Headshot of Assal Rad taken by Delnaz Rad.
Mainstream news reporting on Palestine has often failed to contextualize its history even before the genocide on Gaza began — from the language newsrooms have used when reporting on violence in Palestine to the suppression of reporting from Palestinian journalists, who have faced Israel’s decades-long targeting.
That pattern has only been amplified, as United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese detailed in a July 2026 report that focused on how major international newsrooms reinforced narratives that obscured or justified atrocities against Palestinians over the past three years.
To historian and Center for Media Integrity researcher Assal Rad, examining narrative framing begins with headlines.
As a student, she read Edward Said’s Orientalism, which examines how ongoing U.S. and European colonialism in the Middle East and Northern Africa has been obscured. Its ideas have shaped her edits of headlines from major news outlets, whether the New York Times or the BBC, to highlight hypocrisy in their coverage of Palestine.
“There is a massive discrepancy between the reality of what the region is and the way that it's understood in the Western world,” Rad said.
Rad sat down with The Objective to talk about how that narrative discrepancy informed the making and scope of her latest book, Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide, the context any journalist covering Palestine should include in their reporting, and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JAMES SALANGA: Before gaining traction for being a “headline fixer”, had you already been thinking of writing a book around Western media's coverage of Palestine?
ASSAL RAD: I wasn't necessarily thinking of writing a book about Western media in Palestine or focusing on the news media, specifically, but I've always been interested — as a historian of the region — in the way narratives are constructed and the way the story is told through a Western lens. … I did headline corrections before the Gaza Genocide, because one of the institutions that is part of this narrative ecosystem is obviously the news media. [Editor’s note: Within the book, Rad refers to genocide in Gaza as the Gaza Genocide “to enshrine its memory for generations to come and to refuse the erasure or rewriting of that history.” That style has been preserved in her answers to the Q&A.]
As someone who was a student activist back during the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, I was interested in the role of the media … and the fact that it helped to manufacture consent for an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.
With the Gaza Genocide, it just became so glaringly obvious. You see this public shift in opinion, where people are seeing with their own eyes raw footage from Gaza, and it's being juxtaposed with the way that it's being reported in the news media in the Western world, as well as the way that, frankly, our politicians talked about it.
You have this massive gap that people are seeing in real time, where [before] it may have been more subtle [except to] those of us who have studied the region were privy to it.
That's where the idea for the book came from … [and also from] looking at my own social media and wanting to put it all in one place so it wasn't just a soundbite. When you put it all together, it tells a very damning story of the way that the Gaza Genocide has been narrated, especially the fact that it's still, to this moment, not framed as a genocide despite the fact that that is the global consensus of every leading human rights organization, including Israeli human rights organizations.
The work that I had done during these last three years existed on social media spaces. The concern was, “I don't own any of this.” We've seen this happen with Palestinian journalists and activists, where that digital archive that exists online can disappear as soon as those platforms decide they don't want it to be there. But in book form, it's a lot harder to erase.
JS: Can you remember a watershed moment as a student-activist, as a historian, where you read something about Palestine and Israel in news media that really struck you as feeling off? If so, what was that moment?
AR: I go back to the early 2000s and the second intifada. This is the period in which I'm coming of age and my political views are being formed as an undergraduate student — the era is the second intifada, 9/11, and then of course the ensuing War on Terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. All these events are happening within just a few years of each other.
What's really remarkable about the story of Palestine — and why I think so many students, and even so many older people, once they become aware of it, become radicalized by it — is because as soon as you read any of the actual history, you realize how the story that's been told to you has been inverted the entire time.
When you look at the framing of the second intifada in the early 2000s, the framing is to make Palestinians look like terrorists and militants. They’re belligerents, aggressors. Palestinian violence, even when it is resistance, is depicted, always, as “the bad guys.” Israeli violence, even when they are the occupiers, is always depicted as benevolent, and it's very much rooted in colonial language where that's precisely what happened.
When European powers were colonizing Asia, when they were colonizing the Americas and committing genocide, when they were carrying out systems of slavery, all of it was justified through this lens of the “civilized” versus the “savage.” And that language has only evolved through time, but it's essentially the same basics.
When you learn about it, you realize Palestinians are the ones who are occupied. Palestinians are the ones who are indigenous to the land and who were forcibly expelled from their land in 1948.
You realize that Zionism is a political ideology that was founded in Europe, that has its roots in European colonialism.
