“Always Fight for Israel”

Morning Joe takes a decidedly pro-Israel slant. As Scarborough said about himself on an April 4 segment:

There are those of us who have loved Israel, who’ve defended Israel, who have fought about Israel, who still love Israel, who actually went to battle with their fathers in-law on national television over Israel and would do it again . . . who will always fight for Israel.

Sure enough, the first three months of the show’s Gaza coverage mirrored Biden’s own “bear hug” strategy on Israel: a full-bodied embrace of both the Israeli war and Biden’s blank check policy for it.

From October 2023 to roughly January 2024, much of the show’s coverage was devoted to ardently justifying Israel’s unprecedentedly brutal assault — a campaign explicitly aimed at Gaza’s entire population, but which was invariably framed on the show as a “mission to destroy Hamas” or merely “targeting Hamas leaders.” Viewers were told over and over that Hamas and its violence have nothing to do with the Israeli occupation, but were purely motivated by the desire “to kill Jews”: that it was a Nazi- or ISIS-like group driven purely by evil; or was even “worse than ISIS” and, as a guest at one point implied, more unscrupulous than Adolf Hitler himself.

“There is just absolutely no doubt that Israel is left with no choice but to degrade Hamas,” Scarborough said on October 13, specifically pointing to a number of Hamas atrocities that would later be debunked — and presenting as the only option a military strategy that numerous experts, even hawkish ones, would soon declare unrealistic and self-defeating.

In its earliest segments on the war, the show’s hosts — aware their most powerful viewer, the US president, was paying attention and never shy to heap flattery on him — seemed to speak directly to Biden, assuring him that his unconditional support for this strategy was the right course of action and would reap political dividends at home: “unbelievable moral courage”; “understands the assignment clearly”; “the most important thing to do.”

“Programs like Morning Joe do not do news or news analysis, but engage for the most part in propaganda about topics in which these talking heads actually possess very little knowledge,” says William Youmans, associate professor at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. “They are more like political actors who take cues from power to spread ideological agendas.”

The show early on rationalized the military strategy and its unprecedented rate of physical destruction and civilian death in Gaza. Sometimes that was done through leading questions to guests.

“Could you just, for Americans that are watching and then, you know, who will see strikes against buildings in Gaza, can you explain what those targets are that you’re striking out against, and can you also explain what Israel is doing to minimize civilian casualties while trying to degrade and destroy the Hamas terror network?” Scarborough asked an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson on October 12. A few minutes later, he asked again:

Major, if you could, and sorry to make you explain things that seem so basic to you, but for Americans watching, if you could explain for those who are saying Israel is a great occupier of the Palestinian people, can you explain that Israel turned Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005, had one election since then, and really the greatest victims of Hamas have been the Palestinian people, who have watched them forego aid . . . because their singular obsession is killing Jews and destroying Israel?”

“I absolutely couldn’t agree with you more,” the spokesperson replied.

Such editorializing from the hosts was common. “We will say again that Hamas is hiding behind the civilians, attracting the bombs from Israel that are killing civilians as well,” cohost Willie Geist added to one congressman’s charge that Hamas was fabricating civilian casualties. “All of this of course, just to be very clear, a response to the savage attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Mika Brzezinski reminded viewers, after briefly and gingerly mentioning the “civilian lives that are bound to be lost” as a result of Israel’s actions.

These talking points could be surprisingly malleable. In the first show that followed the October 7 massacre, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt compared the Hamas attack to the atomic bombing of forty thousand people in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, to capture the scale and horror of what the group had done. Six months later, Scarborough brought up the same bombing, only now comparing it to Israeli actions, as a way to exculpate the Israeli government.

