{"id":121741,"date":"2025-06-08T17:05:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T15:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=121741"},"modified":"2025-06-08T06:58:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T04:58:59","slug":"08-05-117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=121741","title":{"rendered":"How the Media Manufactured a \u2018Genocide\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>How the Media Manufactured a \u2018Genocide\u2019<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Zach Goldberg<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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A data-driven investigation into the way coverage of Israel\u2019s war in Gaza surpasses actual genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and beyond<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

A young woman holds a sign that reads: “Stop the genocide” during a gathering of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on October 18, 2023 in Berlin, Germany, days before Israel invaded Gaza. \/\u00a0 Sean Gallup\/Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Concept creep<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In August 2020, I\u00a0illustrated<\/a>\u00a0in these pages how terms like\u00a0racism<\/em>,\u00a0white supremacy<\/em>, and\u00a0privilege<\/em>\u00a0saw a dramatic surge in media usage, significantly reshaping public and political perceptions and discourse. The same dynamic, I feared, was beginning to reshape another crucial term:\u00a0genocide<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Genocide<\/em>\u00a0is going the way of\u00a0racism<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0white supremacy<\/em>, I\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn\u2019t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas\u2019 murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0(1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper\u2019s earlier peak for\u00a0white supremacy<\/em>\u00a0(1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for\u00a0racism<\/em>\/racist(s)<\/em>\u00a0(7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Upon closer examination, however, much like the widespread surge in race-related terminology during the \u201cGreat Awokening,\u201d\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0was far from alone, as references to genocide reached unprecedented highs across numerous major news outlets, including\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0and the Associated Press.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To confirm that these recent spikes were driven primarily by the Israel-Gaza conflict\u2014and to place them in historical context\u2014I analyzed how frequently each of the six outlets paired\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0with countries or groups historically associated with genocide allegations or acts. Using Nexis Uni, I tracked annual coverage associating genocide with well-documented historical cases, including Rwanda (1994), Darfur (2003-2008), Bosnia (1995), Myanmar (2017-present), and the Yazidis (2014-2017).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The results were striking and unambiguous: Coverage linking Israel with genocide has surged far beyond every other agreed-upon historical case of genocide across all examined outlets. In\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, for example, articles pairing Israel and genocide reached levels more than nine times higher than the peak for Rwanda and nearly six times greater than for Darfur. Similarly, in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, more than 1 percent of all articles now reference both Israel and genocide\u2014a frequency unmatched by any other pairing in recent decades.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lines represent the annual percentage of New York Times articles (as indexed by Nexis Uni) that include the terms shown in each panel. Annual article volume was estimated by counting how many NYT articles contained the word \u201cthe,\u201d used as a proxy for total output. Term frequencies are expressed as percentages of this total. Data covers the period from January 1, 1980 through May 21, 2025.<\/span>Zach Goldberg<\/span><\/p>\n
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This is not a minor anomaly. It marks a profound shift in how the concept of genocide is being applied in public discourse.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If Israel\u2019s war in Gaza qualifies as genocide, it would constitute a striking historical outlier: perhaps the first such case of genocide triggered by a mass terrorist attack involving the slaughter of civilians and the taking of hostages; the first in which the genocider permitted food, fuel, and humanitarian aid to flow into the territory of its purported victims; and potentially the only instance in which the perpetrators lacked any prior plan or ideological commitment to extermination. It may also be unique in that the targeted group\u2019s combatants have deliberately embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure and sought to increase civilian casualties for strategic and propaganda purposes. And it could be the only genocide that might plausibly be halted on the spot\u2014not by the genocider, but by the group claiming victimhood. Specifically, were Hamas to release the hostages and lay down its arms, Israel\u2019s military campaign\u2014having achieved its core objectives\u2014would likely cease.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet doing so would mean relinquishing a central propaganda asset: the ability to frame Israel\u2019s actions as a genocidal assault on a defenseless population, a framing that is in turn made possible only by concept creep. Hamas\u2019 casualty figures suggest that far more than half of the dead in Gaza are either Hamas fighters or young men of military age. A ratio of combatants to civilians anywhere close to 1:1 is unrivaled in the history of urban warfare. Does this mean that all past instances of urban warfare\u2014such as U.S. operations in Iraq\u2019s Mosul and Fallujah, let alone Allied bombing attacks on German cities or the Battle of Manila against the Japanese\u2014must retroactively be treated as genocides? Surely, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be considered a genocide, even though historians commonly estimate that the subsequent Imperial Japanese Armed Forces surrender saved at least 2 million lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The answers are highly troubling either way. If the new math of genocide is correct, then we have a press teaching a large public that warfare of any kind is always a hideous crime, even when waged in response to murderous attacks by genocidal maniacs and Nazis on defenseless civilians.\u00a0No<\/em>\u00a0means there is to be one rule for Jews and a different rule for everyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why has the\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0framing of the Gaza conflict dominated media coverage to a far greater extent than conflicts with far clearer claims to that label?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Traditional factors such as access or transparency do not offer satisfactory explanations for the sudden expansion of the term\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0or for the escalation in its use by mainstream outlets. Israel\u2019s open media environment, combined with its geographic proximity to Gaza and the steady stream of imagery and testimony emerging from the territory\u2014often via NGOs and local sources, some affiliated with Hamas\u2014enables consistent and detailed, if often false or misleading, reporting. Far from inoculating Israel against baseless charges, this openness perversely amplifies them, making the country a uniquely visible and morally charged target.