Support for Israel is plummeting among the U.S. public, but Zionism dominates mainstream media more than ever. Several recent high-profile examples show the staggering disconnect between the media establishment and its viewers.
October 17, 2025
MONDOWEISS
Bari Weiss on MSNBC’s Morning Joe
During a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN’s Van Jones told the studio audience that young people protesting Israel’s genocide are actually falling for an Iranian-Qatari disinformation campaign.
Jones proceeded to do an impression of a young person’s social media feed. “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby!,” he joked.
Jones’s callous attempt at humor was condemned across social media, and he quickly apologized for the comments, acknowledging that they were “insensitive and hurtful.”
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However, as Howard University law professor Ziyad Motala notes in an Al Jazeera op-ed, Jones’s apology failed to engage with a dark reality at the root of his joke: the consistent dehumanization of Palestinians.
“A true apology would have confronted the deeper problem: the instinct, common in US media, to distrust evidence of Palestinian pain unless it is filtered through Western validation,” wrote Motala. “It is an impulse rooted in hierarchy, the same hierarchy that divides the grievable from the disposable, the innocent from the suspect.”
That hierarchy has been on full display in recent days, as the mainstream media has centered stories of released Israeli captives while largely ignoring stories of Palestinians.
In a Middle East Eye, Doha Institute professor Mohamad Elmasry identifies a number of such examples.
“Since Trump announced his plan two weeks ago, western coverage has focused heavily on Hamas’s requirement to release the remains of 28 dead Israeli captives,” points out Elmasry. “Much less attention has been devoted to Israel’s obligation, under Article 5 of the plan, to return the remains of 420 Palestinians it has long withheld.”
Such bias has been par for the course throughout the genocide. Media critic Adam Johnson recently noted that the Sunday cable news shows have not featured a single Palestinian guest since October 7.
“As we mark the two-year anniversary of the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, there are dozens of data points one can point to showing media bias against Palestinians, as the U.S. government continues to arm and fund Israel’s massacre in Gaza, but few so perfectly capture the absurdity of U.S. media’s entirely lopsided treatment of the ’conflict’ than the agenda-setting Sunday morning shows almost entirely ignoring Palestinian voices. NBC, ABC, and CNN Sunday shows did not even bother to find a token Palestinian academic, pundit or reporter to push back slightly,” writes Johnson at In These Times.
“Instead we get a string of Israeli Officials, Official-Sounding Pundits and Official Government Spokespeople with Official-Sounding Titles, and Serious Journalists at Serious Publications sitting around a well-lit table on corporate-owned media, telling Americans and their leaders what to care about every week: Who’s winning, who’s losing, what the ’strategy’ is, and how many Palestinians deserve to die that week on the altar of ’Israeli security,’ while the people with the most to lose, whose world has been literally flattened with their loved ones still remain, 24 months on, buried under rubble, are shut out from the discussion entirely,” he continued.
This double standard is obviously not new. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been written about how the U.S. media manufactures consent for Israel’s atrocities.
However, in recent years, something about the media has changed: the viewers.
For years, polling showed that (beyond the occasional outlier) most Americans supported Israel, regardless of their political affiliation. However, recent surveys reveal that’s changed.
A March Gallup poll found that just 46% of U.S. adults support Israel, the lowest number in 25 years.
A September poll from the New York Times and Siena University found that just 34% of U.S. voters said they supported Israel, compared to 47% who said they supported the country shortly after October 7.
“Nearly two years into the war in Gaza, American support for Israel has undergone a seismic reversal,” declared the Times.
Israel’s image has plummeted most dramatically among Democratic voters (a February Economist/YouGov poll found that just 9% of Democrats sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians), in contrast to Republicans, who still back the country by a definitive majority.
However, discernible cracks are emerging on the right as well.
In a March 2025 Pew poll, 50% of GOP voters under the age of 50 expressed a negative view of Israel, compared to just 35% who had a negative view in 2022. An August 2025 University of Maryland Critical Issues survey found that just 24% of Republican voters ages 18-34 sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians.
Despite these numbers, the mainstream media is seemingly moving even further to the right on this issue.
Self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss recently became editor-in-chief at CBS News, after selling her right-wing website, The Free Press, to CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for $150 million. The Free Press was frequently criticized for its Palestine coverage, which included a piece that claimed Gaza wasn’t actually experiencing a famine.
The results are already evident:
In her new role, Weiss will be reporting to Paramount CEO David Ellison, a billionaire ally of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the second richest person in the world, also a noted supporter of Israel, and co-founder of Oracle. Oracle is set to oversee the algorithms of Tik Tok, the very app that pro-Israel billionaires originally wanted to eradicate for allegedly being too pro-Palestine.
So while media ownership and management seems to be getting consolidated in the hands of a well-heeled minority of Zionist true believers, the audience just isn’t buying it anymore.
This was demonstrated in a recent episode of The View, of all places, where New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was pressed by pro-Israel host Sara Haines on the issue. Haines pointed out that Mamdani had “made inflammatory statements, like calling Israel an apartheid state and questioning its right to exist as a Jewish state” and asked why voters should trust the Democratic nominees judgement.
In his response to Haines, Mamdani reiterated his positions and noted that his beliefs led him to refer to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide.
That assertion was met with some applause from the crowd.
“The home audience of the top-rated daytime talk show is dominated by middle-aged women, according to industry data,” conceded the Times of Israel. “It is one of several demographics where support for Israel has declined sharply in the two years.”
