Call them demons without calling them demons: How <i>The New York Times</i> legitimises violence in its coverage of 7 October 2023

The New York Times ’s coverage of Gaza has been extensively studied for media bias, yet its role in legitimising mass violence has been relatively unexamined. Addressing this gap, I analyse the newspaper’s reporting from 7 October 2023, through 7 April 2024 to conceptualise what I term subtle demonisation. Drawing on Hart’s Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis , I integrate Bakhtin’s chronotope with attention distribution to identify four destructive patterns: (1) chronotopic displacement, (2) agentive asymmetry, (3) semantic bundling, and (4) metaphor-driven reclassification that construes Palestinians as existential threats requiring elimination. I find these patterns collectively construct Palestinians as demons without naming them as such, rendering their lives structurally expendable. In doing so, I extend debates on media bias by showing how the language of journalistic objectivity functions as an instrument of epistemic erasure and a mechanism of complicity in atrocity.