This week, some of the most prominent figures in American broadcast news tried to get away with a staggering lie. The story is a particularly instructive case study on the dynamics of the American media's failure to accurately cover the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
On Sept. 12, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that her office would pursue criminal charges against students and alumni who protested the genocide by setting up an encampment on the University of Michigan's main quad. That protest launched on April 22, one day after Palestinian civil defense crews unearthed a mass grave containing 180 bodies at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis. On May 21, university police moved against the protest in the early morning and cleared the encampment, pepper-spraying protestors in the process. Nessel's office filed misdemeanor trespassing charges against two of the protesters; the other seven face felony charges for "an additional count of Resisting or Obstructing a Police Officer," per the DA's office, for "making direct contact with the officers' bodies" while they were being arrested.
On Sept. 13, the day after Nessel's office announced it would in effect charge people with felonies for the crime of being beaten up, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib denounced the attorney general's harsh treatment in an interview with the Detroit Metro Times. Her responses were thorough and thoughtful: She lamented the precedent Nessel's office was setting, the prosecution's choice to ruin students' lives, and the long-term consequences of over-policing the protest. "In 10 years, the University of Michigan itself is going to teach about this movement and say how wonderful it was," she said.
Tlaib also discussed the asymmetrically harsh treatment and severe crackdowns that have characterized the nationwide response to pro-Palestine protests. "We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs," the Michigan representative said. "But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs."
On Sept. 19, Tlaib was the subject of a vile political cartoon drawn by Henry Payne of the Detroit News and the National Review, depicting Tlaib next to a smoldering pager—a day after the government of Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and handheld radio devices throughout Lebanon, killing dozens and wounding thousands in what it claimed was a targeted attack of Hezbollah extremists. Tlaib responded on Twitter, saying the cartoon's "racism will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities." That's a claim Nessel agreed with, though only as a means of defaming Tlaib: In her own tweet denouncing the cartoon's Islamophobia, Nessel also said, "Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong."
But Tlaib never did that. At no point in the Metro Times interview, on Twitter, or in any other published interview had Tlaib ever said anything about Nessel being Jewish, in any context. Yet that didn't stop Nessel's clear implication from becoming a potent accelerant.
For this, we have CNN's Jake Tapper to blame. Tapper—who will find any excuse to use current events to smear Palestinians—had Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one of his programs this past Sunday. "Do you think that Tlaib's suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased was antisemitic?" Tapper asked. Whitmer declined the bait but also didn't defend Tlaib on the merits, issuing instead a non-answer about how Jewish, Muslim, and Arab communities were all in pain.
Tapper persisted. "Do you think Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job?" he asked. "Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not."
That's a very serious thing to lie about so casually, even for a guy who talks about the mass death of Palestinian civilians as if the only problem with that phrase is that "Palestinian civilian" is contradictory. Tapper had set the terms of the issue: Tlaib's supposed antisemitism, not the arrests of the protestors nor what they protested. Whitmer herself even became a target, because even if she refused to come to her ostensible colleague's defense against lies about her saying something antisemitic, she also declined to join in the attack. Jewish Insider's Josh Kraushaar published a story, also on Sept. 22, running with Tapper's lie and portraying Whitmer as betraying "fellow Democrat" Nessel.
Tapper and the Anti-Defamation League's Jonathan Greenblatt used Kraushaar's article to go after Whitmer for failing to hold a congresswoman to account for something she didn't say, and their bullying worked. "The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic," read a statement by Whitmer, who caved under pressure because the decision was made extremely clear: Either throw Tlaib under the bus or be labeled an antisemite alongside her. For the governor of the 10th-most populous state in the U.S., co-signing a lie about the most prominent member of her own party from her own state is simpler than defending the only Palestinian American in Congress, or even maintaining cowardly neutrality.
This all advanced further when CNN's Dana Bash—predictably terrible and dishonest in her coverage on this topic—worked to amplify it. The anchor kicked off a Monday segment about antisemitism by referring to Tlaib's "accusation that the state's Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job."
By this point Steve Neavling, the Metro Times reporter who interviewed Tlaib, had put out a fact-check making clear that she never said what she was accused of saying. That compelled Jewish Insider to poorly edit its story, and prompted Tapper to address the controversy—but only on a technicality, and under circumstances permitting Nessel herself to reiterate the lie.
"I should note that I misspoke yesterday," Tapper said, misspeaking again and using a mealy-mouthed word for "lied." He told Nessel, "I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib's comments," before letting her once again say she thought Tlaib was being antisemitic. Bash outdid Tapper for spinelessness, simply repeating Tlaib's quote and Nessel's line rather than authentically correcting herself.
To call this a simple journalistic failure on CNN's part would be to misread the dynamics in play. The U.S. is facilitating Israel's campaign of extermination in Gaza, which means Americans need to be sold on a war. That job falls to American prestige media outlets like the New York Times and CNN. In February, the Guardian detailed CNN's policy of submitting all stories on the genocide for approval by the network's Jerusalem bureau and parroting Israeli government sources, which is how you get Anderson Cooper nodding along as a former Mossad official says "the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term."
The flaw in this strategy is that people are not as gullible as these mainstream outlets think they are. Any attempted defense of the war on moral grounds hinges on the idea that Palestinians are fundamentally less valuable, less human than other people. One way to do that, Tapper's way, is to portray Palestinian identity as inherently violent and antisemitic, usually by casting doubt on the idea that not everyone in Gaza is a member of Hamas. (You can see this same cycle playing out in coverage of Israel's war of expansion in Lebanon.)
As it becomes harder to cover Israeli aggression without having to talk about murdered aid workers and mass graves outside of hospitals, CNN and its ilk dictate the terms of the discussion such that criticizing Israel becomes dangerous. If you are talking about the signs that 20-year-olds bring to protests, you are not talking about dead children, so you can put your enemies on the defensive. Public defense of Palestinian life becomes more fraught, especially if antisemitism is defined downward to encompass any critique of Israel's government or its war.
Inherently this cheapens the real and violent antisemitism from American right-wingers. The rhetorical goal of treating Tlaib's denunciation of anti-Palestinian bias as equal to Donald Trump saying if he loses the 2024 election, "the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that," is to paint all criticism of an ongoing genocide as supportive of a hypothetical one. Look at Whitmer instantly backing down once neutrality was framed as antisemitic. It didn't matter that Bash and Tapper's attack on the governor was based on a lie; Whitmer had every incentive to keep herself on the safe side of the phony accusation. As a Palestinian-American whose very identity has been established as de facto antisemitic, Tlaib doesn't have the luxury. When she denounces the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh or calls out the contradictions of American progressivism and Zionism, she is labeled an antisemite.
The pushback Tapper and Bash face in this particular case is because their lie is so easily disproved; that's the only sense in which it is exceptional. I recently came across a 2013 Huffington Post interview with Tapper, conducted shortly after he got the CNN gig, in which he spoke about how formative he found the media failures that defined the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. "I cannot overstate how influential that failure of the media was to the way I approached my job when I was White House correspondent," Tapper said. He's proving it every day.