“Pearl Harbor: it forced us to move against the Japanese, forced us to do a lot of things that caused a lot of suffering,” Scarborough said. “We could talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Guests could just as effectively editorialize in the same vein, particularly as the show frequently featured current and former Israeli officials as guests. Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev’s December 15 claim that “Israel’s actually done very well in saving civilian lives” compared to other belligerents — in response to a minute-and-a-half-long monologue defending the killing of civilians by recurring guest Donny Deutsch  — went by with no challenge, despite being demonstrably untrue.

“They’re raising an entire generation of Palestinians who are capable of committing the atrocities on October 7,” former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the hosts on December 26.

“These are not houses. These are military outposts masquerading as houses,” a guest told viewers at the beginning of one January 5 segment, as the camera surveyed the barren, bombed-out ruins of a Gazan neighborhood.

Hosts and guests argued vehemently against a cease-fire, repeatedly pointing to an October 24 interview with Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, who said there would be more attacks like those on October 7. “There you have it. For people calling for a cease-fire, this is what the Israelis are up against,” Geist commented. In a December 4 segment that began with a summary of Israel expanding the war to southern Gaza, Scarborough backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to withdraw from cease-fire talks.

At the same time that the president pursued the policy advocated by his favorite political show, he was ignoring his own administration’s advice. Within a week of the war starting, high-ranking State Department officials warned the policy was making the United States complicit in war crimes and hurting US standing in the region, only to be overruled by the White House. Hundreds of officials and staff members across the State Department, National Security Council, USAID, and dozens of other government bodies would call on the president to back a cease-fire — which the White House opposed, publicly and privately.

“The people who watch the show are the small number of elite opinion shapers who drive Democratic politics,” says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “It’s the venue that prioritizes ideas that then get recirculated and become conventional wisdom.”

Eventually, from around December, this editorial line began shifting — not long after the Biden administration reportedly expected that Netanyahu would soon be booted from office and Democrats began ramping up criticism of him. The vast majority of their criticism wasn’t over the war though, but over the security failures on October 7, Netanyahu’s behind-the-scenes efforts to keep Hamas in power, and other ways he had harmed Israel.

A Glaring Absence

Besides Israeli officials, Morning Joe had no shortage of right-leaning guests making pro-war arguments. Not included in this line-up? Palestinians.

In the six months’ worth of Morning Joe segments posted online that cover the Gaza war, not a single Palestinian guest has appeared, despite the fact that the war had, in that period, killed more than 34,000 Gazans, including at least 14,500 children.

For Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, it’s part of a pattern across media and even the Democratic National Convention stage. “It is a repetitive decision to prevent audiences from hearing firsthand accounts of the human toll and suffering in Gaza and now Lebanon as well,” he says.

Other than a brief, forty-second video clip of a Palestinian mother describing her fears that played in one correspondent’s report, the closest thing to a Palestinian guest was a November 6 segment that featured clips from a frequent pro-Israel guest’s interview with Mosab Hassan Yousef, the virulently pro-war and Islamophobic son of a Hamas founder turned Israeli informant, who made a series of arguments for continued war and against a cease-fire. Almost qualifying was a segment the next day, which, in lieu of interviewing Palestinians, featured New York Times columnist Nick Kristof speaking for them.

“Excluding Palestinians from the show for so long enables uninterrupted dehumanization,” says Gregory Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, an analysis of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding that allowing Palestinians to speak demonstrates viscerally that they are ordinary people who share much in common with viewers. “Such exclusions render Palestinians eminently killable.”

Instead, Morning Joe’s war coverage was overwhelmingly oriented around Israeli suffering. An early segment covering the Netanyahu government’s urging of one million Palestinian civilians to evacuate northern Gaza in advance of an invasion — an act of ethnic cleansing — was framed around the “difficult questions about what that invasion may mean and whether it could put the hostages in danger.”

It wasn’t just the hostages. On Morning Joe, viewers were made to relive the horrific attack on October 7 over and over again. While not surprising in the week that followed the attack, this continued weeks and months into the war, long after the Palestinian death toll overtook the Israeli one, and as it eventually became ten, twenty, thirty times that number.

