Documenting the U.S. Media’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza (w/ Robin Andersen) | TCHR

In Robin Andersen’s new book, she chronicles how the U.S. media utilized their massive reach to help shield Israel from scrutiny as it perpetrated a genocide in Gaza.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Chris Hedges, a former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief, is certain about at least one thing regarding Israeli propaganda tactics: “If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes.” The task of professional journalists and media outlets is to review evidence and verify the information they are reporting, but when it comes to Israel, Western establishment media function as stenographers, echoing their lies globally.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges explores the mechanisms by which Western media function as propaganda outlets for Israel with media scholar Robin Andersen, who documented these practices in her new book, “The Complicit Lens.” They begin with a discussion of the ways media corporations control the narrative through omissions of historical context, dehumanization of Palestinians and censorship of specific words, such as “massacres.” Journalists who work for these commercial outlets are aware of their complicity — a fact corroborated by leaks detailing the propagandistic guidelines editorial departments force their journalists to follow — but sacrifice their integrity and honesty for access to those in power and to protect themselves from retaliation.

Hedges and Andersen explain the ways that media outlets manipulate language to cover up war crimes being committed by the Israelis and shift the blame for Israeli attacks on civilians and infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, onto the victims, Palestinians themselves. Outlets engage in ‘atrocity propaganda,’ amplifying horrific lies about sexual assault and “beheaded babies” told by the Israeli State without factchecking them to generate public support for the genocide of Palestinians, who are characterized as ‘terrorists’ and members of the demonized national resistance organization, Hamas. Andersen reports, “The Israelis were presented in their whole humanity… and the Palestinians are dead bodies, and that’s it.”

Another method of information control is by limiting access. Foreign journalists are restricted from entering Gaza, and those who are allowed in are vetted by Israel in advance. In violation of international law, the Palestinian press is censored through murder. Over 270 Palestinians, including those who work for major media outlets, and their families have been targeted and killed by the Israeli military. The price that we all pay for this complicity by the media is the legitimization of genocide, the absence of accountability and the lack of reliable news sources. As Andersen concludes, our loss is that there are “fewer and fewer voices, fewer and fewer documentation [that] can make sense of this and bring it to global publics.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Thomas Hedges

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Chris Hedges:

Robin Anderson, the author of “The Complicit Lens,” documents how the Western media in the United States and Europe amplifies Israeli lies about the genocide in Gaza and discredits the reporting by our Palestinian colleagues, especially in Gaza. This complicity includes repeating Israeli fabrications that routinely blame Palestinian resistance groups for attacks on their own hospitals, schools, and universities. It includes allowing Israel to smear Palestinian journalists as members of Hamas. It includes giving credibility to Israeli fabrications about beheaded babies, babies cooked in ovens, secret command tunnels under Palestinian hospitals and schools, Palestinian journalists who direct rocket attacks on Israel, and the supposed widespread sexual assault against Israelis by Palestinians on October 7th.

The question is why? Why does the commercial press give such prominence to Israeli lies when it often knows -and I speak as a former New York Times reporter, covered the Middle East - that they are lies. The simple answer is access and careerism. There is a cost, sometimes the cost of your job, if you will repeatedly question the Israeli narrative and earn the enmity of the powerful Israel lobby. If a reporter exposes Israeli lies, he or she swiftly finds requests for briefings and interviews with Israeli and even U.S. officials rebuffed. These kinds of reporters are not invited by press officers to participate in visits to Israeli military units or background briefings. They and their news organizations are viciously attacked. And those who run media organizations, who too often prize this access above the truth, view these renegade reporters as management headaches, often terminating their assignment and sometimes their employment.

The slander used by Israel to discredit my Palestinian colleagues, claiming they are members of Hamas, is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what? Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run Al Aqsa Media Network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention. In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the U.S. government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity in Guatemala, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia, and the Kosovo Liberation Army. I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. And if there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game. The barrage of Israeli lies, amplified and given credibility by the Western press, violates a fundamental tenet of journalism: the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader. It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account. It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza, and it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are often careerism and cowardice.

Joining me to discuss the complicity of the Western press in this genocide is media scholar Robin Andersen. Robin, the author of “The Complicit Lens,” is a professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University, an award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. She edits the Rutledge Focus Book series on media and humanitarian action, serves as a Project Censored judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. You put it all together in the book, and it’s a pretty damning case. Israel damns itself, but early in the book you make the argument, and I think correctly, that nothing that is happening at the moment can be understood without historical context. Israel works very hard to make the starting date of this October 7th, and I think you correctly point out that by doing that, you essentially make it impossible for us to understand what’s happening. So, can you address that point to begin with?

