, who, of course, is the largest private donor under the idf. And they bring in Bari Weiss, who obviously has a history of being staunchly pro Israel. But there was a lot of pushback internally. I know from several reports that she had kind of gone too far or kind of flew too close to the sun in terms of editorial intervention. And of course, they're using 60 minutes effectively to suck up to Trump so they'll approve the much more important prize, which is Paramount, or rather which is CNN and Time Warner and that whole empire, which is far more valuable than Paramount, which is only $8 billion. So I think it's. I'll believe it when I see it because I think the reason why she was brought in was, was pretty explicitly to weed out what was perceived as anti Israel bias or woke or anything considered too liberal or that, you know, it was kind of a combination of right wing grievances that she was there to enforce. So my sense is that they may be trial ballooning this to see if this eases off some of the tensions from their more established reporters.
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B
I agree with you. I'm not buying it. You wrote this piece for the Intercept. Pop this up. You analyzed more than 12 articles from mainstream outlets and more than 5,000 television segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC. What shocked you the most?
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C
What shocked me the most? I suppose not a lot shocked me, although the asymmetry of the data was pretty profound. So we, we looked at bias by comparing. For example, the first thing we compared was what we call emotive words, which is when an Israeli is killed, US Media, whether it's New York Times or cnn, describe it as brutal or savage or barbaric or a massacre or a slaughter. Whereas when Palestinians are killed, overwhelmingly our data shows by about 100 to 1, when Palestinians are killed, it's either never referred to as a barbaric or a slaughter or a massacre, which is the case with the New York Times and Washington Post and most print media, and effectively the case with cable news such as cnnc, which we covered, which we argue is a form of a very obvious bias. So Israel kills 20,000 children over the course of two years and somehow manages, and the number is probably double that, and somehow manages to do so without once committing a massacre or a slaughter. Whereas the New York Times uses the term over 100 times in the first 60 days alone after October 7th. And what we argue is that that's statistically impossible. We looked at the asymmetry and coverage in terms of sympathetic victims, children, journalists. We looked at the totally asymmetrical coverage of antisemitism versus Islamophobia, which was overwhelming, which is overwhelming in the data. We looked at these kind of mantras like right to defend itself, which almost always precede hand waving away mass carnage that emerged from Gaza in the first few months. And the argument is that you can empirically show anti Palestinian, pro Israel bias in media, which we aim to do in a rigorous and thorough way. And then from there we can have a bigger conversation as to why or what we can do about that, or whether people even view this as being a bad thing. Because some people would see that. I know that one of those pro Israel bully groups did a review of our Intercept piece and basically made the argument, well, it's different because it's different. Well, why is it different? Why is slaughtering 20,000 children not a massacre or a slaughter or. But everything Palestinians do is. And their answer is effectively just, it's different because they're a terrorist organization or some kind of tautology. And I don't think that's a very satisfactory answer to most people.
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B
Yeah, I don't think so either. You write that the phrase Israel's right to defend itself appeared 94 times more than the right of Palestinians to defend themselves. Words like savages were often used to justify the killings of Palestinian people. How complicit is the media in whitewashing this genocide?
