As the Gaza war enters its twelfth month with no end in sight, the ongoing horrors continue to become the norm in American media and politics. This process has become so routine that we may not realize how neglect and distortion have consistently shaped views of events since the war began in October.

The Gaza war received a tremendous amount of American media attention, but the extent to which the media reported on the human facts was another matter entirely. The assumption was that the news provided viewers, readers, and listeners who were broadcast, published, and disseminated by the media to see what was really happening on the ground. But the words and images that reached those listeners, readers, and viewers were far removed from the real experiences of being in the battlefield. The belief (or the idea in the subconscious) came to be that the news media, which was authorized to report on the facts of war, were further obscuring those facts. The inherent limitations of American journalism were exacerbated by preconceived media biases.

An in-depth content analysis by The Intercept found that coverage of the first six weeks of the war by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times “demonstrated a consistent bias against the Palestinians.” These influential news outlets “disproportionately focused on Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killing of Israelis, but not Palestinian deaths.” For example, “Editors and reporters used the term ‘massacre’ to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians by a ratio of 60 to 1, ‘slaughter’ to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians by a ratio of 125 to 2, and ‘horrific’ to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians by a ratio of 36 to 4.” During the first five months of the war, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post used the word “brutal” or its variants more frequently about Palestinian actions (77%) than Israeli actions (23%). The findings, in a study by the Foundation for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, suggest an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than twenty times the loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably similar; “the lopsided rate at which the word ‘brutal’ was used in editorials to describe Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as in the supposedly straightforward news reports.”

Despite the sometimes extraordinary coverage, what was most important about the war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of sight. Gradually, the superficial narratives reaching the American public began to seem repetitive and normal. As the death toll continued to rise and the months passed, the Gaza war dwindled as a news story, and most interviews rarely discussed it.

The gaps between the standard media reports and the worsening humanitarian situation have widened. “Gaza’s population now accounts for 80 percent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, creating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and blockade,” the UN reported in mid-January 2024. “Everyone in Gaza is now hungry, a quarter of the population is starving and struggling to find food and clean water, and famine is imminent,” the UN statement quoted experts as saying.

President Joe Biden highlighted the disconnect between the Gaza war zone and American political reality in late February when he spoke to reporters about the prospects for a “ceasefire” (which never happened) while licking an ice cream cone in his right hand. “My national security adviser told me we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done,” Biden said before walking away. On the same day that Biden was photographed at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where he had just taped an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with comedian Seth Meyers, the United Nations lamented that “humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month, down 50 percent from January.” Israel was stopping aid convoys ready to enter Gaza at border crossings. More than a dozen policemen providing security for aid trucks were deliberately killed by the Israeli military. The disastrous consequences were clear.

“The volume of aid delivered to Gaza has collapsed in recent weeks as Israeli airstrikes have targeted police officers guarding the convoys, U.N. officials say, exposing them to looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians,” The Washington Post reported at the time. “On average, only 62 trucks have entered Gaza each day over the past two weeks, according to figures from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — far fewer than the 200 trucks a day that Israel has committed to facilitating. Only four trucks crossed on two separate days this week. Aid groups, which have warned of impending famine, estimate that about 500 trucks a day are needed to meet people’s basic needs.”

While such numbers filled the news reports, the countless real-life horrors were largely out of sight of the media, which showered people with private pain and grief. Major media coverage included some commendable humanitarian reporting and investigative pieces on individual tragedies in Gaza. But even at its best, such journalism did little to convey the scale, scope, and depth of the growing catastrophe. And accounts of the disaster lacked the zeal to explore the cause—especially when the path led to the U.S. “national security” establishment. U.S. media framings of the grieving Palestinian victims rarely included those who caused it in Washington or in Israel. Senior government officials readily expressed regret for the tragic loss of life while continuing to enable the relentless machine of destruction, murder, and annihilation.