Episode 207: US-Backed Killing of Journalists in Gaza & the Limits of “Freedom of the Press” Sloganeering
Citations Needed | August 14, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
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Nima: “Western World Observes Press Freedom Day,” gloated the United Press International newswire back in 1961. “Trump v. CNN: lawsuit becomes test case on press freedom,” declared The Guardian in November 2018. “The 10 Best and Worst Countries for Press Freedom” says US News and World report in 2022.
Adam: For decades, elite US media and government institutions have touted the sacred notion of freedom of the press. Our media, so we’ve been told, have the legally enshrined latitude and responsibility to criticize, interrogate, and expose those in power or government. And according to this high-minded rhetoric, freedom of the press preserves our nation’s integrity and serves as a pillar of US democracy.
Nima: This all sounds well and good, of course. After all, media’s ability to keep the public informed without constraints or compromise is intrinsically good and essential to any society. That’s kind of the whole point of this show. But there are far more limitations to US-based frameworks of freedom of the press than our media and our government tend to let on. Far too often, the concept of press freedom is limited by liberal formulations of negative rights, and even those, selectively applied depending on short-term US interests. As the US-backed wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel enters its 10 month and more than 140 journalists have been killed in the assault — many deliberately targeted by the Israeli military — Western elite sanctimony over their alleged commitment to press freedom has been revealed as hollow, its ideological cracks and contradictions apparent for all to see.
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll examine lofty American conceptions of the freedom of the press, especially as it emerged in the middle of the 20th century in the context of the Cold War, looking at how US media organizations are more willing to award rights, sympathy, and security to those journalists and institutions which help prop up the US State Department line.
Nima: Later on this show, we’ll be joined by two guests, the first: Kavitha Chekuru, an Emmy-nominated and Polk Award-winning journalist & documentary filmmaker. She is the director of the film, The Night Won’t End’: Biden’s War on Gaza, a new investigative documentary about war crimes against civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military and the Biden administration’s relentless support for the war, which was released in June 2024.
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Kavitha Chekuru: They say, you know, this war could stop today if Hamas wanted it to. And we know that’s not true. But the problem is that for the most part, mostly, primarily, I would say in the White House press room, there’s not really any pushback. And so, I don’t think that the political press in Washington has done as good a job as they could have at holding the administration accountable. Like, that’s what they’re supposed to do. That is their job, and they have failed with devastation.
[End clip]
Nima: We’ll also be joined by Hoda Osman, investigative journalist and editor. She is the Executive Editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association. ARIJ partnered recently on The Gaza Project, an investigative series led by the organization Forbidden Stories, that documents how the Israeli military has been deliberately targeting journalists in Gaza since October 7.
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Hoda Osman: I want to give my testimony on how accurate, how professional the Palestinian journalists are, especially the journalists who are in Gaza right now. I’ve been in touch with them since the beginning but recently, because of this project, I had to interview them for our stories, and they’ve been incredibly accurate in their information. They’ve been thorough in verifying anything. If they didn’t know something, they would tell me, Hoda, I don’t know. Let me check. I’ve asked for time codes for pictures, the timestamps, they would take them and show me exactly when a picture was taken. So, in addition to dealing with everything that is going on with all the horrors with not finding food for their families, they’re still working, and they’re doing so very, very professional.
[End clip]
Adam: So, we’re going to kick off with the modern concept of press freedom. It’s obviously an idea that does go back to some extent for hundreds of years, but we’re going to sort of begin the clock in the 20th century for the sake of keeping this manageable. The concept of freedom of the press appears in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, theoretically allowing media platforms to publish or broadcast anything that doesn’t break the law or specifically incite violence or insurrection. Of course, many laws have been written to restrict what the media can present to the public, chief among them the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which effectively rendered it unlawful to published criticisms of the US government and the military. Press freedom became more publicly visible as a cause during and shortly after World War II. In 1943, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), drafted a series of proposals calling for a “world guarantee of freedom of the press” after the war. This was, in part, a business decision. Prior to ASNE’s resolution, the US government filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press, arguing that the news agency had violated antitrust laws because according to the AP itself, many members of the ASNE viewed the lawsuit as “threatening government control over the press.”
Nima: It was also relatedly, a means of advancing US interests. Kent Cooper, the executive director of the AP at the time, advocated for “free interchange of news among countries” as the AP put it, a laudable goal after a time of immense global conflict, of course. Yet, Cooper’s proposals had a chauvinistic undergirding, arguing for US models of news organizations — that is, privately owned and free market-oriented — to be exported throughout the world. Cooper, even while fighting what he perceived to be government overreach, garnered the support of Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, the US Congress, and most of the United Nations. A number of publications worldwide took issue with this, including, oddly enough, The Economist. The magazine noted the following in late 1944: Mr. Cooper, like most big-business executives, experiences a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage. In his ode to liberty, there is no suggestion that when all barriers are down the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world. His desire to prevent another Goebbels from poisoning the wells will be universally applauded, but democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for the A.P.”
