Despite polling well in ways which should give them a chance at winning both houses of Congress, the Democrats have two significant challenges heading into this year’s midterm elections.
The first one is a problem of nostalgia narrative. When they ran against Trump in the midterm elections of 2018, the Democrats could pander to nostalgia for Barack Obama. Rightly or wrongly, the first Black president stirred up yearning during Trump’s first term. He had his many economic and imperial problems, but his story was ripe for liberal reminiscence—especially in the desire to reign in the venal Trump. Can’t we just go back to the respectable Negro with the nice wife and their perfect children? was a strong selling point in repudiating the first Trump administration. No such narrative exists this time around.
The other major problem for the Democrats is the same one that’s dogged them for three straight years: Palestine. According to one poll, her refusal to stake out a position against the genocide in Gaza in line with a majority of Democratic voters cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Despite the strong support for staunchly pro-Palestine congressional candidates like Abdul El Syed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Brand Lander in New York, too many Democratic party congressional candidates—not to mention the national party operation—are missing both the moral and electability arguments regarding Gaza. This—along with the callous abandonment of trans rights by Democratic politicians from Gavin Newsom in California to James Talarico in Texas—will hurt the Democrats’ ability to turn out would-be voters on the left, especially among the young.
Both of these problems run through the heart of the Biden presidency. Where there was palpable (if misguided) nostalgia for Obama in 2018, there is not an ounce of it for Joe Biden, whose presidency began with the death of a million Americans by Covid, ended with his unconditional support for the annihilation of Gaza, and was marred throughout by stories concerning his cognitive ability (which caused him to abandon his re-election and, ultimately, hand the White House back to Trump). Even if Biden could physically go out and stump for candidates—and there’s good reason to believe he could not—his appearance would harm almost anyone who took him up on the offer.
Three new books are helpful for thinking about former President Biden, his relationship with the press, and the ways his administration and the mainstream media colluded to fuel the genocide in Palestine: Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza (Pluto), Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide (Vintage), and Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza (W.W. Norton). If the Democratic party is interested in winning congress and governing as representatives of the actual will of the American people on one of the most important issues of our time, they cannot just run against Donald Trump. No matter how much they assail “Trump’s ICE” or “Trump’s DOJ,” they must own the failures of Biden and his cabinet and assess why millions of their potential voters rejected Harris.
All three books analyze how closely the Biden administration worked with a (very willing) mainstream media to portray Israel as a noble victim and to dehumanize Palestinians.
When margins will be tight, they especially need to appeal to college voters who are not just angry at Trump but who also remember when Biden (as well as numerous Democratic governors and mayors) sent in cops to violently subdue their fellow protestors on campuses around the country. A critical reading of Johnson, Rad, and Ahmed’s books—and a reckoning with the lessons therein—is helpful in understanding the Democrats’ role both in colluding with the press to shape a genocidal foreign policy and in repressing dissent domestically.
All three books analyze how closely the Biden administration worked with a (very willing) mainstream media to portray Israel as a noble victim and to dehumanize Palestinians. All three illustrate how Biden and the press undermined the myth of the rules-based international order by having one set of standards for covering Ukraine and another for covering Gaza. Yet despite their focusing on similar topics and themes, the three books have very distinct framing and approaches, reflected by the vocations and writing styles of the three authors. Johnson (with whom I did a book event earlier this year in Chicago) is a journalist and media critic who hosts the popular podcast Citations Needed; Rad is a historian, media critic, and a fellow at DAWN and the Arab Center in DC; and Ahmed is a news reporter, now of the Washington Sun but with HuffPost for the period of time his book covers.
And while all three books think directly about the nature of language, two of them make very different choices about language than the other.
The cover of How to Sell a Genocide depicts a photograph of Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, in front of a press core that appears to be listening pliantly; both men are smiling, and their body language is relaxed as they sit beneath portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. “I chose to use the word ‘genocide’ to describe the course of events outlined in this book beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023, into the present,” Johnson writes. “I made this decision and chose to use it in the title of the book, not to be provocative for its own sake, but because it is both a consensus in the academic and human rights world and also an objective, well-documented feature of our reality.” Similarly, in Don’t Say Palestine, Rad writes that “Though it is not yet widely employed in mainstream discussion, the term ‘Gaza Genocide’ is used here deliberately, precisely because it names the very phenomena under scrutiny.” She cites a need to name “the systemic violence and deprivation Israel carried out against Palestinians.”
Though he blames Biden for much of the horror in Gaza and writes that “language matters intensely when discussing Israel-Palestine,” Ahmed does not call what happened a genocide. Rather, in Crossing the Red Line, he writes that “I use ‘war’ to describe the period this book covers, October 7, 2023 to January 20, 2025,” when Biden handed the nation back to Trump. “I do so without using the term ‘genocide’ (except when citing others) and with awareness of the violent occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 and of other bloodshed during the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including gut-wrenching attacks on Israelis during the Second Intifada and the mass expulsion of Palestinians during Israel’s establishment (the Nakba).” This phrasing equates resistance to the colonization of Palestine with the colonization itself. He phrases his choice as one to foreground his subjects’ framing, writing his “intent is not to deny this period could constitute a genocide or to cast it as unique and ahistorical but to present it as the players I focus on—the Biden administration—were thinking.”
Even though I disagreed with some of his word choices and framing, I could understand and even appreciate Ahmed’s approach, to an extent: he wanted to present the Biden officials in their own words. Ahmed is a reporter, and a very good one; as he recalls, he interviewed hundreds of people for his work as a journalist and author, and he broke many substantive stories over the last two years. These included important reporting about resignations, behind-the-scenes arguments, and diplomatic cables about matters such as mass starvation in Gaza. This reporting was crucial not just for informing the public, but also in terms of affecting political resistance to the genocide. Not everyone needs to be a wound-up opinion writer all the time (as I myself can be); we need staff writers to do the day-in, day-out work of reporting critically on issues as important as the genocide in Gaza. Media critics such as Rad or Johnson (or myself for that matter) need daily reporters covering the State Department and the White House to be able to do our work; Ahmed was among the best of them.
At its strongest, Crossing the Red Line paints an important portrait of the ghouls who prosecuted the genocide in Gaza, offering an historically crucial record of their conduct and their failures. In covering the likes of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Biden foreign policy advisor Brett McGurk, and mouthpieces Vedant Patel and Karine Jean Pierre—some of whom are already publishing revisionist, self-serving memoirs like Brink and Independent to try to wash the blood from their hands—Ahmed has performed a valuable service.
Despite this, I found myself frustrated, while reading Crossing the Red Line, that much of the helpful data in the book was undercut by the kind of framing, language choices, and equivocation used by journalists broadly over the last few years. Most notably, this is reflected in how the book’s subtitle refers, incorrectly, to Israel—a nuclear power which has dropped 2,000 lb bombs on an open-air prison—as waging a “war” against a civilian population (half of whom were children) that did not have the protection of an air force, navy, or even a standing army. Even allowing for the fact that he has committed to employing the language of the Biden administration, Ahmed’s use of “conflict” over “genocide” undermines the important reporting in the book. This choice downplays the repeated assessment of experts. And when the slaughter of children “live-steams to our devices” while much of the western press pretends it isn’t happening, as Rad notes, a dangerous “gap between reality and its media representation” undermines the credibility of journalism altogether.
Johnson and Rad begin their books with the cold truth that the Biden administration manufactured, authorized, and sold the genocide in Gaza.
