Book Documents How US Networks Equated Hamas With ISIS Hundreds of Times in Gaza War's First Month

A claim that Hamas beheaded 40 babies on 7 October 2023 reached President Joe Biden within a day of originating with Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, an organisation author Adam H. Johnson describes as far-right. The claim was later walked back. By then, according to Johnson's new book, it had already done its work.

How to Sell a Genocide, published by Pluto Press with a foreword by human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, examines how nine major US outlets covered Israel's assault on Gaza between October 2023 and October 2024. Johnson, who reviewed more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 television clips alongside testimony from journalists inside the newsrooms in question, says the project set out to show what he calls deliberate editorial choices.

The genocide in Gaza was "enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence."

The book's quantitative findings are its strongest evidence. Johnson's team found that in the first month of the war, seven major print and online outlets equated Hamas with ISIS 149 times. On air, the count was higher: CNN did so 350 times, MSNBC 369 times. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly called the 7 October attack "worse than ISIS," a line that echoed an Israeli government hashtag campaign promoting the same comparison. These figures and the official statement are independently verifiable public record.

Other claims in the book rest on anonymous sourcing and are reported here as allegations, not established fact. Johnson writes that CNN required all Israel-Palestine reporting to be cleared in advance by its Jerusalem bureau, which operates under Israel's military censorship regime, a claim he attributes to a source who spoke to The Intercept. He also reports that when MSNBC anchors Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin offered historical context for the 7 October attack on the day it happened, network owner Comcast intervened, with one unnamed source summarizing the directive as wanting no context given. Occupation Watch has not independently verified either claim.

Johnson deliberately excludes Fox News and other right-wing outlets from his analysis, arguing their hostility toward Palestinians is open and would draw no denial from their own staff. Instead the book targets the outlets Democratic audiences and officials rely on, on the premise that a Democratic administration and Democratic-led institutions were decisive in sustaining the war through its first year.

The book's starting premise, that Israel's campaign in Gaza meets the legal threshold for genocide, is not Johnson's own finding. It rests on conclusions already reached by Amnesty International, a United Nations commission of inquiry, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, bodies whose assessments remain disputed by the Israeli government and some Western officials but are treated in the book as settled among the relevant professional and legal community. Johnson's project begins where those findings leave off: tracing, outlet by outlet, how a Western public was prepared to accept the result.