Adam: Throughout the 1940s, the US State Department, again helmed by Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, continued to advance US-centric notions of freedom of the press in concert with the ASNE. In the years and decades following, institutions like the Associated Press and Inter-American Press Association and the International Press Institute would publish surveys on “world press freedom,” consistently ranking US-allied countries as the freest. On June 7, 1961 UPI syndicated article headlined “Western World Observes Press Freedom Day” quoted Dr. Ricardo Castro Beeche, the president of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), which established Press Freedom Day (not to be confused with World Press Freedom Day) in 1953.
The article stated this, again quoting Beeche:
‘When the press is free, it helps to make democracy a reality. When the press is obstructed and access to sources of information is curtailed, there exists an authoritarian government of the type the IAPA has repeatedly denounced and against which it has permanently fought,’ he added.
Then, he would go on to cite Cuba, which then, of course, recently became a communist country in 1959. This was just about 18 months prior. He sees Cuba as case number one about why press freedom is important. The article would go on, “He called attention particularly to the plight of the Cuban press and said, ‘The free press of the new world should pledge anew to continue the struggle until the day the Cuban press is again in the hands of legitimate owners.’”
Now, to be clear, the piece did rank some countries under right-wing regimes such as Paraguay low on the press freedom list, but this conflation was strategic. Reporting in The Washington Post in the 1970s noted that the IAPA, the Inter-American Press Association received funding in many ways, was curated by the CIA. In January of 1976, The Washington Post published an investigation headlined: “CIA Funding Journalistic Network Abroad.” The paper cited a Senate Intelligence Committee report and stated:
On Sep 14, 1970, according to the Senate report, the “Forty Committee” of the National Security Council authorized a covert CIA propaganda operation to focus attention on ‘the damage that would befall Chile under an Allende government.’ Salvador Allende, a leftist, was then a candidate for the President of Chile. Less than one week later, an Inter-American Press Association news release was issued in Washington charging that freedom of the press was being jeopardized in Chile by ‘the Communists and their Marxist allies.’ The release, according to the Senate report, was a CIA product ‘through its covert action resources.’
Now, this is an example of the way you can selectively use these lofty notions of press freedom like we can selectively use anything — human rights, democracy — to punish allies while overlooking or downplaying or minimizing those that are allied with the US government. This kind of liberal negative rights-based approach is a good way of delegitimizing threats to US hegemony in the region, and specifically in Chile, when Salvador Allende was, of course, not a Soviet stooge or allied with the Soviet Union. He was a classic non-aligned socialist within the context of a tradition in Latin America. But that, of course, will not be tolerated by the CIA and Kissinger.
Nima: Now, probably the most prominent purveyor of the rankings of press freedom around the world is currently Reporters Without Borders, abbreviated RSF based on its French name, which first lauded its own Press Freedom Index in October of 2002, placing the United States at 17 in the world, and exclusively European countries and Canada were featured in its top 10. RSF has produced loads of valuable work, I want to make that clear, some of which we’re even going to be citing in this episode, but it also continues some of the more chauvinistic traditions of organizations like the IAPA and others. As of 2005, RSF had received funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy and from Cuban exile groups according to a report from The Guardian. One might argue it’s hard to remain independent while you’re on the State Department payroll. Indeed, in 2002, RSF ranked the country of Colombia at 114 on its list ahead of Cuba, which was sitting at 134 and consistently has done so despite the fact that 54 journalists have been killed in Colombia as opposed to zero being killed in Cuba since 1992 according to statistics from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Adam: And this is true more broadly. So, let’s talk a bit about Latin America in the 1980s. Given this history, of course, freedom of the press in Latin America hasn’t been nearly as valued when the press in question represents interests contrary to those of the US.
A stark example of this double standard arose in the second half of the 1980s with the right-wing anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa. In 1986, the Sandinista government suspended the paper for its support of US-backed Contras. Upon the suspension, US media rushed to defend the paper and its publisher, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. In April of 1986, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard awarded Chamorro the Louis M. Lyons award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism for “her newspaper’s efforts to keep a free press alive in Nicaragua.” Foreign Affairs published an essay in December of 1986 by Chamorro headlined: “The Death of La Prensa.” Chamorro would write in Foreign Affairs:
La Prensa had already experienced four consecutive years of brutal censorship, in which 80 percent of the material submitted for publication was suppressed every day by order of the Sandinista military censors. I tell of this, not as a long complaint of melancholy, but rather as testimony for all democracies.
The paper reopened in October of 1987. And on October 7th, 1987 upon the paper’s relaunch, the New York Times called La Prensa “defiant and exultant.” In a piece headlined “A Newspaper of Valor,” The Washington Post added that Chamorro and her newspaper “deserve 10 awards.”
