How Can CNN’s Dana Bash Pretend to Be an Objective Journalist?

Dana Bash on Overtime with Bill Maher. (screengrab)

From her recent appearance on Bill Maher to her interviews with lawmakers, Bash doesn’t even attempt to hide her pro-Israel bias. Plus, WashPost’s Karen Attiah speaks to Zeteo after being rehired.

By Justin Baragona, reposted from Zeteo, August 26, 2026

Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and the mainstream media at large. In tonight’s edition, we take a look at what sources describe as the “crazy” and “biased” way CNN star Dana Bash has covered Israel and Gaza in recent years. Additionally, Karen Attiah speaks to Zeteo after Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post suffered a humiliating defeat when an arbitrator ordered her reinstatement after she was fired for comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death.

Dana Bash Bashes Dems on Israel

“I don’t know how anyone can watch Dana Bash on Bill Maher and still pretend she is an objective journalist,” political strategist Adam Parkhomenko reacted to Bash’s recent appearance on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ on HBO.

During that appearance, the veteran CNN anchor – who hosts ‘Inside Politics’ and co-anchors ‘State of the Union’ – seemed to find common ground with the caustic comedian’s more extreme and inflammatory views on Palestine, Israel, and domestic politics.

Throughout the panel sit-down, Bash nodded along while Maher – who has become increasingly outspoken in his support for Israel – ranted that “Democrats are cowards” for backing pro-Palestinian causes while insisting the party is bigoted towards those of the Jewish faith.

“Well, in the Democratic Party, as long as that faith isn’t Jewish, you’re good, “ Maher, after Bash said James Talarico wears his “faith on his sleeve,” reacted. “Well, you said it,” she responded with a smile. (Currently, there are 31 Jewish Democrats in Congress – counting Bernie Sanders – versus just four on the Republican side.)

And when the sardonic comic sneered that Gaza “is not” a genocide and “doesn’t come close,” adding that many Democrats have only signed onto that because “they’re big on buzzwords and lawn signs,” Bash offered up this extra observation: “And likes on their social media.”

The Bill Maher appearance is the latest in a long list of not-at-all-objective comments from Bash.

As former and current staffers pointed out to Zeteo, Bash has long worn her pro-Israel sympathies on her sleeve throughout her career. However, following the October 7 attacks and the outbreak of Israel’s war in Gaza, Bash has increasingly used her platform to condemn and criticize those advocating on behalf of Palestinians.

“I think that Dana, her background, and her pattern of behaviors are pretty consistent. She’s a huge advocate for the state of Israel, and just doesn’t really conceal that very well,” one CNN insider told Zeteo.

‘State of the Union’ – which Bash shares anchoring duties with Jake Tapper – also did not feature any Palestinian voices in the two years following the October 7 attacks, though it did feature several Israeli guests, according to journalist Adam Johnson’srecent book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. (Most Sunday political talk shows, in fact, did not host any Palestinian guests during that timeframe.)

Another former network staffer pointed out that Tapper occasionally will “let the Israeli government have it because those are the facts.” Tapper, while speaking with Jerusalem correspondent Jeremy Diamond, called out the Israeli military for assaulting and detaining a CNN crew as it reported on Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank as “completely unacceptable.”

Wolf Blitzer, another veteran CNN anchor who proudly embraces his Jewish heritage (and once worked for AIPAC), has also been commended by network staffers for his even-handed approach to Israel and Gaza.

Many pointed to Blitzer’s respectful treatment of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil after co-anchor Pamela Brown repeatedly pressed Khalil to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7 attacks.

“Mahmoud Khalil, you were very clear more than a year ago when you and I had an interview here on CNN in condemning antisemitism, and you were very strong in your words at that time as well,” Blitzer said at the end of the interview.

It’s the way that Bash conducts herself on air that CNN sources pointed to as evidence of her personally “crazy” and “biased” approach towards covering Israel and Gaza, especially since the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

During a Dec. 3, 2023 interview with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Bash said it was “remarkable” that progressive women “are quick to defend women’s rights and speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on Oct. 7 and what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages.”

While condemning Hamas’s actions, Jayapal criticized Israel for violating “international humanitarian law” and noted that 15,000 Palestinians – the majority being women and children – had already been killed in Israeli strikes at that time.

Chastising Jayapal for bringing “it back to Israel,” Bash insisted that “you don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” Sexual violence against Palestinians by Israeli prison guards and soldiers has since been widely documented, and media watchdog FAIR later pointed to the Jayapal interview to label Bash “one of the key spreaders of the unsupported assertion that Hamas perpetrated widespread and systematic sexual violence that day.”

In a friendly March 2024 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bash – who wholeheartedly accepted his claim that Israel was “doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties” in Gaza – gushed: “You’re not Hamas. Israel is a democracy and, as a Jewish state, supports and believes in every life mattering.”

Bash’s coverage of the pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations at Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles in spring 2024 led to a wave of criticism from both staffers and critics.

Leading off her April 29 broadcast by declaring that “the kids are not all right,” she claimed that “anti-Israel sentiment is blurring into antisemitism” and anti-war demonstrators were threatening Jewish students with “calls for another October 7 massacre.” Days later, however, Bash was far more strident with her condemnation of the protests.

“They lost the plot. They‘re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages,” she declared, adding: “What you just saw is 2024 in Los Angeles. Hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe, and I do not say that lightly.”