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While anti-Israel prejudice in the mainstream media is long-standing and certainly plays a role, framing the problem as one of bias fundamentally misunderstands its nature. The rapid escalation in the use of the term\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0is not the product of ignorance; rather, it is entirely purposeful, with mainstream reporters and essayists engaging in frequent linguistic and legalistic contortions to justify their usage of an inflammatory term in order to delegitimize the actions of one side in a conflict and legitimize the actions of the terrorist organization that started the Gaza war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In \u2018The New York Times,\u2019 articles pairing Israel and genocide reached levels more than nine times higher than the peak for Rwanda and nearly six times greater than for Darfur.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Reporters are willingly serving as the delivery mechanism for targeted information operations\u2014a formerly novel role that U.S. media has adopted on ideological grounds in conflicts at home and abroad over the past decade.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The digitalization of news media is undoubtedly a contributing factor to this new ideologically driven role. As became clear during the rise of Black Lives Matter and the broader Great Awokening, emotionally charged and often graphic content now spreads rapidly across social media\u2014frequently stripped of context or lacking verification\u2014amplifying visceral reactions and shaping siloed public sentiment in real time. In these moments, the role of news media is understood by practitioners not as fact-checking or sense-making, but as amplifying and validating slogans and propaganda lines presented by the virtuous parties. The job of the media is not to separate fact from fiction: Rather, it is to draw halos on the virtuous parties and then mobilize the public on their behalf and against their oppressors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This dynamic stands in sharp contrast to earlier cases of genocide like Darfur or Rwanda, which unfolded largely in the pre-smartphone, pre-social media era, when the speed, reach, and emotional immediacy of conflict-related imagery were far more limited. In contrast, today\u2019s digital ecosystem, in which traditional media operates symbiotically with social media, places mounting pressure on mainstream outlets to engage and respond, often reinforcing moralized framings that resonate with viral narratives more than with legal precision or empirical balance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Digital engagement powerfully influences which frame dominates the global discourse, with consequences far beyond rhetoric: shaping historical memory and, most immediately, weaponizing the framing to enact policy targeting Israel, looking to destabilize its government and pressure it to concede to Hamas.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Domestically, the\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0framing solidifies political organization, primarily on the Democratic side, but increasingly in a faction of the right looking to shape Donald Trump\u2019s policy in the Middle East. Consistent with this top-down mobilization, a March 2025 Pew\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0found that unfavorable views of Israel among Americans rose sharply over just three years\u2014from 42 percent in 2022 to 53 percent in 2025. The increase was especially pronounced among Democrats, with unfavorable views jumping from 53 to 69 percent, compared to a more modest rise from 27 to 37 percent among Republicans. Gallup\u00a0data<\/a>\u00a0echo this trend: The share of Americans whose sympathies lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians fell from 54 percent in 2023 to a record low of 46 percent in 2025. Among Democrats, the drop was steep\u2014from 38 percent siding with Israelis in 2023 to 21 percent in 2025, while support for Palestinians rose to a record 59 percent. Republican attitudes shifted less dramatically, with pro-Israel sympathies dipping slightly from 78 to 75 percent and support for Palestinians hovering around 10 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In short, media coverage does not dictate public opinion, but it helps set the tone and frame the moral stakes. Moreover, similar to the BLM riots, the mainstreaming of the\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0frame provides political top cover for an activist vanguard, such as the pro-Palestinian movement, which began on college campuses and has grown increasingly violent. A similar tactic has emerged among so-called influencers on the right, which similarly has attached itself to the frames of\u00a0genocide<\/em>,\u00a0starvation<\/em>, and\u00a0killing Christians<\/em>, to promote an anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish line. The unprecedented volume of atrocity rhetoric attached to Israel in mainstream outlets is not merely a mirror of preexisting outrage; it is a megaphone, broadcasting the idea that Jews are collectively and unambiguously guilty of the darkest of crimes. It is unsurprising that assertions of collective guilt on the part of \u201cIsraelis\u201d and \u201cZionists\u201d bleed into even broader attitudes toward Jews, resulting most recently in two back-to-back deadly attacks, which took the lives of a young couple and torched an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We need our moral language to retain its clarity and gravity, not to mention its anchoring in legal and historical reality. Once terms like\u00a0genocide<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0ethnic cleansing<\/em>\u00a0become routine descriptors for controversial wars or asymmetric conflicts, they lose their power to name the world\u2019s most unspeakable crimes. That erosion weakens our ability to recognize and respond to real genocides when they occur\u2014and distorts our understanding of those that already have, while diminishing the agency and true horror of genocidal actions.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Zach Goldberg<\/strong> is a Research Faculty member at Florida State University\u2019s Institute for Governance and Civics (IGC). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Georgia State University. Before joining IGC, he was a policy analyst and research fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X\u00a0@ZachG932<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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How the Media Manufactured a \u2018Genocide\u2019 Zach Goldberg A data-driven investigation into the way coverage of Israel\u2019s war in Gaza surpasses actual genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and beyond A young woman holds a sign that reads: “Stop the genocide” during a gathering of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on October 18, 2023 in Berlin, Germany, days before Israel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121741"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121758,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121741\/revisions\/121758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}