For US Corporate Media, Italy's Gaza Protests Had Two Strikes Against Them

Saurav Sarkar

New York Times headline writers (9/22/25) localized a nationwide protest, and got to use one of their favorite verbs—"clash."

Marching through streets and blocking access to trains, highways and docks, tens of thousands of Italians called for solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza on Monday during a one-day general strike marked by dozens of demonstrations.

So read the first line of a New York Times item (9/22/25) on massive protests in Italy.

Given a lead like that, you might think that the Times’ online item on the protests and strikes in Italy would deserve a prominent place on its website. But if you’ve followed their coverage of Palestine, and action like strikes more broadly, you’d be unsurprised to learn that this story about grassroots opposition to genocide was buried in a stream of updates on high-level diplomatic negotiations around Palestinian statehood (New York Times, 9/22/25).

By way of contrast, at the same time, the Times home page was promoting three separate stories on the Trump administration’s attempt to link autism to Tylenol, and a feature on whether reptiles have moods—no doubt important stories, but perhaps less so than tens of thousands of people going on strike and in protest against genocide.

At least the Times did cover the Italian mass mobilization; there was only a smattering of online coverage among US corporate media outlets. While much of the rest of the world treated it as a significant story (Al Jazeera, 9/22/25; Reuters, 9/22/25; Guardian, 9/22/25), CNN (9/22/25) ran a 43-second video segment. NBC News  (9/22/25) similarly had a 27-second video segment online. The Associated Press (9/22/25) ran a roughly 500-word story.

Common Dreams' Brett Wilkins (9/22/25): "Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy."

With most major corporate sources in the US abdicating their responsibility to cover this story, that AP story was carried in small outlets in the US that either don’t have the budget or the inclination to have a reporter based in Italy (Washington Times, 9/22/25; Times West-Virginian, 9/22/25; Daily Corinthian, 9/22/25).

The other major source for small outlets was a story by the Agence France-Presse (Yahoo, 9/22/25), which was carried in outlets like the High Point (N.C.) Enterprise (9/22/25), El Paso Inc. (9/22/25) and Redwood (Calif.) News (9/22/25).

That’s all US readers who relied on corporate media would have to go on to learn about the tens of thousands on strike and in protest in Italy. (Followers of independent US media would be better informed—Middle East Eye, 9/22/24; Common Dreams, 9/22/24; Drop Site via X, 9/22/24.) Perhaps it's not surprising that the story got so little coverage, given that it combined two of corporate media's least-favorite subjects: solidarity with Palestine and ordinary people working together to try to change the world.