Janine Jackson interviewed Citations Needed*‘s Adam Johnson about his book* How to Sell a Genocide for the October 23, 2026, episode of CounterSpin*. This is a lightly edited transcript.*

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261023Johnson.mp3

Pluto Press (2026)

Janine Jackson: Winston Churchill did not, evidently, say “history is written by the victors,” but we’re given to understand that Hermann Goring did say, “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.” I went looking for a concept to anchor our understanding of the existential importance of how things are reported and recorded and described, with particular reference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, acknowledged as genocide—the intentional, systematic destruction of a people—by numerous international institutions whose job it is to study and define such things.

I went looking for it because, if there’s anything core to the work of media critics, it’s to counteract the idea that might makes right when it comes to knowledge, that our understanding of the world, and other people and political possibilities, should be utterly shaped by the people with the megaphone, just because they have the megaphone. That’s what we wake up every day and contest.

The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. The author is Adam Johnson, a media analyst and co-host with Nima Shirazi of the podcast Citations Needed. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.

Adam Johnson: Thank you.

JJ: You can stick a pin in this book and spiral out and find the same coherent message, but it begins and ends, I think, with who we are told to see as human.

We’re influenced by news media. We can’t all have firsthand knowledge of everything. And as much as we may gird ourselves, and feel like we’re informing ourselves independently, you see a story in the paper, and you give it some meaning, you know?

But you literally can’t make sense of corporate news media’s conversation on Palestine and Israel unless you accept, at point of entry, that some lives just matter more than other lives. And that shows up in language, it shows up in what’s offered as acceptable ideas about what’s happened, and what can happen now. But that seems core, that notion of humanity, yeah?

AJ: Yeah. In theory, you would have these universalist liberal principles, and stick to them consistently. And what my book shows, I think with pretty definitive quantitative data—and indeed, the book’s critics haven’t been able to dispute the data itself, and they’ve tried—is that there is simply a tier of humanity, and that tier is evident, and most importantly necessary to the geopolitical interest of the US ruling class and Zionism. And without that tiered moral standing, the whole system falls apart.

And this has been a feature of liberal imperialism since liberal imperialism was invented, mostly by the British in the 18th century. You have to have these high-minded, supposedly universalist humanist ideals that exist in the same system as oppression, violence, dispossession and, in this case, obviously, mass killing.

So how do you do that? Well, that’s where the media comes in. That’s where liberal media in particular, with the lowercase L, comes in, and that’s why that’s the focus of the book.

FAIR.org (10/20/23)

JJ: Yeah. It’s so important to say that we’re not talking about Fox News, necessarily. We’re not talking about Donald Trump, necessarily. We’re talking about folks who feel like they’re trying to do the right thing, trying to understand what’s happening in the world, and how those people can be massaged into an acceptance of genocide.

So in the book, there are a lot of examples, but listeners will understand that October 7, 2023, and the beheaded babies, this is what we’re given to understand was the start of the conflict. This is what changed everything. This is what changed us from saying, this is some kind of liberal project—no, no, no; now it’s a fight about “civilization.” October 7 and those beheaded babies seem to be in the back of every kind of news report that we’re reading now in 2026.

AJ: Yeah, that was one of the first big lies. I mean, unlike the Iraq War, which obviously was foundational to me, being a Millennial, there wasn’t one big WMD lie. There were dozens of what I call mini-WMDs, kind of mini lies. By the time you debunked them, we had just moved on to another mini-WMD. And indeed, in some days you would get several at once.

And one of the early ones was this idea that there were 40 beheaded babies, this kind of biblical round number, that anyone who knew anything about Hamas knew would make no sense. It had no precedent. But the goal, of course, was to ISIS-ify Hamas, so it could be put into this “war on terror” turnkey framework to justify a campaign of mass vengeance and revenge.

And I think to some extent, the Israelis who promoted it, and their confederates here in the United States knew it was not true, very much knew it was not true. They’re not stupid. They know Hamas’s MO, but they needed to promote atrocity propaganda to justify what was inevitably going to be a mass slaughter event of Palestinians.

New Republic (10/9/23)

To the extent that that mass slaughter, I think, was still up in the air, certainly that was the emergent consensus within hours of the attack. If one recalls, Tony Blinken called for a ceasefire on October 8 because that was pro forma, and then immediately deleted the tweet. So clearly there was some decision made that this was not going to be the normal kind of “mowing the lawns,” which is what Israel calls the bombing of Gaza, the killing of Gaza, to discipline the civilian population, as they had in 2018, 2021, 2014, 2012, 2009. This was going to be something much more horrific, expansive and deadly, which of course it was. And then on October 13, Tony Blinken issues a memo banning the word “ceasefire” from the Biden White House and the State Department.