One April 22 segment, reporting on a New York public exhibit about October 7, was emblematic. “Hamas did this purposefully to kill, torture and rape Jews,” Scarborough said, before telling viewers they are “terrorists who shot their infants in their crib, who raped their daughters, savaged their wives, killed their parents in front of them,” shortly after. Moments later, he reiterated that the group was one that had “raped their women, who killed their babies, that burned their grandmothers.”

“And somehow, somehow, nobody wants to talk about this,” he said, falsely. “Nobody wants to talk about October the 7.”

But Scarborough did, over and over again, with such lurid descriptions of the violence inflicted on Israelis that day a regular feature of the show’s discussions of the war. In one December 4 segment, Scarborough delivered a lengthy monologue that gruesomely described the rape of Jewish women three separate times in two minutes, as well as a host of other atrocities (“burning their grandmothers . . . the shooting of babies in cribs, the burning of babies in cribs”).

Other times, interviewees did so: “The smell of death was overwhelming”; “Each family, bound together, burned alive, set on fire, bullet holes”; “They raped, tortured, and mutilated Americans”; “Everything was either on fire or burnt, you could still see bodies on the streets, blood everywhere”; “These wonderful houses where these people lived in peace, and they were burned and decapitated and mutilated in their beds.” A volunteer with the controversial Israeli emergency response nonprofit ZAKA related that a Holocaust survivor who had witnessed the infamous Nazi torturer Dr Josef Mengele’s human experiments told him the crimes of October 7 were “much worse” than the Holocaust.

It is hardly scandalous that the show would describe the ghastly crimes of October 7, or express horror about them and sympathy for impacted Israelis. The problem lies elsewhere.

“The consistent emphasis on the horrors of October 7 week after week is intended to provide justification in advance for Israeli atrocities,” says Youmans.

Shupak says the point of this one-sided coverage is to demonize not just Hamas but “the broader ethnic or national group to which they belong to create the impression that violence against them is justified and necessary.”

It also meant the show spread misinformation.

Months after the Israeli government couldn’t confirm some of the most sensational claims about October 7 and the US, European, and Israeli press all debunked them — beheaded babies and numerous other infants shot or burned alive, for instance, or a pregnant woman cut open and the fetus pulled out — Morning Joe’s hosts and guests continued to spread them. (In reality, thirty-six children were killed on October 7 and, as of the time of writing, only one known infant, ten-month-old Mila Cohen). That includes as recently as this past April, when Rep. Josh Gottheimer told the hosts that Hamas had “butchered, decapitated, ripped babies out of wombs, you know, burned babies alive,” with no pushback.

Yet when Israeli forces were falsely accused of shocking crimes, the show didn’t mince words: it was “blood libel,” drumming up hatred and violence against Jews.

At least one regular viewer spread such misinformation further: President Biden himself, who infamously and repeatedly claimed, reportedly against the advice of White House staff, to have seen phantom images of the decapitated babies as late as December 2023, using language strikingly similar to that heard on the program.

Media experts Jacobin spoke to called this part of a “feedback loop” and an “incestuous echo chamber” between politicians and the news media that is, in theory, contrary to the mission of a free press.

“This whole circle keeps politicians in their own bubble, out of touch with the public,” says Youmans.

The other issue is how it compared to the show’s treatment of Palestinians.

Palestinian Lives Matter

Morning Joe simply did not show the same concern, sympathy, or moral outrage for Palestinian suffering and the violence against them as it did for Israelis.

“The helplessness must be unimaginable, impossible to live with,” Brzezinski commented while interviewing one family member of the Israeli hostages. In a later segment, she and Scarborough recounted how she had gasped upon seeing Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin on television (“You don’t have to be a mother or father, you just have to be a human being to have a little gasp when you see that video,” commented Geist).

“An all-American kid,” Scarborough commented in an interview with Goldberg-Polin’s parents. “Long Island. Was gonna go to a school in Binghamton. Knicks fan. I mean anyone watching out in Long Island, I mean, this is your son. This is your daughter. This is your child.”

