The mainstream media has failed us after 7 October | Peter Beinart

In an alternate universe, the American media would have answered 7 October by putting Jehad Abusalim on speed dial. Abusalim, who runs the Washington DC office of the Institute for Palestine Studies, is not only from Gaza, but also a Hebrew speaker who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies. Several months before the attack, he had published an essay arguing that Hamas “appears to be strategically conserving its resources for a potentially larger confrontation with Israel”. It’s hard to think of anyone within taxi distance of America’s television studios who was better equipped to help Americans understand Hamas’s massacre and Israel’s brutal military response.

In the days and weeks after 7 October , Abusalim used whatever platform he had to warn that Israel’s response would bring destruction, not safety. Again and again, he predicted that Israel would obliterate Gaza without defeating Hamas. “There is no military solution to this crisis,” he declared on X (formerly Twitter) on 11 October. “A ground invasion is unlikely to succeed,” he added on 15 October. “Israel is likely to kill ten times the number of Palestinians it has killed so far,” he predicted on 6 November. But “Israel will not achieve a military victory in Gaza.” He also warned of a wider war. “Many are assuming there won’t be a regional escalation,” he added, “but they are wrong.”

A year later, Abusalim’s words look prophetic. In July, researchers at Birzeit University, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and McMaster University estimated that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 – more than 18 times the figure reported by Gaza’s health ministry last November. Yet, Israel remains far from fulfilling Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to “eliminate” Hamas. According to an analysis in August by CNN, the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War, Israel has rendered only three of Hamas’s 24 battalions “combat ineffective”. In June, Israel’s own top military spokesman, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, declared, “Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Unfortunately, the American media never gave Abusalim a megaphone. He appeared on network and cable television only once in the six months following 7 October, and even then, it was only to detail his family’s suffering, not to analyze the war. That was typical. According to a study by George Washington University’s William Youmans, America’s four flagship Sunday talkshows – Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week and Fox News Sunday – collectively interviewed 140 outside guests on camera between 8 October 2023 and 14 January 2024. Only one was Palestinian.

Who did the Sunday shows interview instead? For the most part, Washington insiders. In those early months of the war, more than 80% of the Sunday show guests were current and former US government officials. Few knew much about Gaza, and few questioned Israel’s actions. On 5 November, for instance, Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told Fox News Sunday that the US would help Israel “defeat Hamas”. The network then turned to Jack Reed, a Democratic senator, who vowed to help Israel “destroy” Hamas.

People protest outside CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta on 14 October 2023. Photograph: John Arthur Brown/Zuma Press via Alamy

It might seem natural that the networks responded to 7 October by platforming people who knew Washington, rather than people who knew Gaza. But by doing so, they replicated the media’s failure after 9/11. In 2007, three academics set out to understand why, in the run-up to the Iraq war, the US media largely failed to surface the critiques being made by academic experts and observers abroad. Their answer: the US media takes its cues from America’s two political parties. In their book, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, W Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence and Steven Livingston concluded that when the US “government is already weighing competing initiatives”, the media invites perspectives from both sides. But when official Washington decides that there is only one side – when “policy decisions of dubious wisdom go unchallenged within government arenas” – the mainstream media doesn’t challenge them either. If Johnson and Reed agree that the US must help Israel destroy Hamas, then Fox News Sunday concludes that those are the terms of legitimate debate.

The problem with this dynamic is that ruinous foreign policy decisions often enjoy bipartisan support, at least initially. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Lyndon Johnson the authority to escalate America’s intervention in Vietnam, passed the Senate 88-2 and the House 416-0. In 2002, many prominent congressional Democrats – including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, then Senate majority leader, and Richard Gephardt, then House minority leader – voted to authorize George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. And after 7 October, Biden and his Republican opponents vied to show who supported Israel’s war more emphatically.

Not only did leaders of both parties support the war. They both largely ignored the conditions under which Palestinians live. In his speech from the Oval Office on 20 October, the president used the word “occupied” to describe Russia’s control over parts of Ukraine but not Israel’s control over the West Bank. In neither that speech nor the one he delivered two days earlier in Tel Aviv, did Biden acknowledge that Palestinians in Gaza have lived for decades under blockade.

As a result, the mainstream media largely ignored these realities too – even though Palestinian scholars repeatedly cited Palestinians’ lack of freedom as crucial to understanding Hamas’s attack. In the 51 Sunday television segments that Youmans analyzed, the word “occupation” was mentioned only 15 times. The word “blockade” was mentioned four times. By contrast, Iran was cited 356 times, even though both US and Israeli intelligence concluded that Tehran played no direct role in 7 October. Why the discrepancy? Because Republicans used Hamas’s onslaught to demand a tougher policy on Tehran. In Washington after 7 October, Iran was a subject of fierce partisan debate. The occupation was not.

Not only did the mainstream media mostly ignore Israel’s denial of Palestinian freedom, it also mostly ignored the contradictions in Israel’s military strategy. From the beginning of the war, Israeli officials insisted that only military pressure would convince Hamas to return the hostages it had abducted. And, from the beginning, many Palestinian commentators disagreed. In October, the Palestinian author Iyad el-Baghdadi warned that Israel’s invasion of Gaza would “sacrifice the hostages”. In January, the Gaza-born writer Muhammad Shehada argued that “a permanent ceasefire” was “the only way to free the hostages alive”. Many hostage families agreed. In late October, the Times of Israel reported that representatives of the hostages had urged Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to return all the captives in exchange for all the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

It’s now clear that Baghdadi, Shehada and the hostage families were right. Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza since 7 October than the Allies dropped on Germany in the second world war. Yet, it has not forced Hamas to relinquish the remaining hostages. In August, Amos Harel, the longtime defense analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, declared, The Claim That Only Israeli Military Pressure Can Free Hostages Was Always Wrong. Many Palestinians and Israelis knew that all along. But they had little influence in official Washington. Which meant they had little voice in the American public debate.

Some may argue that the mainstream media didn’t platform anti-war voices after 7 October because the anti-war movement marginalized itself. In some cases, that may be true. Networks had every right to avoid commentators who justified the 7 October massacre. And they understandably wanted guests who could not only criticize the war, but provide an alternative course of action, something some leftists failed to do. Still, it was not hard to find observers who knew Gaza intimately, opposed Hamas’s taking of civilian life, and advocated a political, rather than military, response to 7 October. On 1 November, Shehada outlined a nine-part thread on X that explicitly answered the question, “What would you do if you were in Israel’s shoes & your people were attacked?” Except for Democracy Now, no American television program has interviewed him since 7 October. Baghdadi told me that “Despite my posts garnering millions of views – and the fact that I’m followed by numerous US journalists, analysts, and policymakers – I received no invitations to appear on US cable or network news” after the attack.

Journalists aren’t wrong to interview people in power. But when that’s all they do, they let power – rather than expertise – define the boundaries of legitimate public debate. Again and again in American history, those terms have proved disastrously narrow. Still, not only do powerful officials continue to dominate the airwaves, they are rarely asked to account for their past errors. In the months after 7 October, the most common guest on the Sunday shows was the secretary of state, Antony Blinken. No senator appeared more frequently than South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. On 22 October, Blinken said the Biden administration was “not in the business of second guessing” Israel’s war. On 15 October , Graham declared nine separate times that Israel must “destroy” Hamas. Neither man’s statements have aged well.

Although no interviewer raised the subject, Blinken and Graham have something in common, which viewers analyzing their statements about Gaza might have found useful to know. They were both prominent supporters of America’s invasion of Iraq.

• Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, will be published in January.

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