… Fast forward to the way that the global community has reacted to the Gaza Genocide — it wasn't, you had to pick up a book and read it to see what the history was. They [the mainstream news media] were just telling you lies in real time. They were telling you, “Israel is targeting Hamas,” and you were seeing the bodies of [Palestinian] children every single day. You were seeing men, women and children … being slaughtered on a daily basis. You were seeing emaciated men, women, and children because they are being starved.
Anybody could see it. As long as you had a device, as long as you had access to the internet, you could just see the raw footage of what was happening.
For me personally, it goes back to the early 2000s and that kind of realization of, “You've reversed the roles here. The victims are the Palestinians who have been occupied and colonized. The victims are not the Israelis who have colonized and occupied them.”
JS: You mention Russia and Ukraine, as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as touchpoints for examining coverage double standards when it comes to genocide in Gaza. What made you interested in focusing on this comparatively recent history instead of going into the scope of coverage across Palestinian history?
AR: That's a great question. I say very early on in the book, this is not a history of Palestine, it's not a history of Gaza — there's plenty of excellent texts that dive into all of that history.
The intention I had in mind for an audience was really what drove the way that the book manifested. The audience for me was two main bodies of people: One is just the broad public, right? An average person, an average American, especially in the Western world, who is unaware of our own government's policies … We exist in what are called liberal democracies and a pillar of that is the notion of free press, but so much trust has been lost in the media over the last three years. And not surprisingly, because we watched them whitewash a genocide.
I wanted it to be something that was very, very accessible and that didn't require a deep knowledge of history. That's the way that the comparison to Russia and Ukraine came into it.
What was interesting about that comparison wasn't just the media, it was the way our politicians dealt with it. Specifically the fact that it was the administration of a Democrat — a liberal within the American political landscape — the administration of Joe Biden, who came to office in 2021 [and] his first message to the international community was “America is back.”
The notion behind that was that the Trump administration had gotten away from these liberal democratic ideals … the free press, an international rules-based order, international law. The Biden admin was meant to realign the U.S.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden admin led the world in [making sure] Russia became the most sanctioned country in the world almost overnight. It took them about a month to make a legal call that Russia had committed war crimes. You have the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, at the United Nations, giving these impassioned speeches about how bombing hospitals is not normal, bombing homes is not normal, bombing schools is not normal. Yet that same administration, these same political figures normalized all of those crimes on a much larger scale when Israel was carrying it out against Palestinians, when Israel was doing it in Gaza.
That level of hypocrisy happening side by side was … an undeniable kind of hypocrisy.
[Meanwhile], when you take it into these longer historical periods, it's not that the case is not strong — it is. But sometimes, especially someone who does not necessarily read a lot of history or doesn't look at it with that longer lens, it might be lost on a general audience. When it's happening at the exact same time … it's much harder to deny that kind of gap.
That's one of the reasons why I really wanted to focus on what people could readily remember themselves … It was a very deliberate choice to localize the history into these moments that were readily identifiable to most of the public.
Ethical journalism also advocates for the public interest outside of private interests.
When you're seeing it happen now … you see the lies that these administrations are telling. For instance, Anthony Blinken, in spring of 2024, tells Congress that Israel is not deliberately blocking aid when his own agencies are telling him, “Actually, Israel is deliberately blocking it.”
… If they've lied to you this much during a genocide, the one crime that you think everybody would agree on … you can extrapolate [and] imagine how much they've lied to you this entire time: If they're capable of justifying a genocide, they're capable of justifying everything. Once you highlight that, it makes it easier to digest just how much the historical record has been filled with these types of narrative omissions or lies.
JS: With your tweets revising headlines, did you have a collected database or a spreadsheet? How did you keep track of all of this?
AR: In terms of the archive, I wish I was more organized than I'm going to sound. But I essentially had all of these [tweets] organized into some folders, so it wasn't just one giant file with different images on it. For the most part, it was looking through each file. It was looking at each one [tweet].
There are, I believe, something around approximately like 60 to 70 images in the book. I have a much more extensive archive, but couldn't include all of it.… It was really important to have the images, and that was something that me and my editor very much agreed on. He wanted more and more images.
To me, these social media archives are … new digital archives. The information … might change because it is digital. … Keeping the screenshots of them, so you could see the timestamps [for] when this was happening and how it was unfolding was really important to me. And I have that [set of screenshots] organized as an archive on my own computer, on hard drives.
There's always the concern, too, of, “The book has some of the images, but it doesn't have all of them.” I do think that these … should be part of the historical record.
... There was just another new poll that came out that in terms of countries with negative perceptions, the country with the most negative perception is Israel. It's hard to describe a genocide as a PR disaster, but in their own minds, it is literally a PR disaster. Israel has invested hundreds of millions of dollars — they've quadrupled their propaganda budget, essentially — because of this realization that Israel's reputation has been so deeply tarnished throughout the world … because of the level of atrocity and violence that people have seen.
Over the last year, the media coverage of Gaza has declined under the banner of a ceasefire.
Israel has gone to a sort of low-grade genocide where they're finding this threshold — at what point can we kill people or starve them or harm them, make their conditions unlivable, where it gets less media attention? Instead of killing 100 people a day, you kill four people a day, and now it gets barely any coverage. That's the normalization, right? You're normalizing a genocide. You're normalizing the daily killing of Palestinians just because it's on a smaller scale.
It doesn't make it okay, and yet that's exactly what we've seen.
You see the sale of really important social media platforms like TikTok, right? Social media platforms using other forms of suppression, shadowbanning … trying to basically reverse what has happened over the last three years. The merger of major media organizations and corporations into massive media conglomerates that own multiple, not just entertainment media, but news media … There is this attempt to really try and take the narrative back.
That's why … making sure that this attempt to rewrite history fails because we are archiving and documenting that history in real time is important.
JS: Throughout the book, you talk about major Western media. How would you define that sphere for people?
AR: When I think of a Western media landscape, and I use the phrase “mainstream [media]” or “legacy media,” I'm really focused on liberal media structures just because they are the ones that pass themselves off as being neutral and authoritative.
There are press indexes that talk about how biased or neutral different media [outlets] are. You have the ones on the left, the ones on the right, and then it's supposed to be these ones that are in the middle … the sort of neutral, authoritative liberal media space. The BBC's, the New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, the staples that people go to when they need a legitimate source.
… The entire argument that I'm making is that they are also using propaganda or they're also very, very biased in their coverage, it's just that they do it in such a subtle manner that it doesn't come across as propaganda. That's what makes them more effective.
If you're watching Fox News … you're watching … a conservative filter. If you're reading The Intercept, you might think, “Well, this is independent media. It's more left-leaning.”
… When you're reading the New York Times … there are people like myself and many, many others who are aware of biases within these major institutions, but for the general public, they think they're consuming an authoritative paper of record.
Those major sources pass themselves off as impartial, but in reality, are acting incredibly partial.
JS: Throughout the book, you repeatedly mentioned that there are individual journalists, some of whom you call out by name like Said Arakat, who were questioning politicians in the U.S., questioning some of the editorial policies that were coming out of these organizations to little avail.
What are your thoughts on the tension between the schools of belief that these legacy liberal news structures can change from the inside versus the idea that there must be newer independent media that must come about to change how we tell stories?
AR: I think both of those things can happen at the same time. At least, that should be our aim.
It's great to have alternative media, independent media, whether it's an individual journalist doing investigative work and getting support on a Substack, or it's an independent institution like Drop Site News or Zeteo, which have been created over the last three years.
Why have they been created over the last three years?
It's a very basic economic supply and demand: People were demanding alternative ways of getting information, and there are journalists who filled that void.
It doesn't mean that the journalists at these legacy media institutions are all bad — I think that's not the right way of thinking about it at all. In fact, my argument is that most of them are probably doing or trying to do good work, but within the institutions that they're in, there are limitations.
At the same time, I do think … when you have power dynamics within societies that are so ingrained, that people within those institutions are often unaware of their own orientalism, their own racism, because they're so used to essentially reporting things the way that they are or framing things based on these power dynamics, that it's hard for them to question [them].
… I really hope that seasoned journalists as well as students of journalism will read the book. Not so it tells them what to do, but so that it questions the difference between the ethos of their profession and the way that that has manifested in reality.
Because I do believe in the idea that the free press is extremely important as a notion, especially within a liberal democracy, if we in fact live in such societies.
We have to question it because those institutions are not actually doing what they say they're going to do. That doesn't mean the aspiration is the bad part. It's the execution of it. I think Gaza has served as this watershed moment because it has forced these conversations to be had … All of the promises we were given of international institutions that were meant to prevent genocides, the moral superiority of the Western world, of liberal democracy, of free press, all of it has been called into question because none of it actually fulfilled those ideals in the last three years.
… What does it mean to be part of the free press if the institutions that you work for are silent as your counterparts? Palestinian journalists are being literally hunted down and assassinated and murdered. The job of the journalist has always been dangerous. It's significantly more dangerous today than it was several years ago because Israel justifies the slaughter of journalists. What are these institutions doing to protect their own colleagues?