Noting that antiwar activists were the ones actually being attacked by pro-Israel counterprotesters, FAIR called Bash out for portraying the peace protests as “hate rallies.” Discourse’s Jack Mirkinson said the segment was “disgraceful propaganda” and “deserves its place in the cable news hall of infamy.”

“You know, Dana Bash has said all these stupid things about how there was a ceasefire on October 6, as if everything was just completely hunky-dory the day before the 7th happened,” a former CNN staffer said about that segment.

The longtime CNN anchor, amid public protests against her coverage of pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations and the war in Gaza, has insisted that she’s “not an activist” but rather a journalist who will use her “modest platform to continue to expose Jewish hate” because it is “newsworthy.”

“For some reason, I got under the skin of some. So did Jake. Well, not for some reason. We know the reason. We’re Jewish,” she said while accepting an award in 2024 from the Jewish-American magazine Moment.

A CNN spokesperson said in a statement to Zeteo: “We reject these assertions entirely. They are based on prejudice, not fact, and are deeply offensive. Dana Bash is a well-respected, award-winning journalist who has been trusted by audiences for more than three decades to deliver impartial and accurate coverage of U.S. politics and world events.”

The spokesperson added: “To use Dana, or any journalist’s identity, to cast suspicion on their integrity as a journalist is repugnant and says a lot more about the bias of those making the allegations than anything being alleged about CNN.”

Bash has continued to spark controversy and provoke intense backlash from progressives in the years since, including her smearing a Palestinian-American lawmaker with false charges of antisemitism.

Along with Tapper, in September 2024, Bash helped advance a false narrative that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) accused Dana Nessel – the state’s attorney general – of charging 11 pro-Palestinian protesters simply because she’s Jewish, tying the claims to a Detroit Metro Times interview with Tlaib.

The “smear campaign,” as Zeteo’s Prem Thakker described it at the time, continued for days until Steve Neavling, the Metro Times reporter who spoke to Tlaib, said Bash and Tapper were “lying” about the congresswoman citing Nessel’s Jewish heritage as the reason behind the charges.

Eventually, the two CNN anchors weakly walked back the bogus allegations, with Tapper claiming he merely “misspoke” while Bash offered up a “clarification” while seemingly blaming Tlaib for the confusion. “That campaign by Jake and Dana was stunning,” a former CNN staffer told me.

In more recent months, Bash – following up Tapper’s campaign against Hasan Piker – also unleashed on the popular leftist Twitch streamer for campaigning with Abdul El-Sayed, falsely accusing Piker of “excusing sexual violence by Hamas terrorists” and misconstruing other comments he’s made in the past, something FAIR said was akin to “silencing dissent.”

“It was really disappointing to see Dana and CNN playing into these characterizations of Hasan, who is not as controversial as they’ve made him out to be,” a CNN producer told me. “If you give a bad-faith reading to some of his bigger comments, which is what her show did, then it kind of looks bad on the surface.”

Just last month, Bash relentlessly grilled progressive Jewish congressional candidate Brad Lander for describing himself as a “liberal Zionist” and campaigning for El-Sayed. “Do you not call yourself a Zionist because it is a term that many people on the hard left have started to use as a slur against Jews?” Bash wondered at one point.

Bash also wondered if Lander thought that El-Sayed “not believing in what you believe in the notion of a Jewish state of Israel compromises your humanity.” She also mentioned that some Jewish people may think of Lander as a “kapo.”

Speaking to Democratic strategist Lis Smith the following week, Bash looked to deflect from Israel’s role in the Gaza famine after Smith said Dems aren’t “OK with them starving” Palestinian kids.

“It’s a very complicated issue, and a lot of information that’s not necessarily trickling down. I mean, there was just a UN report that said that Palestinian leaders in some ways were responsible for the starvation. It’s all bad,” Bash concluded. (It appears Bash was referring to a UN statement last month that Hamas had disrupted aid operations at a site in northern Gaza – allegations Hamas denied. The UN has repeatedly called for Israel to allow more food aid into Gaza. In 2024, a UN official said Israel’s severe restrictions on aid could amount to “starvation as a method of war.”)

Still, Bash recently received measured praise from my CNN sources for how she conducted her interview with Netanyahu last month, which saw her confront him about Israeli settler violence.

“But you are the Israeli government. You should be able to stop them, particularly given the enormous impact this is having globally,” Bash pushed back after the prime minister asserted that just “150 or so kids” were responsible for violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Besides pressing him on the escalating violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, she also brought Diamond on immediately afterward to fact-check Netanyahu’s specious claims that the violence was mostly by a small group of “juvenile delinquents.” Diamond noted that Netanyahu was “simply choosing not to” do anything because “it affects a key political constituency.” (Diamond has been on Bash’s show several times in the past as well.)

During the Netanyahu interview, however, Bash still let the far-right leader off the hook elsewhere. For instance, he insisted that Israel has “taken unbelievable measures in order to avoid civilian casualties,” that there’s been “no real fighting going on” since the October ceasefire, and that any non-combatants who’ve been killed by Israel were because “Hamas did not let civilians leave.”

She didn’t once point out that, at the time, over 1,050 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes and fire, including hundreds of children, since the so-called ceasefire, or that the International Criminal Court has accused him of war crimes.

But I guess that’s what objectivity gets you in today’s corporate news world.

Justin Baragona is Zeteo’s media columnist.

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