Nima: Now, Noam Chomsky wrote about this in his book Necessary Illusions, contrasting it with the treatment of publications and journalists who weren’t so aligned with US foreign policy aims. Among other examples, Chomsky cited the elimination of independent media in El Salvador under the US-backed Duarte government “not by intermittent censorship and suspension, but by murder, mutilation, and physical destruction.” Yet, Chomsky noted that “The New York Times had nothing to say about these atrocities in its news columns or editorials, then or since, and others who profess their indignation over the treatment of La Prensa are no different. This extreme contempt for freedom of the press remains in force as we applaud our achievements in bringing ‘democracy’ to El Salvador.”
Chomsky also cited the example of La Epoca, a center-left Guatemalan newspaper in the 1980s, continuing its decades-long campaign of brutal intervention, the United States sponsored right-wing military massacres during the so-called Guatemalan Civil War. Chomsky wrote the following, which occurred in the year 1988:
On June 10, fifteen heavily armed men broke into the offices of La Epoca, stole valuable equipment, and firebombed the offices, destroying them. They also kidnapped the night watchman, releasing him later under the threat of death if he were to speak about the attack. Eyewitness testimony and other sources left little doubt that it was an operation of the security forces.
Chomsky would go on to write, “These events elicited no public response from the guardians of free expression. The facts were not even reported in the New York Times or Washington Post, though not from ignorance, surely.”
Adam: So, moving on to 2000s, this kind of preening focus on freedom of the press, absent any other context, would continue, and it would reach a nadir during the Trump administration when Trump’s attacks on the press, which you know occasionally were admittedly quite bad or very scary, right? A lot of incitement language. And this concern for freedom of the press would not manifest in solidarity with January 20th protesters who were arrested during the inauguration of Donald Trump for literally just being out of protest. They later were awarded monetary compensation by the federal government for their unlawful arrest, and in fact, the prosecutor is now under scrutiny for withholding evidence and using a James O’Keefe video. But they were arrested, again, we talked about this at the time in 2017 when this happened, and media completely ignored that oppression of journalists and instead focused on traditional professional solidarity amongst people that were in the club in ways that were pretty facile. So, in November of 2018 the Trump administration temporarily denied a press pass to CNN correspondent Jim Acosta after a confrontation between Trump and Acosta. In response, CNN filed a lawsuit against Trump and some members of his administration. They eventually dropped the suit two weeks later when the administration restored his White House access. During that two week period, media across the spectrum, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal were aghast with indignation.
Nima: Outraged, incensed.
Adam: Right. They characterized the cost of suspension as a threat to freedom of the press and rising authoritarianism. On November 19th, after Acosta’s press pass was reinstated, the New York Times called CNN’s lawsuit “a test of press freedoms in the Trump era” and published 37 articles mentioning Acosta in November alone. The Guardian similarly described the lawsuit as a test case for press freedom. The hypocrisy from CNN is, of course, staggering for a number of reasons, chief among them being their lack of caring about journalists in Gaza, which we’ll go to in a second. But also at the time and up to this day, CNN takes millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a gulf dictatorship which ranks at the bottom of many of these press freedom indexes. And they pride themselves on being champions of press freedom. CNN’s former President Jeff Zucker, during the Trump years, promoted himself in many puff pieces as a network standing for free press against the hostile Trump administration. Their chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, at the time, he since left, had numerous segments, criticizing the “creeping authoritarianism” under Trump. A Forbes puff piece on Stelter said he was “defending journalism’s role in a democracy, the importance of international press, and at the core of it all, truth.” But of course, Stelter and CNN didn’t mention the J20 arrests. They didn’t mention the arrests made by the United Arab Emirates against several journalists.
Nima: If you can get an invite to the White House Correspondents Dinner, then the press is going to rally around you. If you don’t, if you’re not on that list, and you know, as you said, you’re not part of the club, the solidarity is only going to reach so far. And as we have already been documenting and will continue to document, especially in the case of Palestinian journalists, oftentimes, that solidarity is not only nonexistent, it is denied to the point of aggression.
Adam: Yeah, and so, CNN never once reported on a 2018 imprisonment and later death of Jordanian journalist Tayseer al-Najjar who was imprisoned for three years for “insulting the state’s symbols” by the United Arab Emirates. According to Human Rights Watch, the conviction was based on “Facebook posts written before he moved to the UAE to work as a cultural reporter for Dar newspaper in April of 2015. The trial judgment also cited comments he made to his wife on the telephone that were critical of UAE, which UAE had recorded and used against him in his trial. According to Reporters Without Borders, the UAE is 131st for press freedom out of 195 countries with a score of zero, so it’s not totally clear, and of course, CNN did not report on this, never reports on this. And get paid millions of dollars to do these travel puff pieces, which I reported on in 2021 and 2022.