Robin Andersen:

Sure. It’s a standard media frame to start any conflict at the moment that the aggressors want to start it. And so, when Israel started the narrative and the press, without any pushback whatsoever, just kept saying that every time Israel dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a refugee camp or a tent or a building, killing numerous Palestinians in Gaza, they would say, “This is in retaliation for the October 7th attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians.” It was like a mantra. And they could say that because of this media frame where all of the historical reporting, all of the reporting at all about Israel and Palestine, was condensed into this narrative that began on October 7th, and by beginning on October 7th, then everything that Israel does is retaliatory. It is in defense. It’s a security discourse, and in that way, justified.

What that frame leaves out, as you well know, Chris, is this history of build-up and aggression on the part of Israel in Palestine, that as Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, is “The Hundred-Year War on Palestine.” Just in the 2010s, some of us may recall the “Great March of Return,” which lasted for a month and not one Israeli soldier was killed because it was a peaceful, nonviolent protest at the wall that divides Gaza and Israel. And they were simply demanding the right to return to their homelands. Israeli snipers on top of that wall shot into them, aiming mostly at their legs. We know now that the Israeli soldiers love to do target practice on Palestinians. They shot into their legs and their knees. 124 children had to have prosthetics. They injured 33,000. They killed about 300 over the course of that time, so much so that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appealed to the ICC to look into war crimes because it was, again, of course, disproportionate violence. They were in no way threatened by peaceful Palestinians. And, by the way, this wasn’t organized by Hamas. This was organized by civil society groups inside Gaza and their international allies. So, those things are completely forgotten.

We know in media studies that a conflict never simply starts, right? It has a long genesis of conflict that that leads up to this one moment. And of course, the other added benefit to that narrative, that falsified narrative, is that since there is no reason whatsoever for Hamas to attack the ‘poor, innocent’ Israel, they have to simply be ‘terrorist’, ‘warmongering’, the ‘hyper-sexualized oriental’ spoken about by Edward Said, all of the stereotypes. All of the demonization and dehumanization then is brought to bear on what many consider a resistance fighting group. That’s all I’ll say. Thanks.

Chris Hedges:

Well, I was there for the founding of Hamas. I knew Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the co-founders of Hamas, along with Sheikh Yassin, and they were very clear that there was a national resistance group, which was certainly birthed out of the Muslim Brotherhood, but that they welcomed Christians, non-Muslim Palestinians. That is how they defined themselves.

October 7th wasn’t enough. Certainly, atrocities were committed against Israeli civilians, no one is disputing that, but that wasn’t enough for the Israelis. They had to ramp up the narrative. I want you to deal with this, with the claims that there were widespread sexual assaults, number one, and number two, and this was really reported by the Israeli press, there were significant numbers of Israeli citizens who were killed by the IDF, which just fired blindly, used attack helicopters and tanks, blowing up houses in kibbutzes where Hamas fighters were holding Israeli hostages or families. They would just obliterate the whole house, firing on any car that was traveling back into Gaza, many of which of course probably had Israeli citizens. Attacking Erez, which is the border crossing between Israel and Gaza, just blowing up the whole center with Israeli soldiers that were being held captive by Hamas fighters inside.

October 7th had to be even more, or at least the Israeli narrative had to paint October 7th as being far more brutal, far more savage than it actually was. And the Western media, unfortunately including my old employer, the New York Times, danced to that tune and amplified those lies. And I think even to this day, the New York Times has not retracted its appalling story, I think it was called “Screams Without Words” or something, which was essentially reduced to being based on one source that the whole family recanted and said the woman wasn’t raped, etcetera. But let’s talk about that moment.

Robin Andersen:

Right. The British filmmaker Richard Sanders, who did a couple of documentaries, has done a few documentaries for Al Jazeera. One is “October 7^th”, and he looked at oodles of footage from the helmets of the fighters, and they really surveyed it, and he has a layout of how Hamas went in. And of course, initially they didn’t have any pushback from the Israelis. And you know what Richard Sanders points out is that Hamas had been posting on social media that they were practicing with the balloons, that they were basically gearing up to go into Israel. Now, for some reason, the Israelis weren’t prepared. Even though they were prepared with their Hasbara, their propaganda, right away. And so, you have Netanyahu calling up then-President Joe Biden telling him, “Oh, it was horrible. It was like the Holocaust. They tied up a bunch of infants and they burned them alive. It was terrible. They chopped off their heads.” This is the kind of atrocity propaganda you were pointing out, Chris.