That small View moment represents a large disconnect, and it’s only getting wider.
During a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN’s Van Jones told the studio audience that young people protesting Israel’s genocide are actually falling for an Iranian-Qatari disinformation campaign.
Jones proceeded to do an impression of a young person’s social media feed. “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby!,” he joked.
Jones’s callous attempt at humor was condemned across social media, and he quickly apologized for the comments, acknowledging that they were “insensitive and hurtful.”
Advertisement
However, as Howard University law professor Ziyad Motala notes in an Al Jazeera op-ed, Jones’s apology failed to engage with a dark reality at the root of his joke: the consistent dehumanization of Palestinians.
“A true apology would have confronted the deeper problem: the instinct, common in US media, to distrust evidence of Palestinian pain unless it is filtered through Western validation,” wrote Motala. “It is an impulse rooted in hierarchy, the same hierarchy that divides the grievable from the disposable, the innocent from the suspect.”
That hierarchy has been on full display in recent days, as the mainstream media has centered stories of released Israeli captives while largely ignoring stories of Palestinians.
In a Middle East Eye, Doha Institute professor Mohamad Elmasry identifies a number of such examples.
“Since Trump announced his plan two weeks ago, western coverage has focused heavily on Hamas’s requirement to release the remains of 28 dead Israeli captives,” points out Elmasry. “Much less attention has been devoted to Israel’s obligation, under Article 5 of the plan, to return the remains of 420 Palestinians it has long withheld.”
Such bias has been par for the course throughout the genocide. Media critic Adam Johnson recently noted that the Sunday cable news shows have not featured a single Palestinian guest since October 7.
“As we mark the two-year anniversary of the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, there are dozens of data points one can point to showing media bias against Palestinians, as the U.S. government continues to arm and fund Israel’s massacre in Gaza, but few so perfectly capture the absurdity of U.S. media’s entirely lopsided treatment of the ’conflict’ than the agenda-setting Sunday morning shows almost entirely ignoring Palestinian voices. NBC, ABC, and CNN Sunday shows did not even bother to find a token Palestinian academic, pundit or reporter to push back slightly,” writes Johnson at In These Times.
“Instead we get a string of Israeli Officials, Official-Sounding Pundits and Official Government Spokespeople with Official-Sounding Titles, and Serious Journalists at Serious Publications sitting around a well-lit table on corporate-owned media, telling Americans and their leaders what to care about every week: Who’s winning, who’s losing, what the ’strategy’ is, and how many Palestinians deserve to die that week on the altar of ’Israeli security,’ while the people with the most to lose, whose world has been literally flattened with their loved ones still remain, 24 months on, buried under rubble, are shut out from the discussion entirely,” he continued.
This double standard is obviously not new. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been written about how the U.S. media manufactures consent for Israel’s atrocities.
However, in recent years, something about the media has changed: the viewers.
For years, polling showed that (beyond the occasional outlier) most Americans supported Israel, regardless of their political affiliation. However, recent surveys reveal that’s changed.
A March Gallup poll found that just 46% of U.S. adults support Israel, the lowest number in 25 years.
A September poll from the New York Times and Siena University found that just 34% of U.S. voters said they supported Israel, compared to 47% who said they supported the country shortly after October 7.
“Nearly two years into the war in Gaza, American support for Israel has undergone a seismic reversal,” declared the Times.
Israel’s image has plummeted most dramatically among Democratic voters (a February Economist/YouGov poll found that just 9% of Democrats sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians), in contrast to Republicans, who still back the country by a definitive majority.
However, discernible cracks are emerging on the right as well.
In a March 2025 Pew poll, 50% of GOP voters under the age of 50 expressed a negative view of Israel, compared to just 35% who had a negative view in 2022. An August 2025 University of Maryland Critical Issues survey found that just 24% of Republican voters ages 18-34 sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians.
Despite these numbers, the mainstream media is seemingly moving even further to the right on this issue.
Self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss recently became editor-in-chief at CBS News, after selling her right-wing website, The Free Press, to CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for $150 million. The Free Press was frequently criticized for its Palestine coverage, which included a piece that claimed Gaza wasn’t actually experiencing a famine.
The results are already evident:
In her new role, Weiss will be reporting to Paramount CEO David Ellison, a billionaire ally of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the second richest person in the world, also a noted supporter of Israel, and co-founder of Oracle. Oracle is set to oversee the algorithms of Tik Tok, the very app that pro-Israel billionaires originally wanted to eradicate for allegedly being too pro-Palestine.
So while media ownership and management seems to be getting consolidated in the hands of a well-heeled minority of Zionist true believers, the audience just isn’t buying it anymore.
This was demonstrated in a recent episode of The View, of all places, where New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was pressed by pro-Israel host Sara Haines on the issue. Haines pointed out that Mamdani had “made inflammatory statements, like calling Israel an apartheid state and questioning its right to exist as a Jewish state” and asked why voters should trust the Democratic nominees judgement.
In his response to Haines, Mamdani reiterated his positions and noted that his beliefs led him to refer to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide.
That assertion was met with some applause from the crowd.
“The home audience of the top-rated daytime talk show is dominated by middle-aged women, according to industry data,” conceded the Times of Israel. “It is one of several demographics where support for Israel has declined sharply in the two years.”
That small View moment represents a large disconnect, and it’s only getting wider.
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