By Jenna Martin, Prism
The Media Freedom Coalition asserts that a free and independent press serves as democracy’s watchdog, fulfilling four crucial roles: acting as a “fourth estate,” fearlessly holding power to account; spotlighting marginalized voices and driving action on critical issues as an “agenda-setter”; fostering national unity and shared understanding as a “midwife to imagined communities”; and sounding the alarm on corruption and emerging threats to democracy. These vital functions underscore why press freedom remains a cornerstone of healthy democracies worldwide.
Over the past 17 months, as Americans watched a genocide unfold in real time on their phones, mainstream media outlets acted in direct contrast to these roles. Even as overwhelming evidence from multiple international organizations confirmed that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, America’s most trusted media institutions unquestioningly justified both Israel’s actions and the corresponding U.S. financial and military support, all while simultaneously bombarding the American public with relentless and often predetermined election coverage.
The result was that Americans’ trust in the media plummeted to a staggeringly low 31%.
With President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk spending recent weeks trying to dissolve or gut federal agencies without congressional approval, the media’s role as a canary in the coal mine has never been more vital.
But before trust can be rebuilt, one question must be answered: Why did the media try so hard to control the narrative in 2024? Why would the media have its own narrative at all?
“Hidden narratives”
To track a narrative, we must first track the money, and by leaps and bounds, Israel is the highest beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid. Since 1946, Israel has received over $300 billion in U.S. aid, the vast majority going to its military. The next closest recipient is Egypt at roughly $168 billion. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has sent $22.76 billion to Israel in military aid.
The purpose of this aid is to protect the interests of both Israel and the U.S. According to the U.S. State Department, a consequence of this aid is that it has “turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide.”
But there’s one catch: Under the 1952 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement between the U.S. and Israel, the weapons provided by the U.S. must only be used for self-defense. In effect, this means that anyone who stands to benefit from either U.S. foreign aid to Israel or corresponding military technology contracts has a vested interest in Israel’s actions being framed as self-defense.
Nima Akram, the founder of NewsCord, told Prism that Western media has mastered this framing over decades. The NewsCord site and app use artificial intelligence models, specifically and large language models, to scrape the internet for every news source covering a particular story and then summarize the story’s perspectives and biases, showing breaking news in a way that unravels hidden narratives.
During the genocide, it became overwhelmingly clear that one way Western media absolves Israel of responsibility for Palestinian deaths is by refusing to label Israel as the culprit, while simultaneously framing Palestinians as “terrorists” or “fighters,” Akram said. Coverage from the Washington Post repeatedly suggests that Palestinians aren’t killed by Israel; they die in clashes or fires. In reporting about Israel’s brutal assault on al-Shifa hospital, the Post never mentioned the 1,500 Palestinians killed, many of them patients lying in hospital beds. Instead, the publication quotes the Israeli military’s claim that “dozens of fighters” were killed.
Another common tactic of framing Israel’s actions as self-defense is the humanization of Israelis paired with the deliberate dehumanization of Palestinians. Western media’s reporting of the June 2024 Nuseirat massacre, for example, overwhelmingly focused on the humanity of the four Israeli hostages rescued at the expense of injuring 700 and killing 274 nameless Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women.
In one breathtaking example, CNN normalizes war crimes while reducing Palestinians to literal cuts of meat. The network’s profile of an Israeli soldier emphasizes his difficulties ordering steak after months of running over hundreds of “terrorists” in Gaza. The soldier’s actions in Gaza caused him to associate Palestinian’s crushed bodies with raw meat.
CNN’s only additional mention of Palestinians in the article is about the 42,000 killed.
“All these things add up to change the way people view a certain story,” Akram said, leading to what he said is the most outright malicious form of media bias: the spread of misinformation.
“One of the biggest news pieces that came out was the babies being beheaded,” Akram said, referencing the widely circulated and widely debunked claim that Hamas beheaded babies on Oct. 7. Another notable example is the New York Times’ exposé “Screams Without Words,” which despite widespread criticism for lax journalistic standards, lack of witness testimony, the Israeli police’s admission of no autopsies, and victims’ families renouncing the story, the award-winning reporting remains on the Times‘ website with minimal corrections.
“It allowed [Israel] to really quickly start the massacres at a maximum,” Akram explained. “And I mean sure, [the media] came back and said ‘this isn’t actually true’ and stuff like that, but the damage was already done. Most people only see the original.”
“Controlled and limited”
In his 1998 research paper “Media Influence and its Effects on Military Operations,” Maj. Ronald D. Hahn of the U.S. Marine Corps wrote that the “media is essential for establishing and maintaining public support for any military operation. Without the will of the American people, one of the three elements of the ’Clauswitizian trinity’ is missing and, hence, war can not be successfully prosecuted.”
Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 book “Vom Kriege,” or “On War,” remains one of the most influential pieces of literature on political and military analysis. Though there is much interpretation of how the trinity is applied as the act of war evolves in ways technological, economical, and geographical, one central component remains true nearly 200 years after the book’s publication: If a country is to go to war, the public must be on board.