These are the types of questions that I hope it [the book] elicits. That's why I'm saying I don't think that we leave the liberal media space and say, "Well, it's broken, so there's nothing that we can do about it,” for the same reason we shouldn't abandon the idea of international law or abandon the idea of liberal democracies.
They're great ideas. They're just not doing it.
Our job is to hold them accountable. That starts with understanding that the system is broken.
JS: Speaking of accountability, you say in the book that your hope is that it starts to urge more journalists and more news media to hold politicians in the U.S. accountable for their decisions in facilitating the genocide in Gaza.
To you, what would that accountability look like?
AR: One of the things that I would say is, I think that the fact that our tax dollars, our weapons, and our government have helped facilitate a genocide against an entire group of people is enough for us to act and understand that we're living through a horrific moment in history.
Let's say that there's people who have a mentality of, "Well, that's over there. That's not my problem." Or, "What's happening? The way that they cover Gaza is not my problem because it doesn't concern me as an American sitting in the United States.”
JS: As a local reporter, I often heard that concern: “Oh, this is an international issue. Why are we getting involved?" Yet as you mentioned, there were campus protests happening in so many newsrooms' backyards.
As much as some might want to believe things are in international silos, there are people of those nationalities, of those races, ethnicities in our communities. Anything happening is never going to be something that is “out of our backyards.”
AR: There's all sorts of other ties that come back to us. There's still our tax dollars that are being spent, which could be spent locally in those very neighborhoods, rebuilding them.
But also, Palestine has become a litmus test for so many things, including the erosion of our own rights. If you justify a system that carries out a genocide, a system in which there are no rights, like human beings have been stripped of the right literally to live, that's not going to stay siloed. It's going to have effects.
What happened to campus protests? … The campus encampments of spring 2024 were violently suppressed under Biden admin. The liberal Democrats are the ones that painted students as antisemitic and violent when the vast, vast, vast majority of protests were nonviolent, were peaceful. … When we start suppressing our own speech, that is the effects of our policies coming back. They're not actually separate. They are very, very much intertwined. Sorry, I got a little sidetracked because I think it's just an important point.
First of all, accountability — from a legal perspective, you [politicians] are complicit in a crime [of facilitating genocide], so there's legal accountability. You do your job very badly, so that shouldn't be your job.
If you are a journalist or an editor, or if you are part of these institutions that create the limitations of what people can say, and you're limiting the actual words that describe what is happening on the ground, then you should be out of a job, at the very least. So there's that kind of accountability as well.
… I think there's an argument to be made … that if you wrote a memo for the New York Times in the spring of 2024, telling your reporters not to use words like genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupied territories, “avoid saying Palestine,” it's not direct incitement, but you are creating the conditions under which these crimes can continue.
And I think that there is space for legal scholars to have a debate as to what that means in terms of complicity.
… The main architects of the Gaza Genocide are not just Israeli officials, but American officials that served under the Biden administration.
Now you could argue the Trump administration as well, but by the time Trump takes office, it's already a genocide. Every international norm and law has already been ground to dust by the time Trump takes office.
So the minimum accountability for that is within our own spaces where the architects of a genocide should not be allowed in any public office or space. This whole idea of the Jake Sullivans and the Anthony Blinkens and the [Brett] McGurks trying to rehabilitate their images or distance themselves from Gaza or try to rewrite that story, that accountability starts with us and not allowing them to do so at the very, very least.
JS: If there was one historical touchpoint that you want all journalists who are covering Palestine to include in their stories, what would you want that to be?
AR: That's a really tough question. [Over] the last several years, when articles create that context that you're talking about … history begins with these articles on October 7[, 2023].
And I think at the very least, that history should begin before October 7, [with] the contextualization of the occupation, apartheid, and other repressive policies that Israel has carried out as an illegal occupying power against Palestinians. That context should be there.
The most honest historical touchpoint would be 1948. It would be the Nakba.
… If you take that basic piece of history as the touchpoint, then that would help you understand everything that's happened thereafter. The basic context is, if you want to understand what's going on: ”Palestinians are an occupied population living in an apartheid state and [under] a military occupation for decades.”
What's funny is if you look at articles, there's always this little paragraph that says, “Well, on October 7, Hamas, you know…” So they do understand the idea of context, but that context is deliberate because … when Palestinians are being starved, Palestinians are being killed, then you want to justify it by using that little note. That is not the [full] historical context because it ignores everything that has happened before then.
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.
This piece was edited and copy edited by Marlee Baldridge and Gabe Schneider.