How to Sell a Genocide

“Vivid and meticulous ... Through painstaking documentation, Johnson shows how anti-Palestinian racism among elite liberals and liberal institutions primed Western audiences for genocide” from the foreword by Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework. How to Sell a Genocide is an indictment of the US corporate media’s role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitized Israel’s war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanized the Palestinian people. Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism, and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonization of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, ongoing complicity of the US media. All royalties from the book will be donated to the Middle East Children’s Alliance. Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in the Nation, In These Times, the Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle.