What Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide reveals—and what the question of digital witnessing forces us to confront
There is a disturbing question at the heart of the Gaza catastrophe that cannot be answered simply by asking what governments did, what armies did, or even what the media reported.
There is another question:
What did the world do while watching?
Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, published by Pluto Press, approaches Gaza through the machinery of mainstream American media. His investigation examines how some of the most influential institutions in the Western information system—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC—framed the destruction of Gaza.
It is an important question because wars are not fought only with weapons.
They are also fought through language.
Before bombs become statistics, they become headlines. Before civilian deaths become numbers, they become narratives. Before destruction becomes politically tolerable, an audience must be persuaded—explicitly or implicitly—about whose suffering deserves attention, whose testimony deserves belief, and whose death can be explained away as inevitable.
Johnson's argument is that sections of the establishment media did not merely report the Gaza war. Through selective framing, repetition of official claims, linguistic asymmetries and uneven humanization, they helped construct the interpretive environment in which the destruction could be understood and accepted.
His methodology gives the argument unusual empirical weight.
The book examines more than 12,000 print and digital articles and approximately 5,000 television news clips across nine major U.S. outlets during the first year after October 2023. It also compares coverage of Gaza with coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, seeking measurable differences rather than relying solely on anecdotal examples.
That distinction matters.
The argument is not simply that journalists were "biased."
It is that bias can become measurable through patterns of language, selection, repetition and omission.
When an Official Claim Becomes a Headline
One of Johnson's central concerns is the treatment of claims originating with Israeli or U.S. officials.
Early allegations surrounding October 7—including highly sensationalized claims that later became disputed, corrected or withdrawn—were sometimes circulated before adequate verification had taken place.
The problem is larger than any individual false claim.
Once an emotionally explosive allegation enters the information ecosystem, its correction rarely travels as far or as quickly as the original story.
The first impression survives.
And the first impression can determine who is perceived as human, who is perceived as monstrous, and what level of violence subsequently appears justified.
This is one of the oldest problems in propaganda: the correction may arrive after the moral conclusion has already been reached.
Who Gets to Be Human?
Perhaps the most unsettling dimension of Johnson's analysis is linguistic.
Two populations can be described as suffering the same physical reality while being presented to an audience in radically different moral terms.
One victim is given a name.
Another becomes a number.
One death receives a biography.
Another appears in a casualty count.
One family is introduced to the reader.
Another disappears into the passive construction of "were killed."
Language matters because grammar itself can distribute agency.
If one population is consistently described through active verbs—murdered, massacred, slaughtered—while the deaths of another population appear primarily through passive constructions, the reader may gradually absorb a hierarchy of suffering without ever consciously deciding to create one.
This is not merely a question of vocabulary.
It is a question of whose humanity becomes narratively visible.
Gaza and Ukraine: The Comparative Mirror
Johnson's comparison with coverage of Ukraine provides another disturbing dimension.
His quantitative analysis identifies substantial differences in the frequency with which terms associated with international-law violations and displacement appeared in coverage of the two conflicts.
The purpose of such comparison is not to diminish the suffering of Ukrainians.
It is to ask why similar moral vocabulary is not consistently applied to comparable forms of violence.
That is a legitimate journalistic question.
If "war crime," "genocide," "refugee," "displacement" and related terms acquire different thresholds depending upon who is being attacked and who is doing the attacking, then journalism is no longer simply describing reality.
It is organizing moral attention.
And what journalism chooses not to emphasize can sometimes be as consequential as what it chooses to report.
The Invisible American Hand
There is another dimension of Johnson's argument that deserves attention: responsibility.
The United States was not a distant spectator to the Gaza conflict.
Washington provided Israel with substantial military, diplomatic and political support. Yet, Johnson argues, mainstream coverage often presented the Biden administration primarily through the language of restraint, diplomacy and humanitarian concern.
This creates a profound contradiction.
A government can publicly express concern about civilian suffering while simultaneously providing political or material support to a military campaign.
The journalist's responsibility is not merely to quote both sides.
It is to connect the dots.
Who supplied the weapons?
Who provided diplomatic protection?
Who opposed or supported international measures?
Who had the power to intervene?
Without those questions, responsibility becomes geographically distant.
The bombs appear to fall from nowhere.
But There Is a Larger Question
And here is where the discussion must move beyond media criticism.
Because even if Johnson's indictment of establishment media is accepted in its strongest form, the story does not end inside the newsroom.
The images escaped the newsroom.
They entered our phones.
They appeared on Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and Facebook. They arrived through livestreams, photographs, independent journalists, Palestinian reporters, doctors, aid workers and ordinary people documenting their own destruction.
For the first time in modern history, mass suffering could be witnessed continuously by billions of people without waiting for a newspaper's morning edition or an evening television bulletin.
Gaza became not merely a war being reported.
It became a catastrophe being watched in real time.
And that changes the moral question.
From the Newsroom to the Smartphone
This is where Livestreamed Genocide: A Civilization That Watched and Scrolled approaches the same catastrophe from a different direction.
The central question is not only:
How did the media frame Gaza?
It is also:
What happened to us when we could see Gaza for ourselves?
A newspaper can decide what appears on page one.
A television editor can decide which images reach the audience.
But the smartphone changed the relationship between witness and event.
The viewer could see a destroyed home.
A child pulled from rubble.
A hospital overwhelmed.
A mother searching for her family.
A journalist reporting while standing among ruins.
And then, seconds later, the viewer could scroll.
A photograph of death could be followed by a football video.
A funeral could be followed by an advertisement.
A destroyed neighborhood could be followed by a celebrity's vacation.
A child's final moments could appear between two pieces of entertainment.
The catastrophe became content in the same digital stream as everything else.
This is perhaps the most disturbing psychological transformation of the digital age.
We no longer need to be uninformed to become indifferent.
We can be hyper-informed and morally exhausted at the same time.
The Difference Between Selling and Watching
This distinction creates an important intellectual separation between Johnson's book and the broader question raised by Livestreamed Genocide.
Johnson's investigation concentrates on the production of mediated narratives.
The larger question of digital witnessing concerns the consumption of those narratives and images by an entire civilization.
One examines the newsroom.
The other follows the story into the living room, the smartphone and the scrolling finger.
One asks how public consent may be manufactured.
The other asks what happens when consent is no longer required to produce indifference—when people can witness suffering directly and nevertheless continue with ordinary life.
This is not an argument that every viewer is equally responsible.
Nor is it an accusation against every journalist, every citizen or every society.
There have been journalists, doctors, activists, students, artists, lawyers and ordinary people who have resisted indifference at considerable personal cost.
There have also been Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian and international voices challenging dominant narratives from within their own communities.
The point is precisely that witnessing creates a moral possibility, not a predetermined response.
Some people respond with solidarity.
Some with denial.
Some with anger.
Some with compassion.
Some with exhaustion.
Some simply scroll onward.
The New Problem of Digital Witness
Previous generations could plausibly say:
"We did not know."
The digital age makes that defense increasingly difficult.
We have seen.
We have watched.
We have shared.
We have commented.
We have scrolled.
We have moved on.
That does not mean everyone who sees suffering becomes morally responsible for ending it. Individuals possess vastly different levels of political power, knowledge and agency.
But something fundamental has changed.
Distance no longer necessarily produces ignorance.
The screen has collapsed distance while leaving moral responsibility unresolved.
Gaza therefore presents a challenge not only to journalism but to the culture of digital spectatorship itself.
What does witnessing mean when billions can observe destruction without possessing the power—or willingness—to stop it?
What happens when suffering becomes endlessly reproducible?
Does repetition deepen empathy?
Or does it eventually produce numbness?
Does visibility protect victims?
Or can visibility itself become another form of consumption?
And when the world watches a catastrophe through screens, who exactly is the witness?
Beyond the Failure of Journalism
Johnson's work matters because journalism remains one of the institutions through which societies decide what is credible, urgent and worthy of attention.
But journalism is only one layer of the problem.
Governments shape policy.
Military institutions shape violence.
Platforms shape visibility.
Algorithms shape circulation.
Audiences shape demand.
And ordinary people decide, every day, whether to stop, look, understand, remember—or scroll.
That is why Gaza should not be understood merely as a failure of journalism.
It may also represent a profound crisis of digital witnessing.
The tragedy is not simply that the world lacked images.
The world had images.
Millions of them.
The tragedy is not simply that people lacked information.
Information was everywhere.
The unsettling question is what happens to a civilization when knowledge becomes abundant but moral response remains optional.
The Civilization That Watched and Scrolled
Perhaps this is the uncomfortable lesson of Gaza.
The twenty-first century may not be remembered as the age in which humanity finally acquired the technology to see suffering.
It may be remembered as the age in which humanity acquired unprecedented capacity to see suffering—and discovered how easily seeing could coexist with continuing.
We watched from our phones.
We watched from our televisions.
We watched from offices, universities, bedrooms and trains.
We watched from countries thousands of miles away.
We watched children emerge from rubble.
We watched hospitals collapse.
We watched journalists disappear.
We watched families search for food.
We watched the images multiply.
And then the screen offered us something else.
So we scrolled.
Adam Johnson's How to Sell a Genocide asks us to examine the institutions that helped shape what the Western public saw, believed and understood.
That question is indispensable.
But another question remains.
What did we become after we saw it?
That is the question that journalism alone cannot answer.
Because Gaza was not only livestreamed.
It was witnessed.
And perhaps the deepest moral indictment of our digital age is not that the world could not see.
It is that the world could see—and still learn how to scroll.
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