This atrocity propaganda, this very same kind of thing where it hits you in the gut and it makes you so angry that you want to do something that you say, “Go ahead. Do whatever you want because these people are beyond the human community. They are inhuman,” as they followed up with that very dialogue, the Israeli spokespeople. So, they had to do that to make the violence so horrifying that it would justify whatever Israel was about to do.

Atrocity propaganda, as I mentioned, goes back to World War I, where we have the Germans – ‘babies bouncing off bayonets.’ It follows through historically to justify any war. And then, of course, at the First Gulf War, where we had the Kuwaiti member of the royal family testify before Congress that over 300 babies had been thrown out of their incubators on the floor at the border of Kuwait and Iraq. So, this is a border town, Chris. This is out in a rural area. So, just think about how many babies there could be, premature babies, in incubators. Certainly not anywhere near 300. So, right off, when we think about these in retrospect, we said, “Wow, how could the media have perpetuated this kind of atrocity propaganda?” Also, given, if you think about the legacy media, the establishment media in America, they are supposed to have their very best journalists on a story, right? In the New York Times, how much money does it have? How many employees? 7% of American journalists, are employed by the New York Times. They’re supposed to have seasoned journalists who can recognize atrocity propaganda.

Instead, many outlets in the US repeated the ‘40 beheaded baby story’, and all across Britain and the Western world. And as you point out, from the beginning, and I heard you on an interview very early on, you said, “My experience with the Israelis is that they lie. They lie, and they lie, and they lie some more.” They never pushed back in the US media, never pushed back on the constant lies that were being told by the Israelis. And that’s another way in which they completely abandoned their journalistic mission.

But just to wrap up, what Richard Sanders says, “Isn’t it interesting that, yes, Hamas committed war crimes that day. You can’t kill civilians, and Hamas killed civilians, and they took hostages, which is also against international law.” But what they did that day will never be known, probably, because also, as you point out, even though Israeli media itself aired the testimony of one Israeli woman, for example, who had been held hostage, Yasmin Porat, who told about how, as you just narrated, the Israelis came to Kibbutz Be’eri and opened fire on everyone. She said she was with about 12 hostages. So, they killed all of them. She was the only one left. And then by December 2023 you have a very well-documented, based on investigations by Haaretz, that the military, in fact, called in the Hannibal Directive, which is a military procedure dictated by the IDF that if it’s in a hostage situation, you kill all of the hostages because Israel doesn’t want to negotiate with the hostages. So, you kill the Israelis. We’ll never know.

So, every time the media repeated the mantra, “1,200 Israeli civilians killed, mostly civilians,” that’s a lie, a pure lie. And US media must have known, because certainly they can read Haaretz because it’s in English, and they should have translators who heard the other testimony on some of the Hebrew language outlets in Israel. And then one more thing, Chris. Right within the first month, the Israeli insurance agency published the names and demographic details of the people killed that day. There was exactly one baby under two years old who was shot. So, there was no ‘40 beheaded babies.’ There was no ‘infants rounded up and burned.’ And President Biden lied over and over through November that he had seen pictures of beheaded babies. So, instead of challenging a foreign military, our government and our press amplified their lies.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about the way Israel essentially paints every civilian, including children, as members of Hamas in a way to justify the genocide and the role the press plays in facilitating that mischaracterization.

Robin Andersen:

Well, one of the ways they habitually do that is simply by the by the dehumanization of Palestinians that has happened for years. And we just look at the language. I think the New York Times, and as we know in the Spring of 2024 when the Intercept published the leaks that journalists and then staff at the CNN and journalists and staff at the New York Times released to them, that in fact they had been being told what they could say and what they could not say. And what they could not say was ‘massacres,’ especially for Palestinians. And they were told not to even report Palestinian deaths in any kind of emotional terms because they didn’t want Hamas using their outlets for propaganda. And so, the Palestinians were reported with body counts.

One time, a content analysis showed that the New York Times used the word ‘massacre’ 50 times for Israeli people killed by Hamas and one time for a Palestinian killed. And keep in mind, Chris, within the first 25 days, 5,000 Palestinians had been killed. So, this content analysis of the early coverage, very telling, very damning on the side of the press. And so, with the dehumanization and the body counts, then they added the “Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry reported,” right, for further discrediting.