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C
Well, the title is not meant to be provocative. It's meant to be an actual argument, which is there was a genocide that had to be sold and it was one decided on very early, I argue. So on October 8th, Tony Blinken issues the kind of pro forma tweet calling for a ceasefire and then immediately deletes it. And then on October 13th, he issues a, a ban on the State Department and any administration official from using the word ceasefire. Because at that point everybody, there was a playbook, everyone knew what it meant from previous Israeli bombings in Gaza from 2014-2021-2012-2009, that you call for a ceasefire because they're just going to kill some arbitrarily high number of Palestinians, or as the case in this particular round, they commit genocide and certainly ethnic cleansing. But, but there was a decision made that they were going to go for it, they were going to go for broke. And again at that time there had been a ceasefire being called for by Amnesty International, by Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, every major human rights and medical organization calling for a ceasefire. And then it was clear that they were going to so called eliminate Hamas. Something I argue no one really believed. Tony Blinken himself said behind closed doors to Netanyahu in January of 2024 that defeating Hamas was impossible and that it was largely pretextual to just commit collective punishment against the Palestinians as such. And so the argument I make is that the media, such as it Was. And I do focus on what we broadly consider mainstream media. None of these terms are perfect, but the New York Times, cnn, msnbc. I did not focus on right wing media like Fox News and Newsmax because our assumption was is that they're just going to be mindlessly racist and pro genocide anyway. So that's not really in dispute. But what I argue is that it will only get you 35, 40%. To really get to that 60, 65%, you need to carry out a live stream genocide for two years. And the book focuses mainly on the first year, especially with the Democratic President. You needed bipartisan mainstream buy in. And that was the role that cnn, msnbc, New York Times, ap, Washington Post, et cetera, et cetera played. And what I argue is that you can quantitatively show first and foremost the bias against Palestinians, systematically and rigorously. Again, we studied 12,000 articles, 5,000 news segments. Pro Israel groups do try to critique my work as they did a couple days ago. They can't dispute the facts. They can simply make an argument that yes, there's a bias, but it's good that it's a bias because Israel is good and Palestinians are ontologically evil. And again, one is welcome to find that argument convincing. I find it a little pat.
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B
I agree. I think it's what irritates me about this whole situation is when I hear that 260, I think it's estimated journalists have been killed by Israel, some American citizens, and that these little kids were shot in the head and the heart and this was, you know, very substantiated. And then we're outraged by that. Then they critique us for being outraged at murder and it just is. So it's such a bizarre mind warp when you step into this because in any other area the cartel sniped and little kids and killed journalists, it would be universal outrage. But when we get to the Israel issue, it is looked down upon by these pro Israel groups to fill empathy. And that bizarrely kind of dovetails with the Christian right support of Trump that are writing books like When Empathy Becomes Toxic. You know, it's just like it's this whole like it's trickle down homicidal acceptance that's happening not just with this Israel thing, but over here with what's happening with our government. What do you make of the Nicholas Kristoff peace and then Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to sue him?
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C
Well, I'll back up and discuss the first part because I think they're related, which is there has obviously been a huge pro Israel propaganda apparatus premised on this constant victim mentality. So even though they have wildly more technologically superior to the Palestinians and to obviously to a great extent the Lebanese, they're bombing again, despite the fact that they are backed up by the law, largest empire in the history of the world. They must paint themselves as victims under siege by a kind of left wing Islamo conspiracy theory that hates Israel because of anti Semitism or anti Americanism or some kind of brain worm. And that's why this is what these pro Israel groups, specifically the so called Anti Defamation League run by Jonathan Greenblatt, have been very good at, framing criticism of Israel as a form of racial prejudice towards Jewish people as such. And this is why they've kind of used these turnkey anti discrimination policies on campus to go after or campus protesters and why they use the language of antisemitism to shut down criticism. Because what's the worst thing you can call a liberal? A racist, a bigot. And for good reason. Nobody wants to be a bigot. That's a good instinct to want to have. And they exploit that instinct to chill criticism for what was obviously a nihilistic campaign of mass death and destruction that anyone can see. And this is why I document the disproportionate coverage of anti Semitism using Islamophobia as a reference. Because even if you use the ADL's definition of antisemitism, every one of these government mandated studies at universities, specifically Harvard, found an equal amount of Islamophobia and anti Muslim hatred, as we just saw, of course in the Islamic center in San Diego just yesterday. And yet the coverage we got was almost exclusively about antisemitism. The New York Times under our study for the first six months ran 82 headlines focusing exclusively on antisemitism, only eight on Islamophobia. They had five that were both. Washington Post was 54 for antisemitism, five for Islamophobia. AP was 75 articles on antisemitism and four for Islamophobia. There were 394 headlines in total in mainstream media during the first six months focusing exclusively on antisemitism. That's 394 versus only 34 for Islamophobia. So it's about 10x more coverage. And if you go to mentions, it blooms up to about 50x. And so the question is, if the evidence shows they're