Nima: And they don’t even disclose that they’re getting that money. Yeah.
Adam: Yeah, they don’t disclose that they’re puff pieces. And when reached for comment, they refuse to comment on it. So, this is all kind of very saccharine and very sort of shallow, right? It’s press freedom when it’s somebody in the club and when they’re not in the club, like whether it’s J20 protesters or this Jordanian journalist and as we’ll see, Palestinian journalists, they don’t give a shit.
Nima: As of July 22, 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, at least 108 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Additionally, 32 journalists were reported injured. Two were reported missing, and 51 journalists have been reported to be arrested. CPJ has called this the “deadliest period for journalists” since the organization began gathering information on this back in 1992. At the time this data was presented, CPJ stated that it was investigating, “almost 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries.” Now, one wouldn’t know any of this, judging by elite media coverage. We’ve actually discussed this on the show and Adam, you along with a data scientist and researcher, Othman Ali, which is a pseudonym that he uses to do his work, you have done analysis on this that was published in The Intercept in January of this year, 2024.
Adam: So, in our report, we studied 1,100 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times from the first six weeks of the so-called War in Gaza. We found that the words “journalists,” “reporters,” and “photojournalists,” only appeared in nine headlines. Additionally, only four of the nine articles that did contain those words were about Arab reporters. So, at the time Israel had killed 48 media workers in Gaza, the number, again, is now much greater, but there was scant mention of them. Meanwhile, the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times focused much more on the risk to journalists in the Ukraine war, running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting the war, over a dozen in the first six weeks of Russia’s invasion. Now, six journalists had died in that war in the early days, compared to 48 which, as I mentioned, died in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. And as of January 2024, the number of journalists killed in Gaza was more than four times the number of journalists that were killed in Ukraine, despite the fact that Ukraine, again, during the first six weeks got far more coverage for journalists that were killed because, again, journalists, women and children, healthcare workers are justifiably and understandably more sympathetic victims. They’re how you kind of elicit feeling and sympathy from audiences. So, not focusing on journalists in Gaza is an editorial choice because they’re generally considered to be sympathetic victims of war.
Nima: Right, also reporting on their deaths, on their killings during bombardment is also a way to define the villains in a particular story, right? And so, women and children killed, first responders killed, emergency workers, media workers, and journalists, these kinds of protected classes at least in our perception of innocence and victimhood. If you’re hearing again and again that Russia is, you know, killing women and children, killing journalists, it is clear who the villain in that story is, right? But if you’re not getting similar coverage when it has to do with journalists in Gaza, it is clear why because the villainy would be so apparent and therefore, media avoids putting that kind of scrutiny, putting that kind of label on Israel. An analysis by FAIR.org, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, studied New York Times articles between October 7th 2023 and April 2024, articles that contain the words “Gaza,” “journalist,” “media worker,” “news worker,” “reporter” or “photojournalist,” and found that the Times, as Harry Zehner wrote, quote, “wrote just nine articles focused on Israel’s killing of specific journalists, and just two which examined the phenomenon as a whole” And the Times took a month to publish an article dedicated to the immense risks journalists face when reporting from Gaza, and even that piece didn’t bother to directly ascribe any responsibility for the deaths or danger to journalists to Israel.
Adam: And of course, it’s not just killing journalists. It’s obviously firing, deplatforming, and otherwise punishing journalists in the United States in particular or in the West in general for even supporting a ceasefire or being vaguely sympathetic to Palestinians. In May of this year, the National Writers Union (NWU) released a detailed report called “RED LINES Retaliation in the media industry during the war in Gaza” that found “44 cases of retaliation that impacted more than 100 media workers” in response to “the perception that they support the Palestinian cause or are critical of the Israeli government.” The survey, which covered the period of October 7th, 2023 to February 1st, 2024 in North America and Europe found that workers face deplatforming, firing, suspension, and other forms of discipline with journalists of Middle Eastern or North African descent and those who identify as Muslim especially impacted. “Western media workers have faced a wave of retaliation for speaking up against or critically covering Israel’s war on Gaza — and in particular, for voicing support for Palestinians,” the report summarizes. They use a very conservative criteria. And of course, for every person who’s fired from the platform or suspended for showing sympathy towards Palestinians, there’s, of course, the hundred who just don’t say anything. They don’t want to suffer the professional consequences of that. And we’ve seen this, of course, with a lot of these witch hunts for universities, professors smearing obscure people. Of course, there’s a ton of pro-Israel doxxing, journalists trying to intimidate them.
Nima: It’s all about the chilling effect, which is working.
Adam: Yeah, which works. And that’s, of course, the point. Just as you know, journalists in Gaza, you want to make sure you kill them because you a) don’t want them to report your war crimes you’re doing in broad daylight but b) of course, you want to prevent others from even picking up a phone or picking up a camera or putting on a press jacket. The point is to send a message.