This level of empathy was not extended to Palestinians.

While viewers were constantly and viscerally reminded of the horrors Israeli civilians had suffered on October 7 and continued to suffer in captivity, their plight, appropriately, given faces and voices, Palestinian suffering was covered in interviews with NBC correspondents, almost always from a bird’s-eye distance. They were often a nameless, faceless mass, whose struggles were briefly and emotionlessly described to viewers.

The massive and steadily rising Palestinian death toll was rarely mentioned, according to a search of full-episode transcripts of the first three months of the show after October 7. The Gaza death toll only got a mention in one-third of the first sixty episodes that followed that date, and that’s being generous: several of those mentions were panelists and guests calling the death toll “false,” “exaggerated,” or otherwise casting doubt on the figure, and it was often prefaced with the caveat that it came from Hamas. (In May, Scarborough would spread the false claim on X/Twitter that the United Nations had halved its estimates of Gazan women and children killed, a tweet that is still up despite a UN spokesperson making clear this was not true.)

The Israeli death toll, by contrast, was mentioned in just under half of those sixty episodes — an undercount, since it doesn’t include several times that viewers were told the equivalent of 50,000 Americans had been killed. This was despite the fact that it was a static figure related to a single event further and further in the past, rather than, as in the Palestinians’ case, an ongoing and rising death toll related to atrocities that were taking place every single day.

“A one-sided bias of any world event has a powerful conditioning effect,” says Tarin.

Segments that started out covering the plight of Palestinians quickly shifted their focus elsewhere. On October 17, the show ran a brief, two-minute segment about the brutal murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy that social tensions over the war had inspired; the guest invited on to discuss the incident was the ADL’s Greenblatt, who immediately turned the topic to antisemitism and October 7.

Often, segments on Palestinian suffering became about Israeli suffering. One segment that began by surveying the humanitarian crisis in Gaza quickly pivoted to a lengthy, first-hand account of an Israeli hostage returning to her ransacked home. A November 20 segment that ended with a correspondent reporting that babies had died as a result of Israel’s assault on Al-Shifa Hospital saw the hosts immediately turn to the importance of “how to get the hostages home” and that Israel was “losing the information war.” Another segment on November 9 opened with an overview of the effects of Israel’s siege on the territory and the need for letting in aid, then quickly turned to a discussion of October 7, the feelings and resilience of Israelis, and antisemitism.

“They’re saying, ‘Yes, these terrible things happened to Israel on October 7, but . . .’,” guest Dan Senor said during the segment.

“There’s always a ‘but’,” replied Geist.

“There’s the ‘but’. ‘But: have you thought about the fact that Gaza is an open-air prison, have you thought about the suffering of the Palestinians,’” said Senor, charging that bringing up these points was a “legitimization” of Hamas’s atrocities that day.

Such coverage mirrors what even a former Clinton State Department official has called President Biden’s clear lack of empathy toward Palestinians. The president has been repeatedly criticized for failing to show the same compassion for Palestinians in speeches as he has extended to Israelis, often through graphic and emotional descriptions of the Israelis killed on October 7. When he finally met this past April with a group of Arab and Muslim Americans who described to him the horrors being experienced by those in Gaza, Biden reportedly told them to “think about the young people that were killed on October 7.”

By far the hosts’ strongest language in support of ending the war, and their harshest words for the president for not doing more to bring it about, came in a segment on April 3. But, tellingly, it wasn’t triggered by the situation in Gaza, where at that point the death toll had reached nearly 33,000. Instead, it was the IDF’s targeted killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, the aid organization founded by chef José Andrés, beloved within the DC circuit.

“I gotta tell ya. I’m glad the president spoke out strongly, but this has gotta stop,” Brzezinski said on the segment.