And America spends a lot of time at war. In the nearly 249 years the U.S. has existed, 232 of them—about 93%—have been spent fighting someone, somewhere. This has resulted in an ever-evolving, not-always-so-functional, media-military relationship.
The Vietnam War exemplifies this dynamic. There was initially favorable press coverage, which then shifted after the televised Tet Offensive exposed Americans to the war’s horrors, fueling anti-war sentiment.
The 2003 Iraq War saw a different approach: “embedding” journalists” with U.S. troops. However, studies later showed that the information embedded reporters received was “controlled and limited by the U.S. military,” and was oriented toward the legitimization of the conflict. This resulted in a one-sided view, prioritizing the perspective of the American soldier rather than the reality of Iraqi citizens. Pentagon officials deemed it a successful model for future wartime press coverage.
Every hero needs a villain, and if the U.S. military is the “protector” of all that is good and pure, then who is coming to snatch away our women and children? Who is the terrorist?
Defining “terrorist”
Ahlam Muhtaseb, a professor of media studies at Cal State San Bernardino, told Prism that Palestinians “are usually constructed as the enemy,” often through a “terrorist” trope. She noted that the common trope of the “brown brutal fighter” and the oppressed Arab woman are used to justify military interventions.
“That’s the all-typical trick, right? You go to Afghanistan for what, to liberate Afghani women? It is nonsense,” she said.
She argued that outlets like the Times use the word “terrorist” to describe Palestinian acts, regardless of the context, framing them as terrorists rather than resistance fighters.
The government’s definition of “terrorist” has been shaped by conferences organized by the Jonathan Institute, co-founded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a report authored by Netanyahu that framed terrorism as a clash between civilization and savagery, the West against the Arabs. This framing influenced media coverage, as seen during the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 before a suspect was even identified. Still, a CBS broadcast focused on Islamic terrorism.
“According to a U.S. source, who told CBS News, it has Middle East terrorism written all over it,” anchor Connie Chung said of the bombing at the time. “That has investigators looking for a possible link to Middle East terrorists right here in the American Midwest.” As part of the segment, bold text reading, “Terror in the Heartland” overlays a recording of Palestinian musicians onstage at an Oklahoma theater. Scenes from the PBS documentary “Jihad in America” were also interspersed with the aftermath of the 1983 Beirut bombing and footage from a 1994 car bombing in Buenos Aires. The segment ends with correspondent Richard Threlkeld signing off, “Look out, America. Terrorism has come home.”
The actual culprit turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, a white man whose mental acuity was debated in the media, along with his hobbies and favorite T-shirt.
Thirty years later, the language of terrorism is still selectively applied. Mass shooters or perpetrators of racist attacks are rarely referred to as “terrorists” by the mainstream media, revealing how the media’s use of such terms goes beyond unintentional bias to something much more deliberate.
In her 2023 lecture “Constructing the Terrorist Threat,” Rutgers University journalism and media studies professor Deepa Kumar argued that the media’s portrayal of the American enemy is shaped by cultural differences and U.S. political and geostrategic interests. As an example, she referenced President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 signing of the Civil Liberties Act, which provided reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. It also included a formal apology from Reagan himself.
“Some people have argued that this is because Japanese Americans were integrated into U.S. society and showed that they were good, loyal U.S. citizens and so forth, but in reality, it was only after Japan had actually ceased to be a threat to U.S. interests on the global stage that such an apology was possible,” Kumar said. “That’s an important lesson for us in this, which is that groups of people are turned into racialized threats when there are larger political and economic agendas at work.”
This is something Cop City protesters in Atlanta are well aware of.
“Nefarious level of propaganda”
Micah Herskind, a former policy advocate at the Southern Center for Human Rights, once organized against the construction of Cop City, a $90 million police training facility opposed by 70% of Atlanta residents. Herskind’s focus has since shifted to defending the 61 protesters charged under the anti-racketeering law RICO, including six also charged with domestic terrorism.
The proposal for Cop City came on the heels of the 2020 protests surrounding the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks. Its construction threatens 341 acres of the protected Weelaunee Forest, an environmental asset in the heart of Atlanta’s Black community. The facility is slated to include mock cities, shooting ranges, and bomb simulations, all of which is largely funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF).
Since 1992, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has participated in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), a privately controlled police program that arranges for law enforcement officials to train with foreign governments in areas of detention, mass surveillance, protest control, and more. APD’s surveillance system is modeled after Israel’s, and the proposed Cop City training facility shares striking similarities with Israel’s Urban Warfare Training Center (UWTC). Known as “Mini Gaza,” the UWTC was built with U.S. military assistance after the second Palestinian Intifada in 2005.
The APF is the nonprofit arm of the city’s police department. Of the many corporate and private donations funneled into the APF is the James M. Cox Foundation, which is a division of Cox Enterprises. Alex Taylor, CEO of Cox Enterprises, also served as chair of the Cop City fundraising campaign. Cox Enterprises owns Atlanta’s paper of record: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC).