Nima: Now, this lack of solidarity from journalists to journalists, of course, has long predated Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Reporters Without Borders, again, RSF, between March 2018 and April 2022, the four years following the “Great March of Return” protests in 2018, the Israeli military and police injured at least 144 Palestinian journalists, using live rounds, rubber bullets, stun grenades, tear gas, and baton blows. And in May 2021, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Al-Jalaa building in Gaza City where the offices for such media organizations as Al-Jazeera, the AP, and Middle East Eye were located. Israel has been targeting Palestinian media for decades. In 2002, Israel destroyed the broadcasting center of the Voice of Palestine, the official broadcaster of the Palestinian Authority.
That same year 2002, in a piece for Slate Magazine, current Atlantic writer and middlebrow anti-autocracy expertician Anne Applebaum called Palestinian radio and TV “fair targets” and blamed the Palestinian Authority’s official media for “why the Oslo peace process failed” and producing “suicide martyrs.” Applebaum added at the time, “from the Israeli point of view, the PA’s official media also express tacit approval for terrorism in general and for terrorist ‘martyrs’ in particular.”
One of the most high-profile cases of a journalist killed in Palestine recently was that of Shireen Abu Akleh, the senior correspondent with Al-Jazeera Arabic. Abu AKleh was shot by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank in May of 2022 and as many have pointed out since, a lot of news outlets obscured the fact that Abu Akleh was killed by Israel. The AP, for example, noted that she was “killed by gunfire.”
This kind of dismissal of humanity for Palestinian journalists stretches much farther back than just the past few years though. As I wrote over 10 years ago, back in 2013, the Washington, DC-based Newseum dropped two Palestinian cameramen who were killed by Israeli airstrikes from a dedication ceremony held at the Newseum to honor “reporters, photographers, and broadcasters who have died reporting the news” over that previous year. The camera operators, Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi, worked for Al-Aqsa TV, a channel overseen by Hamas. Their removal from the memorial wall at the museum dedicated to journalists killed doing their jobs was the result directly of pressure from anti-Palestinian organizations on the museum, including the Anti-Defamation League, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Jewish Committee, which characterized the camera operators as Hamas propagandists.
Now, meanwhile, the museum did not remove a dedication to James P. Hunter, a reporter and photographer killed in 2010 by an IED while covering the massive US offensive taking place in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Hunter, an active duty Staff Sergeant with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, was reporting for The Fort Campbell Courier, an Army newspaper in Kentucky. Despite his active status in an occupying military, while covering that occupation for a U.S. Army publication, the Newseum obviously included Hunter on its honorary memorial wall of journalists killed in warfare.
And in his keynote address that year, at the museum ceremony, the much lauded NBC correspondent Richard Engel vocally supported the Newseum’s last minute decision to exclude the Palestinian journalists from their memorial, claiming that Salama and al-Kumi were not “strictly journalists” but political activists who worked in the media,” adding, “Just because you carry a camera and a notebook doesn’t make you a journalist.” Engel also said, “Journalists shouldn’t have causes. They should have principles and beliefs.” Yet without any hyperbole, Engel then proceeded to praise Syrian reporters who worked for media outlets that were actively trying to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime” and who were included without controversy, in the museum’s tribute. According to Engel, the Syrian journalists “certainly died trying to do something noble. They were speaking out against oppression. They died trying to quench a thirst for freedom.”
Adam: Yeah, so this is kind of one on one, different standards for different people, different causes. If your causes align with the US State Department, then you could actually be active military or be in a military fighting capacity. But if your causes are antithetical to that, or opposed to that, or separate from that, you’re therefore a propagandist. There’s, of course, no consistent criteria here. That’s not really the point. And again, this is true because you know, in several cases, reporting from Gaza by ABC News and CNN, and of course, the invasion of Iraq all had embedded reporters in the US military. They weren’t in the US military, but they were rolling with them, operating with them, filming them, oftentimes, quartering with them. And then, of course, anytime a cameraman is within a hundred city blocks of some supposed Hamas fighter, they therefore become Hamas propagandists, a double standard we will talk about with our guests.
Nima: To discuss this more. We’re now going to be joined by Kavitha Chekuru, an Emmy-nominated & Polk Award-winning journalist & documentary filmmaker. She is the director of the film, The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza, a new investigative documentary about war crimes against civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military and the Biden administration’s relentless support for the war, which was released in June 2024. Kavitha will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: We are joined now by Kavitha Chekuru. Kavitha, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Kavitha Chekuru: Thanks for having me.
Adam: So, first off, your documentary is very important. I think everyone should see it. It’s both incredibly moving and also incredibly detailed and thorough and sober. So, I urge everyone to go see it, and I think almost more importantly, get others to see it, not to be too evangelical about it. But I think this is something that all 332 million people in this country should be forced to watch.