“The overwhelming number of Americans agree with José Andrés, that this is just enough, and they need to focus on a permanent cease-fire and they need to focus on getting the hostages home,” commented Scarborough. (Just two weeks earlier, Scarborough had defended Biden and praised him for “desperately trying to work this out.”)

“I’m so sick of hearing about how upset President Biden is,” exasperated NBC analyst Elise Jordan told the panel, suggesting, along with former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, that it was time to cut off arms to Israel.

In segments that followed, the plight of Palestinians was given slightly more salience. But only relatively speaking: these points were inevitably framed around how it “hurts Israel in the long run” and the “damage this is doing to the standing of Israel in America.” In an April 4 segment, Scarborough launched into an uninterrupted, passionate, seven-minute-long monologue listing off Netanyahu’s various misdeeds that had harmed Israel, including another lengthy, often gruesome account of October 7 atrocities that alone lasted a minute and a half. The crimes he had inflicted on Palestinians didn’t get a single mention.

Propaganda by Omission

In constructing a world of alternate facts for its elite viewership, what is arguably most striking about Morning Joe’s Gaza coverage is not what was on the show, but what was missing.

Morning Joe’s audience didn’t learn, for instance, about the growing body of scholars and experts — a number of them Jewish and even Israeli themselves — who considered Israel’s war a genocide. Names like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Francesca Albanese, who had all deemed the war a genocide, were neither mentioned on the show nor on MSNBC as a whole, according to a GDELT Television Explorer search.

On the first morning after fifty-five scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence released a statement warning of the “danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza,” the hosts brought up that word only in the context of student protesters supposedly calling for “the genocide of Jews.” The show tended to argue instead that Gaza was not a genocide, and that to charge that it was was antisemitic.

When South Africa presented to the International Court of Justice a comprehensive list of explicitly genocidal statements from more than a dozen Israeli military and political officials all the way up to the prime minister, Scarborough misleadingly painted them as purely the statements of “extremists in the cabinet . . . who are loathed by the leaders of the IDF” and “whose words are going to be used against Israel.”

Israeli atrocities that sparked worldwide outrage didn’t exist on the show, like video footage of Israeli forces shooting and bombing unarmed Palestinians walking through Gaza, or the discovery of mass graves full of Palestinian corpses in April. (By contrast, a week after the latter news, the show had multiple segments discussing Kristi Noem’s admission that she had killed her dog.)

The day a different mass grave was discovered in February, containing thirty bodies of people killed execution-style, Morning Joe’s only Gaza-related segment was about Biden consoling the family of a US soldier that was killed as a result of the president’s support for Israel’s war.

Despite the show’s overwhelming emphasis on October 7, that Israeli forces themselves were responsible for many casualties attributed to Hamas on October 7 does not appear to have been mentioned in the show. First reported by Israeli media before being picked up internationally, it was not brought up in the segments posted to the Morning Joe site, nor were the reports about it covered on episodes the morning after their publication, when the show typically discussed notable news stories.

A search for “Hannibal” — referring to the Hannibal directive, the IDF policy permitting soldiers to kill Israeli citizens to prevent hostages being taken — shows the word brought up only in the context of Trump’s references to Silence of the Lambs character Hannibal Lecter. References to “friendly fire” came up only a handful of times, referring exclusively to Israeli soldiers accidentally killed in Gaza.

One omission in particular deserves attention, even though it falls outside the six-month timeframe. While the show often claimed the world was ignoring Hamas’s sexual violence, Morning Joe did not once cover the shocking sexual torture of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. Sde Teiman, the detention camp where the torture took place, was mentioned only once on the network, on Chris Hayes’s show one month earlier, and “torture” and “abuse” were, in the context of Gaza, reserved exclusively for Hamas’s crimes on October 7.

War on Protesters

There is one final aspect of note in Morning Joe’s coverage: the show’s war on protesters.