In the years leading up to the terrorism charges, the AJC ran multiple favorable editorials of Cop City while consistently framing the protesters as “environmental extremists” and “anarchists.” The paper even openly speculated about additional crimes protesters could be guilty of, without any evidence. AJC reporter Tyler Estep noted, “If any arrests have been made specifically for the most violent actions of which the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement is accused, they have not been publicized.”
In a January 2023 raid on Copy City protesters, Georgia State Patrol killed environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán. AJC’s reporting on the event goes out of its way to frame the protesters as violent extremists, mentioning an anonymous Twitter account that called for violence against the police, while again showing no verified proof the account was associated with Tortuguita or the protesters. The paper later ran a lengthy opinion piece framing Tortuguita’s diary as justification for their murder, even as an autopsy already revealed that Tortuguita had been shot 14 times while sitting cross-legged with hands raised. No criminal charges have been brought against Georgia State Patrol troopers.
According to Herskind, AJC’s reporting on Cop City has deeper consequences regarding public opinion. “The whole theory of the RICO case is that it’s a criminal enterprise, so there’s even a more nefarious level of propaganda, or ‘copoganda,’ that the media does by referring to people in the movement as part of one organization, when that is something the state has to prove,” Herskind said.
This was echoed in Kumar’s November 2023 research paper in collaboration with the Costs of War Project. Kumar analyzed media coverage of 42 activists arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” from December 2022 to March 2023, finding that in early coverage of Cop City, “The local Atlanta Journal-Constitution effectively served as the Atlanta Police Foundations’ propaganda outlet.”
Media collapse
Making media matters even worse, U.S. media has gone through a cataclysmic level of consolidation. In the spring of 2017, five companies owned 37% of all television stations. In 2021, the Federal Communications Commission eliminated restrictions on a single media company owning television, radio, and newspaper properties within a local market. By 2024, control of roughly 90% of all broadcast media was consolidated into six companies: Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount Global, Sony, and Amazon.
Print media underwent a similar transformation. A 2023 report by the State of Local News Project found that from 2005 to 2023, the U.S. lost 2,886 newspapers, roughly a third of the country’s total. Newspaper employment also decreased by 70%. The remaining employment was even further consolidated, with the New York Times now employing nearly 7% of all newspaper journalists nationwide.
The consolidation also marks a significant increase in private ownership. The same 2023 report found that of the 10 largest newspaper owners, six were large private regional chains. The remaining four were “either owned by, or in debt to, an investment firm, including hedge funds or private equity groups.”
So let’s talk contracts: The most watched cable news networks are Fox News, CNN, ABC News, NBC News, MSNBC, and CBS News—all of which have biases that favor Israel, according to multiple studies. The top five national newspapers in circulation as of July 2024 are the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Fox News and the Journal are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of Israel’s fiercest supporters and a board member of Genie Energy, when the company was awarded a drilling contract in the illegally occupied Golan Heights. The Times’ largest shareholder as of 2015 is Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire and Israeli investor. MSNBC and NBC News’ parent company, Comcast, holds $343 million in Department of Defense (DOD) contracts and partners with CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global, which also contracts with the DOD. Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Post and contracts with both the DOD and the Israeli military.
Viewers and readers eager to consume more independent forms of journalism run into another obstacle: how to access this journalism. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans getting their news on social media is growing, with 54% of U.S. adults now getting their news from at least one social media site, including X.
X is owned by Musk, who is now the head of the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, giving Musk unprecedented power to defund and dissolve federal agencies that in some cases were investigating his companies. Musk also holds a $1.8 billion contract with the DOD to build a spy satellite network through his company, SpaceX. Facebook and Instagram are part of Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who recently announced that he will end Meta’s third-party fact-checking program and allow its open-source AI model, Llama, to be used by U.S. national security agencies and defense contractors.
TikTok, one of the only platforms that originally showed Palestinian content in the early days of Israel’s siege, more than doubled in users looking for news, going from 22% to 52% since 2020. This jump was especially apparent in adults under 30, 39% of whom say they now get their news from TikTok. In response to the powerful ways the app shaped public opinions on Israel, TikTok is now under constant threat of getting banned in the U.S.
And just recently, Google, Americans’ primary search engine for information on breaking news, lifted its ban on using its AI technology for weapons and surveillance. The tech company holds a $9 billion contract with the Pentagon, as well as a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli military.
Nima Akram, NewsCord founder
The genocide, however, has proven to be a turning point for many journalists in legacy media. They’ve signed letters protesting biased coverage and demanded protection of their Gaza colleagues and the opportunity to join them. They have demanded arms embargoes, accusing the State Department of “abetting Israel’s violent suppression of journalism,” and joined together to create the Gaza Project to investigate the deaths of journalists killed in Gaza.
As long as there remain those committed to the truth, American media is not dead. There are countless independent, people-funded networks and journalists working tirelessly to fulfill the four roles of a free and independent press.
But there is no denying that the media landscape has changed. When asked how to navigate it, Akram had one piece of advice: “You cannot read just one news source and trust that it is the truth.”
Because after all, if a country is to go to war, the public must be on board.
This editorial was originally published in Prism. “Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.”
Photo by brotiN biswaS: https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-photography-of-magazines-518543/