comparably urgent and comparably serious, why is there this disproportionate focus on antisemitism? And the reason is because the way the ADL indexes its antisemitic incidences, again, in addition to actual incidences of antisemitism, which is obviously always bad, is they take criticism of Israel or Zionism as such, as a form of racial hatred and racial prejudice. So rather banal. I mean, again, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the adl, has referred to Palestinian scarf, the keffiyeh, as comparable to a Nazi symbol. So they index these rather benign expressions of solidarity with Palestine as a form of racism, as a form of hatred. So obviously that's going to chill dissent. Nobody wants to go to a protest that's viewed as like a pilgrim or being presented as such by New York Times or NBC. And that was largely effective, especially in 2024, when they weaponized this idea of antisemitism to chill opposition to what most people perceived. Because again, we were seeing Death counts of 300 a day, 400 a day. There was one day in late October of 2023 that was a thousand in one day were being killed, obviously 30% of whom were children. And if you oppose this, the only way that in their, I think, diluted worldview, and some genuinely believe it, is that it has to be born from some kind of racial hatred. And there's not, there's not really a way you can counter that in a systemic way when that's constantly being beaten over people's heads. And so one thing the book focuses on is it focuses on the exploitation of antisemitism discourse and people's, I think, otherwise natural and good liberal instinct to oppose antisemitism as a way of shutting down and chilling criticism of the State of Israel, which is an actual state that actually exists. It has F22s, it has tanks, it bombs and imprisons over 3,000 Palestinians without trial. We would call those hostages, but of course, our media doesn't. And so that kind of chilling effect had tremendous impact in, in, in. In chilling opposition to the genocide when it, when it really mattered. In early 2024 and late 2023.
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B
Yeah, I think that Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL, I think he's a gaslighter. I think it's. It's a form of psychological abuse when people see what is happening and that there are facts that are reported. And then if you're told that you have emp, that you're some sort of bigot, that is a really sadistic psychological abuse that that organization in particular takes place.
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C
What about the one silver lining I will say, sorry to interrupt, is that Jonathan Greenblatt has become more Overtly right wing as especially with Trump in the White House. So you remember when Elon Musk did the clear as day Sig Heil the inauguration, he dismissed it as an enthusiastic gesture. And Elon Musk again goes on Twitter almost on a monthly basis and goes
- [16:12]
B
on he's a Nazi.
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C
Goes on great replacement conspiracy theories. That's a fundamentally anti Semitic conspiracy theory. The great replacement. And the ADL never criticizes him because again, he broadly supports Israel and they're an Israel lobby posing as a civil rights group. But go ahead. I apologize.
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B
No, I completely agree with you. As we go to Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to sue Nick Kristof and the New York Times, and then the New York Times had Nicholas Kristof's back. You've studied this and I know this is a new story breaking. Do you think he's going to follow through with it and sue? Do you think this is just like a Trumpian style bluster?
- [16:52]
C
I think it's Trumpian style bluster because as many lawyers have pointed out, to sue you have to have discovery of fundamental claims. So the claim that Christoph is making has been well documented by a number of human rights groups. This is not new information. It's been reported on by Aretz, it's been reported on to some extent by the Washington Post. So you would have to discover the fundamental fact set, which I will reveal, that these types of abuses are actually very, very common. And so it'll never get to that point. It is an intimidation. Again, these intimidations and these threats, whether it's targeting Hasan Piker or whether it's targeting Nicholas Kristof, they're never really for the person they're targeting. They're for the hundreds of other people to say, shut up, don't go there. And so the intimidation and the smears. And again, they were bringing up Nicholas Kristof's father's history of what he was doing in the 1930s. I mean, this ridiculous, like, you know, guilt by genetic association. They're just desperate. They're about intimidating people. And this is something also documented in the book where we have these kind of visual anti doxing campaigns, harassing people at work, harassing people's wives at work. They're not formally affiliated with the Israeli government, but they're certainly funded like the Canary Mission by these pro Israel donors. They're meant to chill everyone else into shutting up. So clearly they would like to punish Christophe. But that's almost. It's something like the primaries where these pro Israel groups spend 15, 20 million dollars on some obscure seat in Kentucky or New York or Missouri. It's less about the candidate itself. It's more about saying that if you step out of line and existentially criticize Israel, it's going to cost you millions of dollars. It's going to cost you litigation. It's going to. So I don't think the lawsuit, which is sort of a textbook lawsuit, it's not really serious. I don't think that's really going to go anywhere. But it's really about sending a message to anyone else in mainstream US Media for covering things that are viewed as being subversive to the broader pro Israel narrative. Because again, so much of this has already been reported in Israeli media. This is not like some forbidden, secret mass rapes Palestinian prisoners and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been recorded, reported in ha. So. But what it's not supposed to do is it's not supposed to break containment. It's not supposed to go to your kind of mainstream, very influential liberal outlets like the New York Times. That's viewed as, that's, that's viewed as, as, as a step too far.