Nima: I’ll be evangelical about it. Everyone should watch this film. It is absolutely devastating and important.
Adam: Yeah, I was raising it like a multi-level marketing thing, but no, yeah, get people to see it.
Nima: Absolutely watch it.
Adam: But as a media criticism podcast, our focus is maybe a little different than some of the other interviews y’all have done about this, which is that I want to sort of talk about the general state of journalism surrounding Gaza. And obviously what y’all were trying to do, at least in part, as I see it, is really give a human face to these somewhat abstract numbers, which is why you sort of profile these three families. I want to sort of begin by asking you, there is this humanization gap that we talked about at the top of this show where it really does become abstract. There’s a ton of reasons why that is in terms of how the media covers it. We don’t have the numbers quite yet, but the proportion of humanizing profiles in the New York Times for, say, Israeli hostage families versus the profiles of Palestinians where you get the sort of full-blown photo shoot, is more or less, you know, 30, 40 to one. But obviously, y’all attempted to correct that. So, I want to talk about if dehumanization fuels violence, wanton violence, genocide. Humanization, I think, is the strongest, at the risk of sounding corny, is I think the strongest antidote to that. So, I want to talk about why you decided to frame it this way, why you all decided to frame it with this profile approach. And where do you view this documentary as fitting into that broader regime of dehumanization, which I think is pretty empirically true?
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think for us, what was important was obviously, Jazeera is covering this war 24 hours a day, every day, and for us, what we wanted to do and what we needed to do was focus on the US role. This war could not continue, could not be happening without the Biden administration’s support. And what we wanted to do was essentially trace that response since October 7 and look at really, to me, one of the questions was all the different chances they’ve had to stop this war and what it’s meant for families on the ground. And I think that dehumanization in the media that you’re talking about, it’s rampant in Western media, right? I mean, not even just for this film, but for this film and Fault Lines documentaries that our team has done, we often have to go film at the White House, the White House press briefing, or State Department, or on the Hill shutter (35:34?). And something that always really sticks out to me or I think about, especially with this, is how many of those journalists have ever met somebody who was on the other side of a US war or a US-supported war or in this case, how many of them have ever talked to a Palestinian? How many of them are looking at the images coming out of Gaza and more than that, how many of them have ever even talked to or given support to Palestinian journalists? The answer for most of those questions is that they haven’t talked to any of those people or heard, you know, what it’s been like for them, not just even during this war, throughout the many wars in Gaza or what’s been happening in the West Bank well before October 7th. I’ve never seen anything like Israel and Palestine get treated — like, there’s nothing within the Western media that gets treated like Israel and Palestine does.
Adam: Well the liberal mind, both liberal Zionist and just kind of liberal more generically mind, I think they could watch this documentary, and to some extent, they’ve kind of reverse-engineered this moral logic where all these deaths are horrific and regrettable and hand wring, hand wring, but it’s all ultimately “Hamas’s fault,” right? Because of this human shields narrative, which we did a whole episode on. Have y’all gotten any of that kind of feedback? I’m sure you’ve heard this line a million times because this is kind of the last line of defense. Say what you will about the extreme, genocidal right-wing, but at least, they’re honest. I think liberals operate in this like elaborate Inception, MC Escher, world of delusion. And if you could talk about how these reverse-engineered moral frameworks, about how all these horrible things we’ve seen this documentary that you document with such care and nuance and detail and analytical thoroughness. Have you heard this from people, either on social media or real life, or they say, but, but, but Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.
Kavitha Chekuru: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s been various points where I’ll open up Twitter, and there’s just all these notifications, and it’s a lot of really poorly done graphics and things like that, which maybe it’s from bots, I don’t know, but it is very much like, but Hamas, but Hamas, but Hamas. And, you know, not in relation to our documentary but back with the Western media, one of the things I had to do through this film was monitor the White House briefings basically every day, go back through a lot of them, and essentially watch John Kirby talk for months on end.
Nima: That’s torture.
Kavitha Chekuru: And it was definitely the worst. And Matt Miller, the State Department spokesperson, does this as well and continues to do it where they say, you know, this war could stop today if Hamas wanted it to. And we know that’s not true. But the problem is that for the most part, mostly, primarily, I would say in the White House press room, there’s not really any pushback. So, I don’t think that the political press in Washington has done as good a job as they could have at holding the administration accountable. Like, that’s what they’re supposed to do. That is their job, and they have failed with devastation.
Nima: Yeah. Now, you know, I want to kind of stay on the topic of journalism more broadly but actually journalists specifically. As we’ve discussed, the film follows families. However, it is dedicated to the journalists of Gaza. As we well know, the state of US Coverage of Gaza is, as you were just saying, horrific and harmful. And at the top of this episode, we also laid out how that connects to a total lack of professional solidarity among American journalists. Much to your point, Kavitha, about the White House press corps, the lack of solidarity from American journalists with the reporters killed in Gaza already, many deliberately targeted by Israel. We’ve also talked about the total asymmetry and coverage of journalists that have been killed in Ukraine with the extreme silence about those killed by Israel in Gaza. So, there’s this kind of widespread indifference to journalists, namely Arab, Muslim, Palestinian journalists. Can you talk a bit about how this institutional bias impacts not only the work of reporters and filmmakers inside Gaza but also the broader reception to your documentary and other work by non-western but still English-language news outlets?
