Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber's Gregory Shupak about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When a Los Angeles police officer killed a child in a department store, the New York Times ran the story with the headline “Stray Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store.” A later headline from the Times referred to the ”Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl.”
That used to be thought of as just newspaper speak, but we can now recognize how that distorted, passive-voice language is a choice that obscures agency and undermines accountability. It's not just words.
We see that obscuring of agency, and undermining of accountability, writ larger when crimes are committed by governments corporate media favor, against populations they don't care much about. Here, journalistic language takes on another level of import, because calling those crimes by their name brings on particular legal and political responses. New research from our guest explores that question in Gaza and the West Bank.
Gregory Shupak is a media critic and activist. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he's author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Toronto. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.
Gregory Shupak: Hi, how are you?
JJ: Well, I'm OK. When Trump declared his plans for Gaza: “You're talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” and then later he declared that the US would "take over the Gaza Strip" and "own it," if you still have an outrage bone in your body, you may have thought, surely this will be seen as the wildly illegal, immoral move that it is.
How can it be resisted? Who can counter it? What bodies do we have to protect Palestinians in the face of this? All of those would be questions for journalists to pursue, but you can't challenge something that you won't name. Which brings us to the research that you've just been working on. Tell us about that.
GS: Sure. So this plan that Trump has put forth and stuck to for quite some time—I thought perhaps it would just be one of his many deranged statements that would be later walked back by, if not him, then others in administration, but he keeps pressing on this—it was widely described as ethnic cleansing by people who are positioned to make that assessment. So people like António Guterres of the United Nations, their secretary general, or Navi Pillay, who is another UN official focusing on Palestine. This plan that Trump brought forth was denounced by them and by others, like Human Rights Watch, as ethnic cleansing.
And yet that term has seldom found its way into the coverage. I looked at coverage of the first, just over a week, since Trump's racist fever dream, and I found that 87% of the articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post did not include the term "ethnic cleansing." And, in fact, only 26% of the coverage included a term like "ethnic cleansing," or something similar that captures the violence of what he is proposing. So terms like "forced displacement" or "expel" or "expulsion" or "forced transfer."
Just automatically, you have a whitewashing of what he's proposing to do, even in coverage that is critical of it. And that's really leaving audiences, who're maybe not terribly well-versed in international law, not in a very strong position to understand just how egregious of a crime it is that Trump is advocating.
JJ: And ethnic cleansing is almost like just a pejorative, as though it had no actual meaning. In fact, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, you found, put it in scare quotes, like it's an accusation and not a phenomenon.
GS: Exactly. And I talk in my piece about Bret Stephens and a couple of Wall Street Journalpieces that endorsed Trump's plan. However, I didn't mention that Stephens had a second piece that addressed Trump's plan in passing, and he blatantly lied and said that Trump's plan does not involve forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza. But Trump has been quite clear that that's exactly what he has in mind. So not only do we have a widespread failure to properly name this plan for ethnic cleansing, we also have quite a few cases of endorsements of what Trump is calling for.
JJ: We know that for many US media—and you illustrated it—US exceptionalism, just the idea that, “Oh, sure, we can do this anywhere in the world,” extends to the point where they don't even really acknowledge international law. And this is a longstanding problem, where the UN is just kind of meddling in US power, and that sort of thing. But it really comes to the point where they don't even invoke the idea that there is something called international law.
GS: Yeah, that's quite important. Only 19% of the coverage of Trump's proposal for Gaza, if you can even call it that, only 19% include the term “international law,” which is really a key paradigm through which this, and any kind of international armed conflict, needs to be understood. But it's just not even being presented to the audience as something that they need to think about.
And it put me in mind of Richard Falk and Howard Friel, [who] wrote a book 20 years ago or so, called The Record of the Paper, and it talked about how in coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, international law was totally absent from New York Times editorials that were in various ways endorsing or at least giving credibility to the concept of the attack. And we still see the same pattern with regard to Gaza, as well as the West Bank, where patterns of ethnic cleansing are also unfolding.
JJ: And yet we know they will invoke international law when it suits, when it seems like something that bolsters the US case.
You found, finally, similar issues with coverage of the West Bank, and I think it's important for folks to understand this is not just a story of Gaza anymore, obviously; this is an expansive story. And when we talk about the West Bank here, as is often the case, you can find an example of an outlet or a journalist who is doing straightforward, informative witnessing, and you can actually use that to contrast with what many powerful, better resourced outlets are doing. And that's the case in coverage of the West Bank, right? It's not that everyone is refusing to witness or acknowledge.
GS: No, I think that one of the main problems I see in the way that the events unfolding in the West Bank are being portrayed is that there's a refusal, you might call it, to connect how each “individual” event or incident connects to others.
So you'll have reports that'll say, Israel’s invasion of Jenin refugee camp that has unfolded in recent weeks has largely emptied out the entire area. But the coverage of that fails to situate that in relation to the fact that we are seeing similar types of violence unfolding in other parts of the West Bank that Israel is attacking, particularly the lower West Bank, and that these are part of a longer-term trend towards, as several observers that I cite in the article have pointed out, of ethnic cleansing the territory.
So, for example, I talk about how in October of last year, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese put forth a report in which she describes escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And she talks about how, since October 7, 2023, at least 18 West Bank communities have been depopulated under the threat of force.
So what she and others have observed is that this is not a matter of, OK, there's a couple days of fighting, and people go back to their homes when it's safe. It's part of a longer-term trajectory whereby it's becoming difficult, and often impossible, for people in West Bank towns to go back to their homes once Israel drives them out. So not at all unlike what we have seen in Gaza.
Gregory Shupak: "What we're talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land."
JJ: But the refusal to connect those dots, and to make it seem as though, oh, a skirmish happened over here today, and oh, a skirmish happened over there yesterday, and not telling the bigger story, is the failure.
GS: Exactly. And as is so often the case with coverage of Palestine, and other issues as well, we get a muddying of the agency of the perpetrators of the violence, right? Everything's reduced to just “clashes” and “conflict,” rather than efforts to enforce colonial subjugation, and resistance to that. So that kind of power dynamic is completely glossed over, when you get this anodyne language about just conflicts and clashes. There's no space within that language for communicating that what we're talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.
