St. Louis Media Covers Anti-Trump Protests, Ignores Protests Over Palestine and Israel
St. Louisans have been coming out in large numbers to oppose the horrible policies and decisions being inflicted upon our country by the Trump administration. As they should. Local mainstream press has covered many of these protests. Again, as it should. This includes February’s “Not My President” protests and the recent “Hands Off” protest, which got widespread coverage. There was coverage of a protest about threats to cut Veterans Administration services and a protest by postal workers about attacks on our postal system. There was some coverage of a recent rally for trans rights, in the midst of Trump’s unconscionable attacks on rights for transgender people. There was a lot of coverage of the anti-Tesla, anti-Musk protests, brought on by the company’s CEO and his role in crippling the federal government’s ability to function.
Meanwhile, protests continue that oppose Israel’s intensifying genocide against the Palestinian people – an immoral act that is backed by the Trump Administration and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. St. Louis media is mostly ignoring these protests – only Mound City Messenger has provided coverage of three recent local actions. All three events drew healthy crowds, and showed the struggle for peace and Palestinian liberation is a long-term movement.
This behavior is consistent with the pro-Israel bias we have seen in St. Louis’s media. The disappearance of local opposition to the war in Gaza is especially acute among local television news, which has consistently shown an extreme bias against Palestinians and their supporters. These stations have repeatedly featured a man who believes that there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza”, yet refuse to cover his bigotry. To the extent that there have been any stories in our local press that cover the protests fairly, it has come occasionally from the Post Dispatch and St. Louis Public Radio, despite clear pro-Israel bias from some of these outlets’ reporters and editors. That said, it has been quite some time since either publication has covered local marches and other public protests in support of the Palestinian people. This is despite numerous opportunities. Local media outlets have mostly chosen to focus on the police response to protests or false accusations of violence by representatives of establishment Jewish organizations. This despite the fact that none of these protests have been violent. The only exception is the violence inflicted on protesters by police.
A good example of this bias is the one and only recent pro-Palestinian action that did receive any coverage. A Jewish art student at Washington University was recently pushed off campus for displaying his art project on the grass that expressed sympathy with Palestinians. This outrageous act of suppression of free speech was covered in the Post-Dispatch – and only the Post-Dispatch. It deserved to be covered by more outlets, but at least it was covered. The university’s actions are a clear example of artistic suppression, based solely on the art’s political content. The reason for the coverage was clearly the issue of free expression and the involvement of and conflict with the police. The horrors of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people was not the focus of this article. In contrast, none of the recent anti-Trump / anti-Musk protests involved on-the-ground conflict and some of them were quite small. They were all still covered in a way that communicated the message that protestors were wanting to convey. Contrast this to pro-Palestinian protesters, whose message has been consistently ignored in local reporting.
The loss of the Riverfront Times has significantly limited the public’s ability to understand the local movement for justice in Palestine. The weekly paper was the media outlet that most consistently published reporting about the movement in a way that was fair to the people involved. This is especially true with respect to coverage of the absurdly repressive and violent response of Washington University last spring, when the university aggressively responded to a non-violent protest in opposition to Israel’s genocide and Washington University’s role in perpetuating it. The closing of the Riverfront Times has been very helpful to those who don’t want to see fair and sympathetic coverage of pro-Palestinian protests in St. Louis.
In recent months, the already unimaginably terrible situation in Gaza has only gotten worse. Israel has intensified its genocide against the Palestinian people with daily massacres of civilians, including intentionally bombing a tent full of journalists, a massacre of unarmed Palestinian EMS workers, and the killing of over 200 children in three days – all while intentionally starving the people of Gaza. Still, St. Louis major media outlets refuse to cover St. Louisans speaking out against Israeli crimes. By doing so, they create the impression that St. Louisans are almost uniformly on Israel’s side.
This issue is a centrally important moral and political issue of our time. People care and continue to protest the conflict in Gaza. Coverage should reflect this fact.