A body count is not a person. It is a body. By that time, the person is dead. Oftentimes, the Israelis, and then all of these heartfelt reporting we had on the hostages that were still being held, if you look at the difference in coverage, the Israelis were presented in their whole humanity, often pictures of them, videos of them, their works, their place within their culture, their society, their professionalism. And the Palestinians are dead bodies, and that’s it. And when they were on the air, professors, lawyers, aid organizations, anybody who was on the air was, as I quote a Palestinian writer in the book, “They were asked to sing for their airtime. They were bullied. They were shouted down.” We remember then, right? “Do you support Hamas?” “Do you think Israel has a right to exist?” And that that’s what they got. That’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates got a year later. So, it’s the thoroughgoing dehumanization. Of course, and when you dehumanized Hamas that they were ‘terrorists’, they were ‘animals’, then Hamas, it filters down where we lose civilians.

And then everyone becomes Hamas. And Israelis have actually said that, “Everyone in Gaza is a terrorist. There are no innocents. There are no children.” And here’s what I think is very ironic. At the one time they keep lying, they’re not doing this. To this day, they are now saying that the starving of the Palestinians, as they continue to do it as we speak, it’s a hoax, right? Meanwhile, they are all over media, which we don’t see in our media, saying, “There’s no innocents in Gaza.” Israelis in ministries and officials are saying, “We think every person in Gaza should be dead. We want them out. The settlers want Gaza.” All of that saying, which is admitting, at the same time, that they are committing war crimes, while the media is doing everything to downplay the war crimes that they are committing.

Chris Hedges:

I want to talk about how Israel will plant this narrative repeatedly that Palestinians are responsible for the attacks against them. We saw this with Israel’s attacks against schools, hospitals, infrastructure, bakeries. I mean they were even bombing wells, desalination plants, power plants. And the bombing would be reported and then the Western press would dutifully report the Israeli narrative that it was an errant rocket or the famous press dog and pony show they, I think it was in the basement of - was it Shifa Hospital where they pointed to a list of workers - I think it was a timetable for workers - and said it was a Hamas terrorist and because it was all in Arabic, the press couldn’t read it. But they’re just shameless about blaming the Palestinians for their own suffering.

Robin Andersen:

Over and over again. The Flour Massacre that took place in early spring, well, no February 2024. Think about it, as the Palestinians were already hungry, they were on the verge of starvation then. That’s how much the Israelis control what happens in Gaza. They’ve controlled the amount of calories Gazans can have since the early 2000s. As many of the human rights people have said, they will be studying food security by using Gaza as an example for years to come and how that can happen. They were starving already by weaponization of food by Israel, even in the Spring of 2024, and the Israelis shot at the hungry Palestinians who came to the aid trucks to collect flour. And what did the Israelis say that was repeated widely over the course of this 24-hour period where they had killed over 100 Palestinians and directly shooting at them? Well, the first one was that the soldiers were scared because the Palestinians came to the truck. Then then they trampled themselves, right? They stampeded. And there was ‘lawlessness’. Lawlessness has been the thing that has justified the starvation and hidden Israel’s blocking of aid ever since that moment. All through this time, it’s been lawlessness. Lawlessness blames the people who are being starved. It’s an old saw. It’s a trope, it’s a media trope. And so that you don’t have to identify who’s doing it? What’s the cause? Why are people hungry? No, it’s chaos and lawlessness. They called it a “food-related death”, “an aid-related death”.

Whereas this wonderful journalist that I followed for 10 months before he was assassinated by Israel, Ismail Al-Ghoul, in that instance, writing for Al Jazeera, went to the hospital and found the bodies that were a result of this Flour Massacre that Israelis had shot Palestinians collecting aid, and said that they had no evidence of trampling, and it wasn’t a stampede. And instead, they had the bullets from Israeli rifle fire to show that that’s what killed them. So, evidence, and over and over again, the Palestinians were constantly blamed for what they were doing.

And the Al-Shifa hospital example gives us another view of this. Before that, Israel attacked a hospital in an absolutely unprecedented attack on a medical facility in modern history. No one has done that before. They built up this propaganda with a slick 3D video showing a Hamas Pentagon three layers deep below the hospital, all out of the Israeli imagination. It looked like, as someone wrote, a James Bond lair, if nothing else. It was completely fabricated. And they built up and built up to that. And then when they went in, they told the media - and here’s the thing, on the other side the media is actually showing the doctors in Al-Shifa hospital. And the doctors are saying, “We have asked international teams to come in and prove that there aren’t Hamas functioning out of this hospital. They’re asking for sanctuary.” They say, “We are surrounded. We are just about ready to be attacked.” Israel comes into this hospital, kills doctors, nurses, patients, and basically bombs and destroys the hospital. The media then follow up with this outrageous claim where “Yes, hospitals are protected under international law unless the enemy has gotten into the hospital.” They repeated that over and over again. This is the first time that the major hospital was taken out in November 2023, Al-Shifa. And it was an absolute lie.

Hospitals, even if they were treating Hamas patients, which they weren’t, they were as full of civilians, even if they had a Pentagon in that hospital, which they didn’t, not one piece of evidence was shown afterwards, even if they had all those things, the aggressors are still obliged under international law to protect the doctors, the patients, the medical staff, and the medical facility. The way they got away with that first one, and the press bought it. And, by the way, Biden also confirmed, “Yes, we’ve got intelligence, our own intelligence has also shown that Hamas is using that hospital.” They never told you who they were. They never gave any names. They never showed any evidence of an investigation. And so, Biden’s blood is all over the hands there, too, of the attack. And that was the first one, and over the course of the genocide, and they are still attacking what’s left of the medical facilities in Gaza. And they completely wiped out the entire healthcare system in Gaza, which is again just unprecedented genocide in the modern era.

Chris Hedges:

I want to talk another about another aspect of how they control the press. First, of course, they have prohibited foreign journalists from entering Gaza. The very few times that any foreign reporters have entered Gaza, they have done so in groups organized by the Israeli military, and those reporters, I know because I used to do it, are handpicked by the Israeli military, because they will be obsequious to whatever it is they’re fed or told. That’s number one. Number two, they have killed over 270 Palestinian journalists, and I’ve covered a lot of war, but that number is far beyond any number that I experienced in the wars in Central America or in Yugoslavia or anywhere else. I mean, frankly, I think it calls for a complete boycott of Israel given the number of journalists that they have slaughtered. And then, at the same time, Israel has created mechanisms, which you document in the book, by which they actually filter the reports that are disseminated by international news organizations such as CNN. And as you point out, anything that appeared on CNN had to be fed through the Jerusalem Bureau, which meant that it was vetted by Israeli censors because, having worked in Israel, nothing goes out unless it’s approved by the censor.

Robin Andersen:

Absolutely. They didn’t tell the American people, their readers, their audiences, that in fact they didn’t have access, that Israel had blocked all Western media out of the enclave. And of course, before that, as we know, journalists and mainstream media have always measured their ability to cover a war by being with the soldiers in the field, in the theater of operations, right? That’s standard. Journalists, that’s their wish list. They want to record what’s happened and that’s how in the War on Terror, what they did is those first, as you’re talking about those special journalists that are chosen and vetted, they were embedded with the troops that went into Iraq during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

They turned that war basically into a reality show. I’ve written a lot about that war, and that was the first time they embedded journalists. And they had worked up to that to make sure that they could control the media. This is the US military, part of their Psy-op strategies. And when they went into Israel, on the occasions that they did, and they were there for Al Shifa afterwards, yes, they vetted their copy and everything that they printed went through Israeli censors. I think that this was also dependent on us not knowing that they had blocked Western journalists.

But another thing is, and you know, I’ve had a lot of people ask me, these are their colleagues, these are journalists on the ground. They not only worked for Al Jazeera - yes, a lot of them were just working with their cell phones and posting - but these were Arab language outlets, a lot of very legitimate outlets were global outlets, and even the AP and the wire services were using the photographs and the testimonials taken on the ground in in Gaza, but they wouldn’t tell anybody. They very rarely reported anything. Early on, the Washington Post did, at least they showed some of the journalists who had been killed with their photographs and their hopes and desires and why they were a journalist. It was like one of the only things that was out there early on.

But they never said that Israelis targeted them or killed them. And they even, Hamza Wael Dahdouh, the son of the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza, his son, they killed him, direct strike, and they called him a ‘terrorist.’ And that was how, as they killed more and more journalists, they increasingly labeled them terrorists. But you know, you’re talking about a heat-seeking missile that a car is moving at high velocity, and it’s found by a heat-seeking, that is a direct assassination. And that’s what they were doing toward the end. Then they were also just taking out hospitals when they could, also take out four journalists who, one was in the hospital and being treated from the first attack by Israel. They killed their families. They directly targeted the houses of their families. While Dahdouh’s family was also just massacred before they killed his son.

