The Choices the New York Times Makes

The comments of a random Columbia student? Huge news! Israel accused of genocide? Not so much.

Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images

Last week, Amnesty International, perhaps the most prominent human rights group in the world, declared that, in its judgment, Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

Many who have been witnessing the genocide carry on for over a year probably wondered why the hell Amnesty had waited so long to make this seemingly obvious conclusion. But even so, no other group with the reach, authority, or prestige of Amnesty had called the genocide by its proper name until now. The organization’s decision was thus a signal that the fact of the genocide is becoming a matter of increasingly mainstream consensus, rather than something that can be waved away as merely the opinion of fringe radicals. In other words: it was a big deal.

Or was it? Not to go by the way the New York Times, perhaps the most prominent news organization in the world, covered the story.

The Times ran a single article by correspondent Adam Rasgon about the report. Out of curiosity, I stuck the piece into Google Docs and hit the trusty word count tool.

765 words—a pretty medium-sized article for the Times. If you read the piece, though, you’ll notice that barely any of those words are devoted to anything the 296-page report actually says. These are the passages about the report itself:

“Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the Amnesty report said.

“Israel’s unlawful conduct throughout its military offensive resulted in unprecedented harm to Palestinians in Gaza that resulted in the massive scale of killings and serious injuries over an extremely short time,” it added.

[…]Amnesty International said it took into account acts by Israel between October 2023 and July 2024, including what it described as “repeated direct attacks on civilians” and extensive restrictions on humanitarian aid.

That’s it. Rasgon’s piece does contain hundreds of words about Israel’s denials of genocide; the fact that the report doesn’t deal with the October 7 attacks (a separate Amnesty report on Hamas is apparently forthcoming); and even a line about how the death toll in Gaza “doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.” For some reason, the UN’s assertion that at least 70 percent of the dead in Gaza are women and children didn’t find its way into the piece. Weird!

I decided to look at the scope and length of some other Palestine-related pieces in the Times over the past year to suss out what does appear to fire the paper’s neurons more than the question of whether Israel is committing the worst possible crime against humanity. And the results are, well, interesting.