Media Watch 26 June 2025
Correspondents and anchors at CNN spent the days after the Israeli attack on Iran largely ignoring the apartheid army’s deadly strikes on Palestinians in Gaza.
ZUMAPRESSAnti-Palestinian bias at CNN quite possibly hit an all-time high following Israel’s 13 June attack on Iran.
The message from the network is very clear: If you’re Palestinian, you don’t matter. At best, you’re an afterthought.
After Israel’s attack on Iran, I subjected myself to hours of CNN coverage in the US – as opposed to CNN International. News of Israel’s ongoing massacres against Palestinians, particularly hungry people seeking food aid from the untrustworthy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, was extremely scant.
Instead, CNN journalists Anderson Cooper, Clarissa Ward, Nic Robertson, Oren Liebermann and Jeremy Diamond – who earlier in the month had exposed GHF’s lies about its distribution of food aid – paid more heed to Israeli injuries than to deaths caused in Gaza by the Israeli military.
Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted that “Gaza is being deliberately disappeared” by CNN and other mainstream news sources.
The coverage of Gaza I saw was extremely brief.
On 19 June, there was a quick reference from anchor Boris Sanchez to Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza during his interview with Avi Mayer, the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. I didn’t realize how strange his sentence construction was until I checked the transcript later.
“SANCHEZ: I do want to ask you, Avi, about the damage to the Soroka Medical Center, because critics of the Israeli government argue that it’s hypocritical to say that Iran has crossed a red line with its attack while the IDF [Israel’s military] has repeatedly attacked hospitals in Gaza, including an attack as recently as overnight in which certain children were killed at a camp.”
Sanchez appears to have been referring to an Israeli attack on Beach refugee camp. He didn’t think it important enough to specify that these “certain children” were Palestinian children killed in a tent in that refugee camp.
Later that night, after midnight on the US East Coast, anchor Erica Hill gave the deaths in Gaza seven sentences – a vast improvement over what I saw from her daytime colleagues who spent the day emphasizing Iranian attacks within Israel and largely ignoring Palestinian deaths.
Hill, for her part, noted: “The Palestinian health ministry says Israeli strikes in Gaza Thursday killed more than 70 people, including children. I do want to warn you, the video you’re about to see is graphic. It shows first responders trying to rescue victims from destroyed buildings.”
She referred to “three other children” killed in a tent in Beach refugee camp and then cited the Israeli military as saying it was “not familiar” with any attack there.
In a rare CNN interview with a Palestinian guest, Christiane Amanpour (who does more of these interviews than any other CNN anchor) spoke to poet Mosab Abu Toha, recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in a 16 June broadcast. The interview was filmed just before Israel’s 13 June attack against Iran.
Abu Toha and Amanpour discussed Palestinian deaths in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military. As best as I could discern, however, that report appeared on CNN International and not CNN domestic.
I repeatedly raised concerns about the absence of Gaza coverage during Israel’s war against Iran, but received no response from CNN journalists.
Most Palestinian deaths in the days since Israel attacked Iran have not been reported by CNN domestic.On the other hand, CNN did report lightly injured Israelis. Of course, lightly injured Palestinians go unmentioned when Palestinians killed and dismembered by high-powered American weaponry don’t even get reported.
CNN’s focus on Iran often seemed intended to push a devastating outcome for Iran by heightening anger with the country over Israeli injuries and deaths while giving less attention to Iranian civilian casualties and mostly disregarding Israel’s deadly actions in Gaza.
Strikingly, on the afternoon of 24 June, after the declared ceasefire and President Donald Trump’s belated anger at Israel, Clarissa Ward suddenly began mentioning the devastating number of deaths in Gaza during the war against Iran. She had repeatedly failed to report these casualties in the preceding days as they added up day by day.Saying that “the world has been absolutely consumed with hostilities between Israel and Iran over the past 12 days,” Ward noted that “more than 860 people have died in Gaza, more than 70 today alone.” She pointedly did not say who killed all those Palestinians, though she did mention the “absolutely devastating and critical” humanitarian situation.
When the history of these 12 days is written, CNN’s decision to downplay the ongoing genocide and Israeli war crimes in Gaza should receive ample attention.
Tapper coasts with Gallant
Questions from The Electronic Intifada to Jake Tapper about his interview with former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in the midst of the Israeli war on Iran went unanswered.
Tapper, during his 18 June interview of Gallant, did not ask him a single question about the International Criminal Court arrest warrant that he faces.
Though Tapper did ask Gallant about former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s assertion that the Israeli military is committing war crimes in Gaza, the CNN anchor did not push back when his guest rejected that Israel is engaged in war crimes.
“This is 180 degrees opposite to the truth,” Gallant declared. “Israel is working according to international law. And sometimes mistakes are happening. But, unfortunately friendly fire can kill even your own citizens or soldiers. But these are mistakes. There is never – there have never been any orders on the Israeli side to hit anyone that is not an enemy.”
Tapper could obviously have mentioned the more than 56,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, including tens of thousands of civilians, in the past 20 months. He could even have mentioned Israeli citizens killed due to the Hannibal Directive, the Israeli army’s doctrine that permits the killing of Israeli captives along with their captors and bystanders in order to prevent Israel’s enemies from using them as bargaining chips.
He chose not to do so.
What does it mean?
Anybody who watches CNN and gets news from social media too is surely aware of the vast disconnect between the horrors occurring in Gaza and the dearth of related news on CNN.
Why watch CNN once you realize it is obscuring a big piece of the news and clearly biased against Palestinians?
Of course, this has the beneficial aspect of driving more news consumers toward The Electronic Intifada and other news sources that point out scores of Palestinians are being killed every day in Gaza.
Corporate news media so obviously biased are sealing their own decline in an era when viewers have numerous choices. This will be generational as younger viewers are already more inclined to get their news elsewhere.
More importantly, CNN’s failure to report the news out of Gaza extends greater impunity to Israeli officials to pursue genocide and ethnic cleansing. When they’re under a microscope for war crimes and other offenses, Israeli officials are less likely to be inclined to kill Palestinian civilians.
CNN journalists have a great deal to answer for as a consequence of their decision to report just miles from Gaza, but largely ignore the rampant Israeli human rights abuses occurring there.
Add new comment