So, we’re talking about, as you point out, this is the slaughter of journalists like we’ve never seen. We have organizations, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, all of these, Palestinian, in this case, journalism syndicate recording this stuff, telling the FCC, trying to tell the world, and silence. This is probably one of the most horrible things that the that the journalists who were being killed noted. And they said, “Our colleagues in the America are just completely ignoring our deaths, and we’re their colleagues,” because they didn’t see them as colleagues. They saw them as Palestinians, who weren’t worthy of the title. And also, if they had told them that, they understand that their reporting simply repeats Israeli talking points and it’s standardized. And they’ll show you some of the brutality, but it’s never about Israel. It’s always, “This is the consequence of the Israeli Hamas war.” This is not a war. Hamas wasn’t an army. We know full well it wasn’t a war. And still to this day they won’t say it’s a genocide, although everybody in the globe now knows that it’s a genocide. And even the American public knows it’s a genocide. But somehow the New York Times just can’t bring itself to use the word genocide. So, that’s the standard frame, and they know if they start to talk about the Palestinian journalists, they will put them to shame and they will have to talk about their reporting. And to my mind that’s as also a significant reason that they never reported on the deaths of Palestinian journalists.

Chris Hedges:

Well, if they did report on the deaths, they gave the Israeli line, I mean headlines like “Israeli targets Hamas cameras,” one of my favorites. I think this was the Reuters team, where they killed all of these people. And they’ll kill them in what they call double tap strikes where they’ll shoot journalists. Journalists often set up their tents around hospitals because they needed generators and power and everything else. But they would target the journalists and then moments later, when people came to their aid, if they’d been wounded, they would hit them again. This was repeatedly done to journalists and the Israeli characterization of those journalists who were killed were picked up in the headlines of all of the major media outlets.

Robin Andersen:

Yeah. I remember the reporting on the direct hit of Ismail al-Ghoul and his colleague Rami al-Rifi and it was a direct hit on the car. And the New York Times wrote very, very little about it. They never even explained how Ismail was killed and they directed it to some conflict Israel was having with some agency. And you get this type of reporting that’s just column inches of nonsense reporting that really makes no sense and is not to the point. And then I wonder, I have friends who wake up every morning, and they read the New York Times and I say, “Why do you do that to yourself?”

Chris Hedges:

I mean this is part of the reason that the legacy media or the establishment media has such low credibility. I mean it has approval ratings that are lower than Congress, which takes some work. I mean in many ways what they’re doing is completely self-destructive.

Robin Andersen:

Absolutely. And to go back to killing the journalists around hospitals, the second time Israel went into Al Shifa was the spring of 2024. And that attack on that hospital again was even worse than the first. And the media coverage was also worse than the first, because what they did is they related to the first hospital and they said, “Just like they were there a few months ago, they’re there again.” And the IDF sent out their press release: “We didn’t kill one civilian. It was so great. We got 500 terrorists there.” And that’s how they reported the final attack on Al-Shifa, which really did destroy it.

That was the one, if you recall, looking at some of that footage and some of the testimony afterwards of the nurse and the other ones who survived it, they said they had three different wristbands of different colors. They put one on you and they just took a group of men out and they shot them. They just executed about 300 people. They said those people were Hamas terrorists. What those people were were civil defense employees working for Hamas, which would gather at the hospital along with some journalists because the hospital, as you point out, was the place that had power. And it was also the place that was telling the journalists what was going on because they saw the bodies. They saw the wounded. They were caring for the wounded.

So, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why Israel wanted to take out all the hospitals. But they killed civil defense workers that day. They mowed them down, the bodies, and then a few weeks later, they started to unearth them and that’s what we saw with the unearthing of these, many of them had been patients. But they were civil defense workers. So, this is something that today remains very underreported and not understood very well, is that the civil defense workers were working for Hamas in government capacity and being paid. When they deliberately wiped out all of the fabric of life in Gaza and all of the social services, including health care and food aid, but civil defense, they were the ones left that had to go, for example, and dig up the bodies that they had mowed under in front of the hospital. So, when then they say “chaos,” the level of deviousness and lying becomes extraordinary. When you then say, “There’s so much chaos in Gaza,” which they have deliberately engineered, and deliberately what I call ‘censorship by murder,’ murdering the journalists and fewer and fewer voices, fewer and fewer documentation can make sense of this and bring it to global publics.

Chris Hedges:

Great, thanks Robin. And we have to honor the tremendous courage and integrity of our Palestinian colleagues, huge numbers of whom have paid with their lives. They did the real reporting, while the Western press went down to the border area and put on flak jackets and helmets and did stand ups where they had about as much chance of being hit by a piece of shrapnel as they would by an asteroid. I just stand in awe of my Palestinian colleagues, many of whom I know and some of whom I’ve lost. I want to thank Diego, Thomas and Max, who produce the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

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Jubilant Sandinista rebels ride a small tank in the main square of Managua as junta arrives June 20, 1979 to take control of the government.

GUATEMALA-GUERILLAS TROOPS

Guerillas troops of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URGN) listen to orders from their commandants 07 May 1996 before deploying to El Rincon in Guatemala’s Sierra Madre mountains, a trip which will take them one day. The troops mission is to explain to the residents of the town the URGN’s position in peace talks with the government. (Photo by MATIAS RECART / AFP) (Photo by MATIAS RECART/AFP via Getty Images)

Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA)

Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) soldiers pose on April 23, 2012 at a base near Bentiu. Sudanese war planes launched a fresh bombing raid on a key South Sudanese town Monday, dashing hopes that a withdrawal of Southern troops from a contested area would end weeks of fighting. AFP PHOTO / Hannah McNeish (Photo credit should read HANNAH MCNEISH/AFP via Getty Images)

Electricity Cuts Deepen Gaza Crisis 10 Years After Israeli Blockade

GAZA CITY, GAZA - JULY 20: Palestinian Hamas militants are seen during a military show in the Bani Suheila district on July 20, 2017 in Gaza City, Gaza. For the past ten years Gaza residents have lived with constant power shortages, in recent years these cuts have worsened, with supply of regular power limited to four hours a day. On June 11, 2017 Israel announced a new round of cuts at the request of the Palestinian authorities and the decision was seen as an attempt by President Mahmoud Abbas to pressure Gaza’s Hamas leadership. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Ethnic Albanians Under Siege in Kosovo

392582 02: Officers in the Kosovo Liberation Army dress up a young boy as a soldier and give him a gun at a rally February 1999 in Kosovo. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo formed a ragtag guerilla army in response to persection by the controlling Serbian military. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Sandinistas Celebrate

Jubilant Sandinista rebels ride a small tank in the main square of Managua as junta arrives June 20, 1979 to take control of the government.

Visit of Alija Izetbegović to France

President of Bosnia and Herzegovina Alija Izetbegovic with wife Halida Repovac are welcomed at the Elysee Palace by French President François Mitterrand. (Photo by Jacques Langevin/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - Palestinian militants move towards the border fence with Israel from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. Barrages of rockets were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip at dawn as militants from the blockaded Palestinian enclave infiltrated Israel, with at least one person killed, the army and medics said. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP) (Photo by SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images)

Palestinians Protest Along The Border With Israel

GAZA CITY, GAZA - MAY 14 : A Palestinian woman waves a Palestine flag to encourage others as mass demonstrations continue on May 14, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza. Israeli soldiers killed at least 41 Palestinians and wounded over a thousand as the demonstrations coincided with the controversial opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. This marks the deadliest day of violence in Gaza since 2014. Gaza’s Hamas rulers have vowed that the marches will continue until the decade-old Israeli blockade of the territory is lifted (Photo by Etienne De Malglaive/Getty Images)

Edward Said

Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist Edward Said, Mantova, 19th September 2001. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

HAMAS leader, Palestinian Doctor Abdul A

HAMAS leader, Palestinian Doctor Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi chats with visitors at his house in Gaza City 18 June 2003. Rantisi returned home after he was wounded in an Israeli helicopter strike against him a week ago. AFP PHOTO/Mohmmed ABED (Photo credit should read MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)

Hamas Leader Injured In Israeli Missile Attack

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP - JUNE 6: (FILE PHOTO) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas, attends a demonstration June 6, 2003, in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Islamic militant movement Hamas, and some 14 other people were wounded in an missile strike in the Gaza Strip September 6, 2003, medics said. Hamas officials said Yassin was treated in hospital for a slight hand wound after he was wounded when a missile struck a house he had just left it in a densely populated area in Gaza City. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images)

A destroyed vehicle seen after the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

SDEROT, ISRAEL - 2023/10/08: A destroyed vehicle seen after the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood launched by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas in Sderot. Fighting between Israeli soldiers and Islamist Hamas militants continues in the border area with Gaza. The death toll of Israelis has risen to 600, Israeli media reported. (Photo by Saeed Qaq/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