So to maintain that level of raw carnage—which, again, if people recall, was 300, 400 people a day were being killed. Indeed, some days had 600 or 700, and one day in late October had 1,000 killed. And that level of just raw brutality and violence and mass killing needed to have a correspondingly horrific atrocity propaganda to justify.

And obviously you had 250 or so captives that were taken by Hamas, most of whom were released in the first few weeks when they had the initial exchanges, but that kind of ran out of gas, or was going to run out of gas, in terms of its moral justification. So you needed these stories about beheaded babies. And then by the time it’s debunked, three or four days later, and Biden falsely says he had seen pictures of it, and so reporters, somewhat politely, were like, “Well, OK, well where are the pictures?” Well, there are none, but it had already served its purpose.

Newsweek (10/25/23)

And of course, you get atrocity propaganda with respect to these claims about Hamas having a policy of mass rape, to peel off female critics of Israel’s so-called military response. And the New York Times lowers its editorial standards to publish that story in December of 2023, which really does provide the real propellant, the real accelerant of genocide, regardless of whether or not one believes it, if that’s its manifest effect, or believes the most maximum claims, because the claims somewhat vary.

And that kind of ISIS-ification was necessary to justify 20,000 children who were killed, because that’s what happened. I mean, 20,000 worlds, 20,000 universes, again, 500 times more than were killed on October 7. And that level of brutality in murder needs to, like any good screenplay, it has to raise the stakes. And to the extent to which journalists pushed back on it, or tried to complicate it and provide context, they were swiftly and severely disciplined, and accused of Hamas apologia or downplaying atrocities, or some other such manipulative extortion that’s leveled against people for doing the basic job of reporting.

You’re not allowed to provide context, you’re not allowed to humanize, you’re not allowed to provide any kind of secular political reasons why any of this would happen. It just has to be mindless jihadist barbarism and one-note and antisemitism.

Adam Johnson: “The New York Times used ‘massacre’ 124 times. They used ‘slaughter’ 53 times. They used neither words to describe the killing of Palestinians.”

And so these kinds of pathologizing, Islamo-pathologizing, is pretty much what you’ve got. You got a lot of “they hate us for our freedoms” claptrap, a lot of orientalist claptrap about civilized worlds. My book mentions 150-plus mentions of the word “civilized” or “civilization”; and “barbarity” and “savage” are used too, which are clearly meant to appeal to a certain orientalist worldview.

The emotive words I document, for example: On CNN and MSNBC, CNN used the word “savage” 13 times, “barbaric” 56 times. MSNBC used the word “savage” 23 times and “barbaric” 46 times. These words were never once used for Israel. The words “slaughter” and “massacre” were reserved exclusively for Palestinians killing Israelis.

The New York Times used “massacre” 124 times. They used “slaughter” 53 times. They used neither words to describe the killing of Palestinians. How the New York Times can assess that Israel managed to kill 21,000-plus children and somehow never once committed a “massacre” or “slaughter,” I submit it to the listener that it’s not mathematically possible, how you can commit such widescale death and carnage and killing, and not once commit a massacre or slaughter, or behave barbarically or savagely.

These are obviously loaded terms meant to, by implication, humanize the victims of Palestinian violence while dehumanizing victims of Israeli violence, the description of which is always kind of anhedonic and medical and detached.

JJ: We see them trying to find a comfortable liberal stance for people who want to be on the right side of things, and news media kind of helped them do that by saying, “Yeah, things are horrible, but….” And that’s part of the media critique, is not just the one-sidedness—and I would encourage folks to understand how data-driven this book is—but it’s also this conversation where, yeah, you feel bad about it, but you don’t need to feel that bad about it.

AJ: Yeah. So this was done through what I call in the book “modes of rationalization.” Very early on, in the first weeks especially, lowercase L liberals, institutions, media, of course the White House, President Biden, didn’t really even defend the carnage on first principles. What you usually saw was an excuse-making, a deflection regime.

So what they would do is they would acknowledge, yes, it’s bad. Yes, Israel is overdoing it, right? They love this line, “Too many Palestinians have died,” which would logically follow up with, how many Palestinians do you think should die?

Washington Post (11/14/23)

And that’s where you get all these elaborate interventions by liberal media. The first, and I think probably most impactful one, is this idea of human shields. So this is the Jake Tapper, New York Times, Washington Post editorial board line that, yes, the carnage is bad. Yes, you can see it on TikTok and YouTube and Twitter, because obviously you can’t deny the carnage. There’s videos going viral every day of the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen in your life. So you do the next best thing, you can’t deny that there’s a murder, so you do what any good defense lawyer does. You try to plea down to manslaughter, or some other minor infraction, which in this case is, yes, Israel’s perhaps being overzealous in their “military campaign,” but: Hamas uses human shields.