Troublingly, toward the beginning of the book, Crossing the Red Line repeats largely debunked claims about sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7. (I was among 60 journalism professors to call on the Times’ story “Screams Without Words” to be subjected to an independent review, which never happened). Despite this, Ahmed does later go on to address the extensively-documented sexual violence committed by IDF soldiers against Palestinian prisoners. He even explains how the Biden administration pushed a particular narrative about sexual violence to undermine ceasefire efforts. Near the end of the book, Ahmed does an especially good job of detailing Israeli pinkwashing. As its best, Crossing the Red Line shows that even as Israel crossed Biden’s red lines—both literal (Raffah) and moral—the administration supported the unfolding genocide (a word I refuse to avoid, even if Ahmed illustrates it without using it) every step of the way.
Johnson and Rad begin their books with the cold truth that the Biden administration manufactured, authorized, and (working hand in glove with the mainstream media) sold the genocide in Gaza. They both detail how coverage of Gaza fits into patterns of racism and imperialism used when discussing the Middle East over the last few decades. But the two authors take distinct approaches in their media analysis. Rad’s is much more broad and qualitative. Anyone who follows her online is familiar with her viral posts where she marks up New York Times headlines with a red pen and savages Times-speak to convey what is actually being said. (In one such illustration in Don’ t Say Palestine’s first chapter, “Why I Correct Headlines,” Rad marks up “Evictions in Jerusalem Become Focus of Israel-Palestinian Conflict” to make it “Forced Expulsions in Jerusalem Become Focus of Palestinian Struggle.”) Macro in scope, she focuses on headlines, she says, “because people often do not read beyond them,” articles are behind paywalls, and readers “regularly consume headlines….while scrolling through their phones.”
Read together, these three books paint a damning portrait of an administration and a media apparatus that worked together to manufacture consent for one of the greatest atrocities in living memory.
Johnson deals with the micro in excruciating detail: “like any good media critic,” he writes, “my job is one of prosecutor.” He pulls no punches in making a moral argument—“In analyzing how American media helped create the political, ideological, and moral conditions for mass death in Gaza…one must always make clear the stakes, situate the media criticism in the context of the actual humans who died—those who had limbs blown off, their children starved to death, watched loved ones waste away from preventable disease, saw their families torn apart.” While Rad is giving the broad picture of the media headline war from 30,000 feet, Johnson goes inside the individual stories. He does so by “pulling from over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips in major outlets and showing all the work in open source formats.” With quantitative precision, How to Sell a Genocide is filled with numbers, such as in this devastating passage:
In the first hundred days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 262 children were killed. In the first 100 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza, more than 10,000 children were killed (the true number is likely much higher). But mention of child deaths and related terms were 33.4 percent higher for Ukraine than for Gaza—4233 versus 3632.
The book is full of devastating charts and graphs. In current journalism, we hear a lot about Trump trying to spin the press and push “fake news.” But through Johnson’s arithmetic work (paired with his own analysis), we can see clearly, in black and white visuals, exactly how well a sycophantic press followed the Biden administration’s lead to not just sell a genocide, but to try to hide the mass slaughter of children.
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Read together, these three books paint a damning portrait of an administration and a media apparatus that worked together to manufacture consent for one of the greatest atrocities in living memory. Fortunately, and despite their best efforts, they failed to fool the public; support for Palestine has steadily grown over these last three years.
The Democrats desperately need to chart a new course for their party. A supermajority of prospective Democratic voters have repudiated the disastrous, immoral, and electorally suicidal one charted by the Biden administration, and yet the leaders of party still refuse to budge. Hakeem “‘Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever” Jeffries and Chuck “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel” Schumer are as zealously Zionist as ever, and three ardently pro-Israel Democrats (Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Wesley Bell and Jared Moskowitz) were recently given key positions on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On this policy, the Democrats would do well to follow the most popular elected member of their party, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and to learn from the lessons offered in Crossing the Red Line, Don’t Say Palestine, and How to Sell a Genocide.
If they don’t, they may wake up to a congress as controlled by MAGA as the Supreme Court is—and they may find themselves as much in the minority as Justices Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor, and Katanji Brown Jackson.