On an episode released the day after this year’s Yom HaShoah, when Jews around the world commemorated the Holocaust, NPR’s podcast Code Switch spent 36 minutes asking “Gaza commanded our attention. Why hasn’t Sudan?”
Hosts Gene Demby and Leah Donnella explored why the U.S.-declared genocide in Sudan lacked the profile of the conflict in Gaza, which Code Switch labeled a genocide in its Sep. 17, 2025, episode. Neither Demby nor Donnella reflected on the media’s role in this discrepancy. Instead, they focused on race, U.S. financial involvement, and the “foreignness” of Sudanese culture and geography. For critics of the media’s Gaza fixation, the answer is simpler.
No Jews? No news.
Double Standards Despite Double the Death Toll
The hosts failed to see the double standards in their own discussion of why Gaza was discussed more than Sudan.
They featured a long-time listener’s comments, who said he knew very little about the genocide in Sudan. He wondered why there had been little public outcry after then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias had committed a genocide in Sudan in January 2025.
Donnella told listeners that estimates suggested more than 150,000 people had died since the Sudanese civil war began in 2023. Despite child soldiers at checkpoints, starving people, and victims of sexual violence, torture and brutality, very few in the media seemed to care about Sudan.
The Financial Argument . . . Plus Genocide
Demby argued Gaza was a “pocketbook issue” because “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of foreign aid from the U.S.” The hosts suggested Americans view Gaza through a domestic lens – citing an example of Michigan Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who asked constituents if they would rather fund schools or “[buy] another country a tank.”
If financial considerations weren’t enough, Demby said it must have been the combination of U.S. material support and Israel “doing this bad thing.” This casual treatment of the Israel-Hamas war is revealing as it underscores the abject disinterest of the hosts to acknowledge the nuances of the war. (Indeed, there was no reference in the entire episode to Hamas or the atrocities it carried out on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the war.)
It gets worse. The hosts also ignored the congressional accusation that Americans were indirectly involved in the genocide in Darfur by virtue of a $1.2 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the knowledge that the UAE had provided weapons to the RSF. The “follow the money” logic somehow only applied to Israel.
Race and Geography of “Foreignness”
Code Switch questioned whether the genocide in Sudan attracted less attention than Gaza because of “stereotypes of Africans as inherently violent.” The podcast has covered Gaza and Palestinians on several occasions, but not Sudan, making the hosts’ acknowledgment of their own bigotry commendable.
Then, the hosts blamed education, arguing Americans don’t know much about Sudan – or very much about anywhere in the world (which includes Israel and Gaza). Despite America’s war with Iran, Demby rightly suggested most Americans could not identify Iran on a map – the implication being it would be even harder for Americans to find Sudan. This raises a question: Do the hosts think most Americans know where Gaza is?
In a 2017 poll, 81 percent of Americans could not identify the Arab world on a map (and over one-fifth of Americans said the fictional city of Agrabah – from Aladdin – was a real part of the Arab world). In a 2020 poll, only 23 percent of registered voters could find Iran on a map. In a 2006 study, only 25 percent of young Americans could find Israel a map, and Gaza is one-sixtieth the size of Israel.
Demby and Donnella then speculated if a place or culture (in this case, Sudan) feels “foreign” or “unfamiliar,” Americans may feel what’s happening there is unimaginable and unsolvable. But if “foreignness” is the barrier, why is Gaza, a non-democratic territory governed by an Islamist, designated terrorist organization, the center of American attention?
The “Politicization” Trap
The hosts agreed it was a “challenge” to qualify genocides because people think “it” must “look like” the Holocaust.
Donnella then introduced Prof. Scott Strauss’ idea that the term genocide became politicized regarding Israel and Gaza. It could have been a lightbulb moment, but Strauss’s presentation wasted the chance:
[On] the one hand, it became a term to call Israel illegitimate. And on the other hand, when pro-Palestinian activists tried to raise awareness to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza during this war, and they use language like “it’s genocide,” that was sometimes met with a kind of ferocious response that doing so was antisemitic, doing so was a blood libel, doing so was a fundamental insult to Jews.
This is asymmetric framing. Strauss framed pro-Palestinian activists as charitable, sympathetic humanitarians, but described critics of genocide terminology by their most ferocious responses. Strauss did not engage in the substance of the genocide debate related to Gaza. Instead of explaining why the genocide label applied to Sudan, he simply lamented how the Gaza conversation removed focus from Sudan.
Strauss’ conclusion illustrates a wider problem: the media, and the analysts it platforms, seem less interested in facts and actual analysis. They focus instead, to the detriment of their audience, on narratives, politics and perceptions.
NPR’s Mirror is Broken
Code Switch’s search for sociological excuses avoided an uncomfortable reality: the media, including NPR, chose to hyper-fixate on Gaza to the exclusion of Sudan, where everyone agrees a genocide occurred. NPR did not explain to its viewers why it made such a choice. More generally, it totally excluded the media from the analysis.
The intense attention to Gaza comes from a relentless media focus that disappears absent a Jewish angle. Hiding behind the notion of foreignness overlooks the fact that the job of the press is to educate the public. Which is to say, Sudan is “foreign” to Americans because journalists have been derelict in their duty.