Now, what’s important to understand is that absolutely no human rights group on Earth—even human rights groups that have been very critical of Hamas, like Human Rights Watch—have ever endorsed this definition of human shielding. That is not what the word “human shield” means. It doesn’t mean a military actor in proximity to civilians. And international humanitarian law, there’s a very specific definition with respect to, on pain of violence, either by gunpoint or strapping a bomb to someone, you make them defend you from enemy fire in active combat, or go disarm booby traps from a room or something. And we know Israel actually does use human shields, by the way. This was reported on in the Washington Post briefly.

So this definition is a purely media concoction. It’s an ad hoc media invention. It is by Zionist propaganda groups like Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which are of course the front groups of AIPAC. They just invented this kind of pseudoacademic, pseudo–human rights framework of human shielding. And it became conventional wisdom, despite the fact that, again, it’s not endorsed by any objective, neutral third party at all. Certainly no international legal organization and no human rights group has ever endorsed this definition.

Citations Needed (2/7/24)

And it’s a definition that has its antecedents in other US imperial conquests. It was very popular, of course, during Vietnam. Whenever a village would be bombed, US officials would repeatedly say, “Well, the Vietnamese Communists are using human shields.”

The first time it was used in earnest was during the US occupation in the Philippines in 1898 and ’99 and 1900. They would repeatedly accuse the insurgents of using human shields.

Because what else are you going to say when you decide to indiscriminately bomb civilians? You’re not going to say, “We are attempting to extract concessions from a military actor by disciplining the civilian population,” which of course is what they’re doing, and in British imperialism was called the moral effect. It’s the same principle. Because that sounds bad. So you say, “Oh, well, they’re keeping human shields.”

So it becomes this kind of what I call liberal SSRI. It sedates you into kind of going, “OK, well, I guess they have no choice, human shields.” And then you flip channels to watch The Masked Singer or whatever. It’s a way to sort of avoid the issue.

JJ: And it feeds into the idea that they are so craven that they are…. It takes me back to Golda Meir saying, “We wish they would love their children enough to stop”—the idea that these people are so craven that they’re offering up their children to be murdered because they hate us so much.

AJ: Yeah, inexplicably. And of course you can’t maintain—Hamas maintains roughly 40, 50% support in Gaza. It varies depending on how the poll asks the question, but that’s roughly their support. They have a base of support, obviously. You can’t maintain that level of popular support when you use a hospital over a command and control center. It’s obviously absurd. But it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense, because it’s premised on a bunch of glib racist assumptions about them having a kind of Arab brain disease where they just love to die.

Jewish Chronicle (11/13/24)

And then you have, of course, the second mode I detail, which is this idea that Biden was helpless. Or, correspondingly, that he was working hard on getting a ceasefire. And this goes in conjunction with the fake ceasefire talks, which begin in March of 2024, which were always a complete fiction. And they’re completely belied by the fact that the Israel ambassador to the US at the time, Michael Herzog, later told Israeli media in April of 2025 that Biden “never asked for a ceasefire, not once.” And they were largely there to get pressure off the White House.

And we know that, because the most powerful country in the world can unilaterally tell Israel to stop whenever it wishes, more or less. They could probably function for a few more weeks, but not really. And this was confirmed by the Israeli ambassador later, but anyone with two brain cells could see that Biden was not sincere about ending the bombing, because he repeatedly said he would not use the one tool in his arsenal that would’ve actually ended it, which was a genuine arms embargo, or the credible threat thereof.

And so the media completely, hook, line and sinker went along, and I mean the media in the most general sense; there’s not really any exceptions at all on mainstream media here. It goes along with this fiction that there are ceasefire talks, despite the fact that they’re premised on a completely nonsensical contradiction.

And indeed, they redefine the word ceasefire; in 5,000 years of human warfare, it means both sides cease firing, but then roughly on March 2 of 2024, it’s redefined to mean, actually, Hamas surrenders.

So you would get these Orwellian statements where Biden and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Kamala Harris would say these Orwellian phrasings like, “Well, we need a ceasefire in Gaza to rebuild it without Hamas in power.”

Well, wait a second, you just skipped a step. What, is Hamas going to magically surrender? What does that even mean? Clearly any post-war Gaza would have to involve Hamas and the other militant groups, whether it be PIJ or PFLP or others, because that’s how ceasefires work. You don’t just say, “I’m going to cease firing when the other side completely capitulates and surrenders.”