President Biden Meets With Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 25: U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House on July 25, 2024 in Washington, DC. Netanyahu’s visit occurs as the Israel-Hamas war reaches nearly ten months. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Former President Biden Speaks at ACRD Conference in Chicago

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - APRIL 15: Former U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a conference hosted by the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled (ACRD) on April 15, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. ACRD champions the rights of those who depend on Social Security and disability services. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Al-Aqsa University left in ruins due to Israeli attacks on Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - NOVEMBER 29: An aerial view of demolished Al-Aqsa University, after the Israeli army’s direct target, forcing thousands of students to suspend their studies in Gaza City, Gaza on November 29, 2025. Al-Aqsa University is Gaza’s most prominent institutions, the university had provided education to more than 25,000 students across 15 faculties. (Photo by Mohammed Eslayeh/Anadolu via Getty Images)

First aid trucks arrive in Gaza after the ceasefire

GAZA CITY, GAZA OCTOBER 12: Palestinians carry sacks of flour and boxes of supplies as they gather amid the rubble to collect humanitarian aid in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, on October 12, 2025. The first convoy of aid trucks carrying essential food, medicine, and drinking water entered Gaza through the Kerem Abu Salem border crossing as part of the cease-fire agreement. (Photo by Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Journalists protest against Israeli attacks in Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - AUGUST 01: Dozens of journalists protest holding press badges and pictures of their colleagues Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi who lost their lives on duty in Gaza City, Gaza on August 01, 2024. The journalists condemned the Israeli attacks and their results in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-WAR-ANNIVERSARY-HOSPITAL

TOPSHOT - Men walk toward a destroyed section of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on September 17, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group. Once the crown jewel of Gaza’s proud medical community, the Palestinian territory’s main Al-Shifa hospital has become a stark symbol of the utter devastation wrought by the Israel-Hamas war. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)

Graduation ceremony held for 170 doctors in Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - DECEMBER 25: A view from the graduation ceremony held at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which suffered severe damage as a result of Israeli military attacks, for 170 doctors who earned their specialist certificates from the Ministry of Health on December 25, 2025. A large number of Palestinians attended the ceremony, which was held in the hospital garden. (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Two Journalists, Including Son Of Al Jazeera’s Wael Al-Dahdouh, Killed In Southern Gaza

RAFAH, GAZA - JANUARY 7: Family and friends including Al Jazeera reporter, Wael Al-Dahdouh (2nd R), bid farewell to the bodies of journalists Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya on January 7, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza. The journalists, Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya, were reportedly killed when their car was bombed after reporting from an air strike on a building this morning. Hamza is the son of Al Jazeera reporter Wael Al-Dahdouh, whose wife, daughter, grandson and another son were killed in an Israeli air strike earlier in the war. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

U.S. Marines Prepare For War In Kuwait

NEAR IRAQI BORDER, KUWAIT - FEBRUARY 1: Journalists scramble behind U.S. Marines from 3rd Battallion 1st Marine Division as they practice squad rushes February 1, 2003 at Living Support Area Seven near the Iraqi border in northern Kuwait. The U.S. military continues a buildup of its forces in the region ahead of possible conflict in Iraq with upwards of 150,000 troops expected by mid-February. (Photo by Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

A day of remembrance: Recognizing the courage of journalists on the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists

RAFAH, GAZA - (ARCHIVE): A file photo dated January 07, 2024, shows Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh mourning during the funeral ceremony of his son, Al-Jazeera cameraman Hamza Al-Dahdouh, who was killed alongside freelance video journalist Mustafa Thuraya, who also worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP), in an Israeli drone strike in Rafah, Gaza, as journalists continue to be targets of attacks in wars. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - Palestinians try to put out a fire at the emergency department of the Nasser hospital after it was hit in an Israeli airstrike, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 23, 2025. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-GAZA-MEDIA

TOPSHOT - Demonstrators gather in solidarity with journalists killed by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip, during a protest organised by the Gaza Journalists Syndicate, in Gaza City, on August 26, 2025. Gaza’s civil defence agency said five journalists were among at least 20 people killed on August 25 when Israeli strikes hit a hospital in the south, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressing regret over the “tragic mishap”. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - Palestinian journalists attempt to connect to the internet using their phones in Rafah on the southern Gaza Strip on December 27, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Power cuts have become a fact of life in war-torn Gaza. But thanks to embedded SIM cards, Palestinians can still access the internet and stay in touch with loved ones abroad. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP) (Photo by SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images)