THE COMPLICIT LENS
US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
by Robin Anderson
310 pp. OR Books $23
Even those of us who closely followed U.S. mainstream media bias in its coverage of Israel’s murderous war on Palestinians since October 7, 2023 will find that The Complicit Lens, a superb, comprehensive new book, is indispensable. Author Robin Andersen is a veteran expert in media studies. Her success is two-fold. First, she exhaustively chronicles the day-by-day twistings, distortions and omissions in the New York Times, CNN and the rest. She uses an impressive, broad range of sources (including this site), and documents them in an astonishing 942 footnotes.
And she weaves this enormous mass of information together, and outlines revealing patterns. For instance, she zeroes in on clear bias in the language that the mainstream used to describe deaths, right from the beginning. She points out that the New York Times from October 7, 2023 to November 24 “used the word ‘massacre’ fifty-three times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians but only once to refer to Palestinians being killed by Israel.” This linguistic dishonesty had immediate consequences. Andersen cites a U.S. opinion poll from March 2024: “At a time when the official death toll in Gaza stood at 32,000 Palestinians, compared with 1,200 Israeli killed, ‘half of Americans do not know which side has had a higher death toll.’”
Andersen refutes the most hysterical anti-Palestinian claims, such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s contention that Hamas “took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.” She then goes an essential step further, and zeroes in on a central question: “What was the purpose of such sensationalized fake news, such gut-wrenching propaganda?”
She cites independent reporter Caitlin Johnstone’s explanation — the dishonesty had a sinister aim: Israel and its allies needed to frame the October 7 attack in “the most shocking and rage-inducing discourse in order to make Israel’s ongoing murder of civilians in Gaza look appropriate.”
Andersen then turns to what she calls “the compromised media landscape.” She explains how the New York Times and others are under constant pressure from pro-Israel pressure groups, like the ill-named “Honest Reporting.” She further cites the double-standard, (exposed at length at this site): Honest Reporting successfully pressured the New York Times to fire the Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salem, simply because he had made a Facebook post praising the resilience of Palestinians — but at the same time the Times did not recuse 3 of its own reporters who actually had children who served in the Israeli military.
The valuable insights in this book are numerous. For instance, she quotes honest, passionate coverage by Joy-Ann Reid, an anchor at the MSNBC cable network, and then suggests that the network, supposedly a progressive outlet, later fired Reid (in February 2025) for her outspokenness on Palestine.
The book devotes an entire, well-documented chapter to “the destruction of Gaza’s health care system.” Israel and its apologists charged without evidence that Hamas hid inside hospitals. (This site’s courageous Gaza reporter, Tareq Hajjaj, is one of Andersen’s sources.) One quote bears repeating; the Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, who had worked at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza for 16 years, said there is “no evidence at all of Hamas —if it was a military command center, I would not work there.”
Another chapter describes Israel’s often intentional murder of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who were trying to bring truth to the world. She reminds us about reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, the Al-Jazeera bureau chief for Gaza, who continued reporting even after an Israeli air strike murdered his entire family. Al-Dahdouh made an inspiring video statement: “As long as we are alive and as long as we are able to perform this duty we will do so without hesitation, because it is a noble, holy and humanitarian message which is sanctified by all international and humanitarian laws and agreements.”
Andersen demolishes “Screams Without Words,” that infamous, lurid December 2023 article in the New York Times that claimed to report on how “Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7.” It turned out that the 3 Times reporters were unqualified, biased, or both, and that people they quoted in the article later denied making the statements attributed to them. Some 60 American journalism professors asked the Times to review the report, and Jewish Voice for Peace also issued an online alert that called on the paper to “issue a full retraction and conduct a full, independent, and public investigation into its editorial process.”
But so far, astoundingly, the New York Times has not corrected the record.
There is much more here, including an analysis of how the mainstream media distorted the widespread protests on American college campuses. (She notes, accurately, that “student reporting at the Columbia Spectator and The Harvard Crimson was comprehensive, balanced and far better than the establishment media, with coverage that put the professionals to shame.”)
There is another intriguing angle in Andersen’s vital book. In several places, she uses more accurate reporting in Israel’s own flagship paper, Haaretz, to rebut mainstream U.S. media dishonesty. For instance, in May 2024 the Israeli paper refused to accept Netanyahu’s explanation that an Israel aerial attack on refugee tents in Rafah, southern Gaza, that killed dozens of civilians has been an accident. The American mainstream media repeated Israel’s lie without challenge. By contrast, Haaretz said: “The Rafah Horror was neither ‘a mishap,’ nor ‘exceptional,” and the Israeli paper indicted “the willful media blackout regarding the scope of death and destruction.”
Robin Andersen has done a tremendous service to the cause of truth and justice for Palestinians. Every journalism school in America ought to assign her book as required reading.
James North
James North is a Mondoweiss’ Editor-at-Large, and has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City. Follow him on X at @jamesnorth7