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the main ways that that institutional bias impacts the journalists in Gaza is that they are more vulnerable. I think, if more of the industry, and the parts of the industry that have power, unfortunately, like the New York Times or CNN, if they had, from the very beginning, actually given solid support to journalists in Gaza, but, you know, not just in hiring them, which they should be doing, and they’re not, at least not on a very regular basis, but actually being outspoken about it. I think it’s fair to question if as many journalists in Gaza would have been killed since October 7. And that, to me, is, I think one of the biggest parts of it is that it has made those journalists more vulnerable. And also the other, you know, second to that which, you know, it feeds into it is that something we’ve seen a lot is when Western journalists talk about the fact that they’re not being led into Gaza, which they should be talking about. That’s a big deal, and more journalists need to be let in. When they do that, though, they make it seem like there aren’t any journalists in Gaza who haven’t, you know, been risking their lives, who haven’t been killed, who aren’t, you know, suffering from starvation right now to show the world. And I think, you know, this has happened a number of times. I think there was Christiane Amanpour. She was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and I think she said it at one point, and a lot of journalists in Gaza went on Twitter and, you know, basically, like, are you kidding.
Adam: And Jon Stewart, I’m not mistaken, actually corrected her.
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, then she kind of backtracked. But I was deeply shocked by that.
Adam: Because the chauvinist implication, obviously, is that you can have kind of “journalists” or kind of semi-journalists but ultimately, all compromised. They’re all kind of Hamas-adjacent, and therefore, suspect. They’re not credible is the implication, right?
Nima: They don’t have that, you know, “Western objectivity,” of course.
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, and I mean, with the New York Times, with the piece that they did, the “Screams Without Words,” looking at the allegations of sexual assault on October 7th by Hamas. They hired a very young reporter and then a filmmaker who had, I believe, worked with the IDF for this very, very important investigation. And yet, the industry, I think, you know, they were criticized by the independent media but not really by mainstream media whereas journalists and Palestine in Gaza, these Palestinian journalists, the rest of the industry treats them like they aren’t real journalists, right?
Adam: And they’ll use them as stringers and for video, but they won’t give them any credit. And Clarissa Ward went into Gaza on December 13th, 2023, and I’m not saying this is her fault, necessarily, and she did a very sympathetic report, but to the way CNN framed it, at least the editors and producers kept describing it as an exclusive.
Nima: Right. The only white journalist in Gaza, yeah.
Adam: I was like, that’s not what an exclusive is.
Kavitha Chekuru: I think it was in January, The New Yorker, they put out a piece about the perils of war coverage in Gaza, and it was actually all about Clarissa Ward. The writer from the New Yorker did not interview one journalist in Gaza at all. And it’s not like there aren’t journalists in Gaza who don’t speak English. Al-Jazeera English has an entire English network with a number of people she could have interviewed and didn’t.
Nima: So, Kavitha, making this film, you worked very closely, of course, as you said, with journalists in Gaza. Can you actually talk about that process and who your, I mean, absolutely incredible partners were on the ground in Gaza and kind of how you worked with them to create this incredible film.
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah. I mean, they’re amazing. So, we did it in a number of ways, but the main team was through a Palestinian production company called Media Town. And so they’ve worked with Al-Jazeera with the news department but also with the documentary department as well. But they had a team in the north, who are still there, and a team in the south, both are documentary filmmakers. And so, what we would do is essentially, me and my executive producer, Layla, we would write up questions in English, and then she would translate them into Arabic. And then, we’d send those to the team along with, you know, instructions of what we would want them to film. And then they would go to the interviewees, and they would film the interviews and when they could, they would send it. But sending the footage was actually really difficult because they had to make sure that it was safe because they would need to go up to a roof to get a signal because the internet access is so unsteady. And the other part of this is that when we set out to do this, we knew that we needed to cover an airstrike. And well, the first thing was trying to figure out how to narrow that down, right, because there’s been so many. But because we worked with these journalists, they said to us, hey, you should look at this airstrike that happened in December, and it turned out that more than 100 people from the same extended family had been killed, and it hadn’t really been covered because at that point, there really was only kind of a core group of journals left in the north. Most of the other journalists had gone south because of the orders from the Israeli military, you know, pretty early in the war. But it was because of them that we were able to report on that airstrike and then, actually, we asked Air Wars, the civilian harm investigation organization in the UK to see if they could research it as well. And so, all of it was thanks to these amazing journalists in Gaza. And I think if the rest of the industry was doing that, I question if the war would even be where it is if the rest of the industry had been working more closely with journalists since the beginning.
