WHY DON’T AMERICANS KNOW?

In February of 2024, about 5 months into the Gaza genocide, CNN reported that 30,000 Palestinians had been killed, while the death toll in Israel was about 1200. In other words, 25 times more Palestinians had been killed than Israelis.

What’s even more horrifying is the stunning numbers of Palestinian children killed. As of March 2024, 12,300 Gazan children had been killed, a number that represented more deaths than all the children killed in all wars worldwide for the prior four years.

In spite of this grossly disproportionate carnage, which has only continued to grow, the Pew Research Center reported around this time that half of Americans didn’t know whether Palestinians or Israelis had suffered a higher death toll.

In this section we try to explain how Americans can be so oblivious to the massive asymmetry in the death toll between Palestinians and Israelis, a war funded in large part by the US government.

Limiting Journalistic Access

“Now I understand why Israel is denying journalists access to the appalling scene in Gaza“

July 5, 2025

Even though I have been to a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq and Somalia, I have never, but never experienced anything like this… Now I understand why Israel is denying journalists access to the appalling scene in Gaza

Jean-Pierre Filiu, French Historian

Quoted in Ha’aretz by Netta Ahituv, July 5, 2025,

Suppressing Reporters and Reporting

“Israel has been able to get away with genocide in Gaza precisely because, for the preceding decades, the western media refused to report on – or hold Israel accountable for – its well-documented ethnic cleansing operations against Palestinians, and its brutal apartheid rule over them.

A few of our most principled journalists tried to report these things in real time. But they publicly paid a high price for doing so.”

Jonathan Cook, November 16, 2025

Jonathon Cook, a former reporter for The Guardian newspaper, describes in detail the history and mechanics of how reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets slanted in favor of Israel. Read the full article here.

Taking Managerial Control of Media Companies

In 2025, several large corporate transactions were initiated that will have the effect of concentrating control in the hands of pro-Israel owners. The media companies impacted include Paramount and CBS, as well as the Social Media platform TikTok.

Faced with the evidence of genocide, Zionist apologists ‘can’t explain that away,’ [Lara] Friedman [of the Foundation for Middle East Peace] told +972. ‘So what they’re going to do now is get hold of the means by which that information is spread.’ Meeting with social media influencers in New York in September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s ‘most important’ ‘weapons’ were ‘on social media,’ and he described the deal for TikTok, with its 170 million American users, as ‘the most important purchase that is going on right now.’

Quoted in Israel’s +972 Magazine,

Bias through language choice

..headlines have always run the killing of Palestinians in the passive voice as if it were a natural disaster and not Israeli air strikes and not targeting of Palestinians. Amnesty International showed in 2014 that Israelis struck inhabited Palestinian homes. They were not collateral damage. They were targeted. No one was held to account.

– Noura Erakat, Palestinian lawyer & scholar

May 18, 2021 – CBS News interview with Noura Erakat, “How the media impacts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

The impact of media bias

“Bias hiding in plain sight: Decades of analyses suggest US media skews anti-Palestinian” 

Published: February 29, 2024

How the media reports on events can greatly influence public perceptions of what is really going on.

Natalie Khazaal, Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology describes decades of anti-Palestinian bias in the US Media, noting several types of bias including

1. Selective coverage

2. The down-playing of Palestinian suffering through reduced frequency and language used

3. The rationalizing of Israeli violence, while depicting Palestinian violence as barbaric and senseless,

4.  The obfuscation of historical context

5.  The favoring of Israeli sources over Palestinian sources

Media staffers allege systematic bias

editorial policies… have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.

Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,’ said one staffer.

In February 2024, The Guardian also reported that CNN was facing backlash from its own staff decrying management edicts that led to systematic and institutional bias.

CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’

Published: February 4, 2024

Quantitative analysis shows media bias

Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.

Finding from The Intercept’s quantitative analysis of reporting from the six weeks following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks

In January 2024, The Intercept published its analysis of reporting in major US newspaper in the weeks following October 7, 2023.

Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows

Published: January 9, 2024

NY Times leak alleges bias

The newspaper has instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to avoid the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land… they have told journalists not to use the term ‘Palestine’ except in very rare cases… reporters should not use the term ‘refugee camps’ …

April 17, 2024 – Novara Media reporting on a story from the Intercept about a leaked NY Times memo

British-Israeli Journalist Comments on Anti-Palestinian Bias

Palestinians time and again are relentlessly put on trial.. Palestinians who come from Gaza who have potentially lost lives, have families and have lost lives in Gaza, they are interviewed and put on trial. they are treated as spokespeople for Hamas unless they vociferously, you know, give enough evidence to show that they’re not.

June 30, 2025 – Speaking at the “Genocide in Gaza” conference, British-Israeli journalist Rachel Shabi argued that mainstream outlets have not only failed to report the ongoing atrocities with accuracy and integrity, but have actively enabled the war through omission, distortion, and dehumanization.