Like most born and raised New Yorkers, I believed my home was the center of the universe. Since I’ve moved to Israel, I’ve watched how New York congressional candidates have made my new home their epicenter rather than their future districts.
Between June 20 and June 21, 2026, MS NOW aired no fewer than four interviews with New York congressional candidates and a campaign strategist on its panel show “The Weekend: Primetime”. In every interview, either the guests themselves or panelist Ayman Mohyeldin raised the subject of the “genocide” in Gaza.
In doing so, the network’s panelists demonstrated a dangerous trend in modern journalism: media personalities acting as judge and jury, flattening strict international law into a political talking point.
The only candidate MS NOW interviewed who refused to label Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” was Jack Schlossberg, running in New York’s 12th congressional district.
It was hard to ignore Mohyeldin’s dismay after Schlossberg refused to capitulate to this narrative, even after the anchor pushed back twice.
Yet Mohyeldin’s passionate advocacy for the label ironically revealed how little he, or his co-panelists Elise Jordan and Catherine Rampell, understand about what the word actually means. Genocide is not a colloquialism, a feeling, or a matter of opinion; it is a legal charge with a stringent threshold. Under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the crime requires a specifically proven “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The burden of proof in the newsroom
In the newsroom of MS NOW, however, the burden of legal proof appears entirely optional.
For instance, when Mohyeldin attempted to corner Schlossberg, he pulled up a recent social media post by Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling to “burn” Lebanon. Mohyeldin triumphantly asked if this rhetoric was genocidal. While this rhetoric is undeniably incendiary, using a quote about Lebanon to prove a legal charge of genocide in Gaza reveals a profound misunderstanding of how specific evidentiary standards work. The legal definition of genocide requires the intent to destroy a distinct, specified group; a post about a completely different country is legally irrelevant to the charge at hand.
Furthermore, Israel’s prime minister quickly and explicitly refuted Ben-Gvir’s statement. By weaponizing selective, irrelevant details, Mohyeldin demonstrated both his ignorance of the evidentiary standard and a clear agenda to malign Israel regardless of the facts.
The panel’s legal illiteracy was compounded when Schlossberg himself stumbled, incorrectly stating that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide. Strikingly, none of the panelists corrected him. Had they done their journalistic homework, they would know the ICJ issued a narrow ruling in January 2024 on the “right to be protected,” not on the merits of the genocide charge itself. Former ICJ president Joan Donoghue explicitly corrected this widespread media error on the BBC in April, stating: “The court did not decide… that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
The nadir of the interview arrived when Jordan challenged Schlossberg. Acknowledging his Juris Doctor from Harvard, she asked him what he “sees” as a situation that “qualifies as genocide.” Jordan fundamentally misunderstood that a legal definition is a fact, not a matter of personal opinion.
In a very clear double standard, the MS NOW panelists abandoned this rigorous cross-examination when interviewing other guests over the last weekend – such as candidates for NY-7 Antonio Reynoso and Claire Valdez, and strategist Morris Katz. When they casually dropped the phrase “genocide in Gaza,” the panelists never asked them to justify their accusation.
Consider Valdez, who claimed to stand up for the dignity and security of “people everywhere.” The hypocrisy of her interviewers was obvious when they failed to ask if that dignity and security extended to Israelis. They gave her a complete pass, ignoring both her admission to protesting Israel just after the October 7 Hamas massacre and her pledge to block Iron Dome funding, a policy that endangers Israeli lives.
Likewise, when Katz decried “taking money from AIPAC” and “sending taxpayer dollars to fund more of Netanyahu’s wars” as signs of corruption, the panel simply nodded along. They failed to question his hyper-fixation on an American lobbying group lawfully advocating for pro-Israel policies, while ignoring hostile foreign governments like Russia, Iran, and China that attempt to sway US elections. The MS NOW panelists only sought to scrutinize the one candidate who insisted on maintaining a fact-based, legally accurate argument.
Genocide is a legal term, and whether a state committed it must be proved in court, not in the newsroom. The architects of the post-World War II order envisioned international law as the bedrock of a liberal democratic world, empowering courts to pursue justice against perpetrators of the ultimate evil based on rigorous evidence.
When media personalities bypass this process, deciding Israel’s guilt in a studio rather than a courtroom, they set a dangerous precedent. They cease to act as journalists and instead mimic the outlets run by authoritarian regimes, where guilt is presumed before innocence and verdicts are decided by political narratives rather than evidence.
New Yorkers who value democracy and the liberal world order should consider what kind of world they seek to live in and remember this when they watch complex, legal realities co-opted into colloquial political smears.
The writer is a US media researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) in Israel. She was previously a Breaking News Desk Manager at The Jerusalem Post. She grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