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B
Okay, last question. I think that we have seen the dam break in public opinion regarding unconditional support for Israel. We have seen the support for Israel, the country plummet in the Democratic Party. And do you think the mainstream media in America, do you think it catches up with this? Do you think that, you know, typically where the public is, then commerce goes and finds it and is there, or do you think this part of corporate media is just broken? It's fubar?
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C
I think in key ways it is. But what I think is likely to emerge is a kind of PR off ramp where you see this emerging narrative around what I call one bad man theory, that this was simply Netanyahu forcing everyone to do it, both in Israel and stateside. Or as you see this new talking point being peddled by J Street, of we need to end US Aid to Israel, which sounds like a very meaningful break from consensus. But then you look at the fine print and by end US Aid to Israel, they simply mean funding of the weapons systems. But we still give them the weapons systems. So it's not an arms embargo, it's simply cutting off the funding. But since all defense spending is funny money anyway, it's mostly a cosmetic difference. It's just Israel pays for it versus the US but it doesn't really change anything. And it was actually a proposal first introduced by Benjamin Netanyahu in January of 2026 and then supported by Lindsey Graham. And so you have, I think, these kind of pseudo breaks from Israel because again, they can read a poll like anyone else can with Democrats. This is now an 80, 20, 85, 15 issue. So they're coming up with ways of looking like you're opposing Israel while not fundamentally changing the arms flow, the financial and economic support. So really what matters to me is do you support an arms embargo? Do you support bds, meaningful pressure on Israel rather than cosmetic hand wringing about, quote, unquote, too many Palestinian civilians dying, which is an expression they love to say, which implies there are some number of Palestinians who deserve to die. They never tell you what that number is. And so I think you'll get a lot of crocodile tears, a lot of hand wringing, a lot of pseudo breaks like this ending US Aid or scapegoating Netanyahu as if, like people don't. If you look at Netanyahu's opposition in Israel, they're just as genocidal as he is on key issues. This requires an external pressure by their largest patron, the United States, not some kind of electoral coup, which again, if you look at polling and you look at the actual positions of Netanyahu's opposition on the fundamental issues of genocide, war with Iran, they're in agreement. So that's where I see it going. I think it's going to be about massaging people's guilty consciences and then basically doing nothing. That's ultimately the conclusion of the book. Unless something fundamentally changes in our politics and we demand more concrete positions like support for BDS or like a full arms embargo.
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B
Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff and I think a lot of Americans are kind of opening their eyes to all of this because we've all been. Myself, I'm the most guilty of this, of all, of being on a corporate news MSNBC diet. And when you get off of it, once you see this stuff, it's really difficult to unsee it for anybody who's a critical thinker, has a conscience, cares about human beings. And so I want to encourage my audience to not only follow you, but to also support Intercept. And it is a non profit publication sponsored almost entirely by no donations. You can go to their website and support them@the Intercept.com and please go subscribe to Adam Johnson's podcast. Citations needed. Is there anywhere else my listeners can find you, Adam?
- [23:02]
C
Just the book, how to Sell a Genocide. It's out now and I have a substack the column or columblog dot dot dot com.
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B
Thank you so much, Adam.
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C
Thank you, Sam.