The Intercept claims U.S. media favors Israel. But its “study” relies on double standards, missing context, and anti-Israel bias.
by David Lange
Key Takeaways:
The Intercept’s claim that American media is biased against Palestinians collapses under scrutiny, relying on opaque methodology, selective framing, and glaring double standards.
The article argues that many of its examples merely reflect basic journalistic realities: Israel is a sovereign state responding to a terrorist attack, while Hamas is a genocidal terror organization that systematically embeds itself among civilians.
By stripping away legal, moral, and factual context — while promoting grotesque anti-Israel smears — The Intercept turns ideological activism into pseudo-scientific “media analysis.”
The Intercept has published a piece by Adam Johnson, who claims to have statistical findings that the American media is biased against Palestinians and systematically favors Israel.
Yes, you may want to read that sentence again.
After all, that would erase 25 years of HonestReporting, not to mention invalidating the past few years of witnessing virtually every major Western outlet amplify Hamas casualty figures, platform anti-Israel ‘activists’ and antisemites, obsess over Palestinian suffering, and scrutinize Israel’s every military move in microscopic detail while often stripping away the context of October 7 and Hamas’ strategy of embedding itself among civilians.
But Johnson claims the exact opposite in his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, which he dutifully plugs in the piece. And while his so-called proof is presented with the aesthetic authority of data journalism, don’t be fooled.
The Methodology to the Madness
Let’s start with the most fundamental problem of his findings: we have no idea how any of this was actually counted.
Johnson claims to have examined “over 12,000 articles” and “5,000 TV segments.” But how? What was his methodology? Did he count them himself, or have others assist? Did he use AI? And if so, did he check the accuracy of the results? Were the searches for keywords conducted with any controls for context, or did every mention of “Israel’s right to defend itself,” for example, count equally, whether it appeared in a news report, an op-ed, or a quote from a foreign official? Curious minds want to know.
This isn’t a peer-reviewed study, or even a white paper. It is an anti-Israel person supposedly counting things in ways they don’t explain, to support a conclusion they announced before counting began. It is confirmation bias wrapped up in pseudo-science.
Apparently, International Law Is “Bias” Now
Johnson presents as proof of bias how Israel’s “right to defend itself” was mentioned on CNN and MSNBC 94 times more than Palestine’s equivalent right. But consider the obvious alternative explanation: the “right to defend itself” framing was overwhelmingly deployed by the Israeli government, American officials, and Western leaders in their public statements – statements that journalists are obligated to report. Measuring how often journalists transmitted this phrase tells us about the rhetorical landscape of the conflict, not necessarily about journalists’ own editorial biases.
Yet elsewhere in his piece, Johnson does claim to have filtered out quotes from officials and commentators (notably the “emotive words” charts), but not here. This inconsistency is never explained, so one could assume he did not employ such filtering here.
