Inside Geneva: Books to make you think

As journalists, what words do we use to describe the events we are reporting? Are they chosen in part because of how we feel personally about those events?

In a conflict in which atrocities are being committed by both sides, is our language more bland if we have sympathies with one side, and more outraged if we have long been negative towards the other?

And, if we work in a renowned institution, one famous the world over for the excellent, positive work it does, if we see it being destroyed from the inside for ideological reasons, should we remain quiet? Or should we go public, even if it risks losing our jobs, or being punished?

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You might think the answers to those questions are easy. In fact, they are not, and both are examined by the two authors we talk to on Inside Geneva, Books to make you think this week. Their books are in turns riveting and forensic accounts of two topics which are very relevant to Geneva. First, the destruction of the US aid and development agency USAID, and the consequences for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

And second, a data driven investigation of the way the US mainstream media (often called “fake news” or “the liberal media” by President Donald Trump’s administration) reported the conflict in Gaza.

Let’s start with the first, a book called Into the Wood Chipper, by Nicholas Enrich, who was assistant administrator for global health at USAID when Donald Trump began his second term as president in early 2025.

Enrich and his colleagues had anticipated cuts to the agency, they had expected ideological pressure. What they weren’t prepared for was the almost total ignorance of Elon Musk’s Doge (department of government efficiency), about what USAID actually did.

Enrich describes how he initially looked forward to explaining to them “what we did in terms of infectious diseases, maternal child health, family planning…They were shocked”. One Doge member told Enrich “I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

As we in Geneva know, abortions are not what USAID did – it provided, among other things, programmes tackling HIV-AIDS in Africa, food support in areas where famine threatened, and humanitarian programmes to help civilians in Ukraine. Programmes that are now ended by young, ignorant people whose decisions were influenced not by the reality of USAID’s work, but by a right-wing disinformation campaign that lied about what the agency did.

Enrich’s book is a compelling, but also poignant, account of how USIAD was destroyed. He and his colleagues had genuinely thought there could be a dialogue with the new administration, they even offered areas where savings could be made, but to no avail. When Enrich finally realised he could influence nothing, and that he too was about to lose his job, he decided he should write an account of what he witnessed.

“The people who so recklessly tore down the agency and put so many lives at risk around the world are still sitting in high positions of government,” he told Inside Geneva. “And it was able to be torn down that easily because people did not stand up and speak out against what was happening.”

“So I hope this book is a call to action for people who see that something is fundamentally breaking in American democracy.”

How to describe conflict

Our second author on Books to make you think, is Adam H Johnson, whose book “How to sell a genocide”, is a forensic investigation into the way the US media has reported the conflict in Gaza.

Johnson has confined his investigation to the first year of the war, and his focus is on what he terms the “liberal media” – the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, and MS Now. During the course of our conversation, it becomes clear he has not bothered with Fox, or other MAGA adjacent media, apparently because he thinks they are irretrievable.

Johnson, who also writes for the Intercept and hosts the media critical podcast Citations Needed, is very sure of his views, and often quite angry. But his data backed analysis of the media coverage of Gaza is enormously persuasive.

He takes a detailed look at the kind of language journalists used to describe the Hamas attack of October 7 2023, in which over 1000 Israelis were killed, and the subsequent intense bombardment of Gaza by Israel, and finds that emotive words such as “massacre”, and “slaughter” were used almost uniquely to describe what had been done to Israeli citizens, but almost never about Palestinians.

“The New York Times referred to the killing of Israelis on October 7 as a massacre 124 times,” he told Inside Geneva. “And a slaughter 53 times. They referred in the same timeframe to the killing of Palestinians — despite the fact that in the first 100 days the killing was seven or eight times more than October 7 – they used similar language zero times.”

“Zero, not once, did they refer to anything Israel did to the Palestinians in the first 100 days as a massacre or a slaughter.”

Johnson’s book contains a wealth of examples like this, and is compelling when it argues that the language used served to uphold the Israelis’ status as human beings, and at the same time effectively dehumanised the Palestinians.

But what the book lacks, for me as a journalist, is any particular curiousity about why journalists chose this kind of language. Johnson told me he was not particularly interested in what was in the journalists’ hearts, he was interested in “what they do.”

For me this ignores the caution from fearful editors that journalists reporting on Gaza have so often experienced, the pressure on editors and media companies from governments not wishing to offend Israel, and the intense lobbying from pro-Israel groups that journalists, editors, media companies and governments have been subjected to.

The story of how Gaza was reported is more complex than the angle explored in Johnson’s book, but nevertheless his comprehensive investigation of the language used by US mainstream media should make all of us –- journalists and our audience –- think.

After all, he points out: “Do you think that it is possible Israel killed 20,000 children at least –- that’s the official number that no one disputes –- 20,000 children over two years and never once committed a massacre or a slaughter? Does that feel statistically likely to you? I think the answer is, on its face, no.”

Listen to both interviews in full on Inside Geneva –- and make a date for our next episode, out on July 7, when we take a look at the candidates to be the next UN secretary general.

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