Though the hosts eventually dropped their opposition to a cease-fire and started criticizing the war, what remained was their implacable hostility toward the campus protesters who had beaten them to it. Morning Joe viewers were told over and over again that college campuses were hotbeds of antisemitism, that antiwar protests were hate marches calling for genocide, no different from those in Charlottesville or Nazi-era Germany — and that they needed to be shut down by disciplining and even dismissing both students and professors or, ultimately, by using police force.

This fear campaign operated from the very start of the war — when ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt told the hosts on October 10 that campus antiwar protests were akin to the 1939 gathering of twenty thousand American Nazis in Madison Square Garden — to the very end of the first six months, when Geist charged that protesters’ rhetoric was “just explicit calls for antisemitic activity, behavior, and violence,” and Scarborough claimed protesters were “talking about ‘genocide’ and holding up signs that talk about the final solution.”

“If you’re a Jew at Harvard, you can’t even walk across your own campus without being surrounded and attacked,” Scarborough claimed on November 2. “Talk about how these neo-Nazi groups are in fact infiltrating and manipulating some of these protests and [turning] them into something they were not originally designed for,” Al Sharpton baselessly asked one guest. In April, Scarborough described US campus protests as part of a “world war against Jews.”

This picture has had little relationship to reality. There was no mention of the documented fact that protests were not just led, but made up of and often organized by Jewish students and antiwar groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (the closest that came to it was a guest acknowledging that protesters “would say there are Jewish students among the encampments, which I’m sure is absolutely true”). Far from being violent, separate analyses that drew on Armed Conflict Location and Event Data and were released on May 10 and June 22 found that close to 100 percent of campus protests documented no violence from protesters. By leaving out such facts, says Zogby, Morning Joe served as an “echo chamber” to feed a narrative that campuses were threatening to Jewish students and that left-wing antisemitism was the most important issue to confront.

Guest Donny Deutsch brought up the widely covered incident at New York’s Cooper Union college, when, in his telling, Jewish students were “huddled in a library, afraid as a mob is pounding antisemitic chanting outside,” comparing it to “Berlin in 1939.” But the protest had been throughout the campus before passing by the library for a couple of minutes, staff had locked the library door only as a precaution and kept it locked to minimize disruption for those studying, and police later told the press that there had been no injuries, arrests, damage, or any danger from the protesters at all, and that protesters had not at any point chanted anything violent — just “Free Palestine.” It’s an example of the way the show distorted reality for unwitting viewers by leaving out key facts.

Much of this was reflected in the words of the president himself, who finally waded into the issue after months of avoiding the subject and, together with the First Lady, angered many by repeatedly condemning what they called the “violent” and “antisemitic protests.” On the same day that Morning Joe painted the students occupying Columbia University buildings as “terrorists,” “outside agitators,” and far-right rioters who were saying “that Jewish kids shouldn’t exist,” the White House put out statements charging that the protests were violent ones that indulged in “hate speech” and “hate symbols.” Two days later, Biden tacitly endorsed the violent police crackdown on the activists.

“Committed to Propaganda”

Morning Joe’s Gaza coverage is not unique. Experts say it reflects both the findings of their own research as well as numerous studies of US media coverage that consistently show Palestinian perspectives are underrepresented and that Israeli death and suffering is considered more important than that of Palestinians.

“The coverage on MSNBC and throughout the media sphere poses a consistent double standard not tolerated by other demographics,” says Tarin.

While Morning Joe may not be an outlier, its status as the favorite political show of, and unofficial political advisors to, a president and White House responsible for what even a serving career US official has called Israel’s “nihilistic regional murder spree” gives it a special role: cocooning the powerful in a distorted and often flattering alternate reality that justifies their actions — in this case, one of the most appalling crimes carried out this century.

“The program is committed to propaganda rather than actual discussion of real events and history,” says Youmans. “These personality-driven programs actually resemble much more state TV in authoritarian countries where the hosts read scripts freshly delivered from government ministers.”