By Connor Lālea Hampton, September 1, 2025
The New York Times has described the Palestinian genocide using words like “war” and “conflict,” but those terms aren’t accurate. It’s a massacre.
However, this word choice isn’t surprising given the internal, linguistic battle occurring behind the pages of our publications.
The New York Times was flamed in April 2024 when a memo was leaked to the public instructing journalists to avoid words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory” concerning coverage of the genocide in Gaza. The memo also asked journalists to avoid the word “Palestine” except for very specific cases.
Journalism is powerful because it puts knowledge in the hands of the people. But sometimes, it gives us enough language to keep us complicit. If journalists can’t use words backed by human rights organizations, then what’s the point of covering anything accurately at all?
The Students for Justice in Palestine E-Board on Cal Poly Pomona’s campus have introduced themselves anonymously this year. It should not be this dangerous to call out a genocide.
Before bigger news publications like New York Times, the Washington Post and BBC News decided they wanted to give fair coverage of the Palestinian genocide, journalists in Gaza showed viewers the daily horrors and violence they experienced on platforms like X and Instagram.
While Western journalists were censoring Israel’s war crimes, Wizard_bisan1 and publications like Al Jazeera were reporting on them in real time.
Language and timing are important. If language and video are the way America sees Gaza, then every editorial decision will either assist in whitewashing a genocide or bring the whitewashing into focus.
In a time where people don’t trust the media, young Americans have flocked to Jubilee debates and videos of Charlie Kirk coming to college campuses to keep tabs on the political temperature. Constant boggling down important issues into “free speech debates” grants us the illusion there is space for us to argue about the value of someone else’s life.
Pierce Morgan Uncensored clips continue to go viral on X. People yell and shout at each other about whether the number of Palestinian lives lost is justified. For example, in May 2025, a clip went viral about Morgan changing his views on Israel.
“I think we’ve reached common ground about what we view has been happening through this period of this blockade, which just frankly is just starvation of the people there, including so many innocent young women and children,” Morgan said.
The language he uses here is important because it shows how he thinks. Morgan is negotiating what counts as a valid view of reality. He’s pushing for common ground when the ground is already there. Whether people want to see it, the common ground is truth.
In my experience as a Native Hawaiian person, or Kānaka Maoli, I see how the Palestinian struggle parallels the struggle of Indigenous people in my country. America uses terms like “annexation” and “statehood” to cover up the reality of the military’s occupation of Hawai’i.
This language is dangerous and erases the violence people suffer daily. When journalists soften their words to cover the war crimes in Palestine, we pretend like something bad isn’t happening. If it’s our very language that is being weaponized against the Palestinian people, then we as journalists must choose to speak differently.
In February 2025, I wrote about how Tom King, who worked in the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iraq invasion, now writes for DC Comics. While Iraqi civilians were stripped of dignity through occupation, the man complicit in that occupation reinvented himself as a storyteller. That is the privilege of America. We silence the people who survived our violence by writing our own narratives.
It’s happening again with Gaza. Palestinians are already documenting the destruction they are facing, but Western media believe they can decide which narratives survive. If we refuse to call genocide or starvation what it is, then we are choosing to be complicit. And while America loses itself to discourse and think pieces, real people are dying.
As a journalist, I’m tired of public opinion. I’m tired of disguised neutrality and performative moral high ground. What I care about is visible change.
If we must be anonymous to speak the truth, then journalism has truly failed.
Feature graphic courtesy of Connor Lālea Hampton