Al Jazeera (7/23/25)

JJ: It’s interesting that media actually scurry to try to make an argument, because at the same time, we’re seeing a total shutdown on criticism of the genocide. It’s crazy, it’s wild, the way that people are being told, “No, no, no, no. Don’t even say. The. Word. You will be kicked off campus if you say genocide. You will lose your job if you say genocide.”

We’re pretending we’re having a conversation about it. We’re pretending that politicians are fighting something, or trying to have a conversation about something. And at the same time, people are being literally silenced from expressing one point of what we could consider to be an argument about this.

AJ: Well, yeah, because liberal imperialism is too big to fail. Obviously, there’s efforts to accountability. I’m hoping to work on one called “Drop the Genocide 20,” which you can check out.

But fundamentally, I think the extent to which people think there was some accountability for Iraq has been way over-indexed. That is not actually what happened. Of course, it’s primary promoters of conspiracy theories like Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, who of course, was one of the main promoters of the Gaza genocide. He promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and now he has probably the single most important job in liberal media.

So I think everyone who promoted genocidal propaganda is going to be promoted. They already are promoted. They’re going to move up the ranks. Because of course, as you know, you’re not promoted and moved up the ranks in media by being truthful or accurate or adversarial to power; you’re there to sell whatever power decides to skeptical liberals. That high-leverage intervention is really where you make your bones, make your money.

And that’s what we’re seeing now, is that there’s no accountability, because this was bipartisan, this was supported by liberal institutions. And the extent to which they’re going to try to wriggle off the hook is going to be A) to blame Netanyahu, make Netanyahu the kind of omnipotent force that compelled every liberal to get behind this, with this manipulated Biden narrative. I mean, he’s not a scapegoat in the classic sense that he is, of course, very much responsible for the genocide. He’s chiefly responsible, but he’s not the only person involved.

And, of course, Biden wasn’t forced to do anything. He wasn’t manipulated. He knew what he was doing, and he never called for a ceasefire. So they’re hoping [Netanyahu] can lose the election so they can pin it on him and put it in a neat little box with a bow on it, and we can all move on and act like it was some fundamentally justified, but ultimately excessive overcorrection or overreaction, I think is the go-to narrative now, because the people who supported it are too big to fail.

JJ: Where do we go?

Drop the Genocide 20

AJ: There’s obviously much one can do. I think you get involved in your local BDS organizing and other such interventions, but I personally am working on this Drop the Genocide 20 campaign that’s been organized by DSA and Track AIPAC and Just Foreign Policy, and supported by others. It’s been signed on by Rashida Tlaib and Chris Rabb. And that is basically a pledge to drop the Genocide 20, the 20 most influential people, most responsible people, in the Biden White House.

Obviously, the list is much longer, but it’s a place to start, and making a bare minimum pledge to not work with them, promote them or otherwise boost them. But it’s been pulling teeth getting so-called progressives like Ro Khanna and AOC to agree with it.

So I think what we’re doing is we’re trying to heighten those contradictions by beginning a campaign to lobby Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Chris van Hollen, these people who I think are running for president in 2028, and who are very much going to run on Gaza, as it were, and saying, “Will you commit to, at the very least, not hire the administration officials who had a hand in the role to lie, propagandize and otherwise cover up internal State Department reports showing genocide?”

That’s a good place to start, because a lot of people are going to want to be “good on Gaza” without really committing to anything. And one of the ideological leaps that actually, if you pay attention to what a lot of these progressives have said on this issue, whether it be Ro Khanna or AOC or Van Hollen or others, is that, unlike Rashida Tlaib, they have actually not made the ideological leap from genocide to blaming Biden for genocide. They have said it’s a genocide, but if you actually read carefully what they say, they’ve never actually formally blamed the Biden White House or any Democrats for their support for it.

And I think that’s actually a really important distinction, because blaming Israel for genocide is obviously going to give you a lot of flack, but it’s fundamentally easy to do, right? It doesn’t actually create any contradictions or cognitive dissidence or tensions within one’s own party, especially because they all told people to vote for Biden, right?

So I think that we need to get people who are supposedly good on this issue to be firm and clear about what the implications of the word “genocide” mean. Because, again, they’ve all used the word. (Chris Van Hollen uses “ethnic cleansing,” but even still.) The word “genocide” has implications and obligations. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s not just meant to convey maximum outrage. It actually compels the speaker to do something about it. And thus far, many of the people who have used that word, and I think are kind of trafficking in the goodwill and the political capital of that word, have not actually followed through on what it means.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Adam Johnson. The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. It’s out now from Pluto Press.

Adam Johnson has written for a number of respectable places, and also at FAIR.org. Thank you, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AJ: Thank you so much.

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