Nima: Yeah, that was the coverage of the Salem family, I believe. And just the idea that just even to get the footage to you as you’re making the film basically as an act of putting their lives on the line by just being on a rooftop, just so that they could upload files. You know, just really goes to show what conditions these journalists are operating under whereas, you know, obviously, most CNN journalists are wearing flak jackets and reporting from Tel Aviv.
Adam: Yeah, because there’s been a targeting of journalists. I think when people see 103, 120, 140 plus journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza, the vast majority of Palestinian, some Israeli, some Lebanese, they think, oh, well, that’s sort of incidental. Or just because they’re indiscriminately bombing, which is, of course, in and of itself, horrible. But there have been numerous reports. +972, an Israeli-based publication has detailed how Israel drone strikes journalists who are labeled as journalists because they’re journalists because, for obvious reasons, the same reason people historically have always targeted journalists, which is, you don’t want people to report the bad shit you’re doing. And so, I think people don’t quite internalize how egregious that is, and how if there was all this documented evidence, again, of an enemy state — China, Russia, Iran — doing this, there would be, of course, far more outrage in Western press. And there is that hypocrisy, which we documented. And I’m curious again, as someone who does work for an English language news outlet that has been doing this relentless, courageous reporting in Gaza and, of course, has been banned by Israel, within Israel for that reason.
Nima: And Israel routinely bombs Al-Jazeera offices in Gaza.ad
Adam: Yeah, so how is that interpreted? I mean, how is that interpreted to be in the face of that kind of naked cynicism and hypocrisy, the professional solidarity stops at the water’s edge?
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah. I mean, Wael Dahdouh, the bureau chief for Al-Jazeera in Gaza, he had to leave because he had to get surgery after he was attacked in an airstrike, and his cameraman, Samer Abudaqa, was killed, but he’s been pretty outspoken about the fact that how disheartening and disappointing the lack of support and solidarity from the rest of the industry has been. And you know, it comes in the ways I think we’ve already talked about. But even when the Pulitzers came out, I think it was last year, the year before, they gave an award to the journalists of Ukraine. It was very specific. It was the journalists of Ukraine, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Kavitha Chekuru: This year, it was for the journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza. Because apparently that means I get it too, because it could be somebody with, like, an egg for a photo on Twitter/X.
Adam: That’s a 2006 Time Person of the Year version of journalist. It’s everything and nothing.
Kavitha Chekuru: They didn’t even say Palestinian.
Nima: And it’s now been over three years since Israel bombed the Associated Press Office in Gaza. And again, we just see no cross-industry solidarity. Because I guess the implication is, of course, if you are in Gaza, you are therefore inherently a viable target, right? Like, you are then part of an “enemy” and therefore, your life is not worth the same as anyone else’s.
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, and I think this has been happening since before October 7th, right? When Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al-Jazeera correspondent in the West Bank was killed, you know, there was some outrage, a bit, but not that much. It was like a kind of a blip for one day, it felt like, or maybe a week. Or the funeral where mourners were attacked at her funeral. The rest of the industry barely said anything. And again, I said it before, and I’ll say it again. There’s nothing like Israel and Palestine. Nothing gets treated like Israel and Palestine within Western media.
Nima: Right, exactly because you’re not gonna give a Palestinian journalist the Khashoggi treatment.
Kavitha Chekuru: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, at least from the US media, the mainstream media, it’s like a second layer of propaganda where they only know how to cover the rest of the world in the lens of US foreign policy but in support of US foreign policy and US government interests. You see that with everything from Afghanistan to Iraq to Ukraine to this and most notably this.
Nima: One of the most powerful parts of this film The Night Won’t End is the section that really covers the life and then the murder of Hind Rajab, killed by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. And I’d love to talk about that part a bit. CNN’s Kasie Hunt, when the news about Hind’s murder broke in the media, and I say “broke” meaning, you know, not that many people were covering it but still, when this became news, Kasie Hunt somewhat infamously referred to Hind who was six years old when she was murdered as a “woman,” you know, when she did a throwaway line about her killing. And in what ought to have been — one would hope in like a more just world — a galvanizing story of tragedy, right, of the abject cruelty and dehumanization of the ongoing genocide backed by the United States government willingly. All that went away, all that kind of dissolved, and it just became another kind of like, oh yeah, we heard about that, it’s kind of a bummer. But then moving on, topped off by, as you covered in the film, this vague appeal to a “Israeli investigation” into the incident. Can you talk about Hind and this section of the film, kind of how you approached covering these moments and the incredible and I mean truly brutal audio and video that accompanies this section and just how this glaring lack of meaningful coverage in any sense in the US press really does indicate exactly what American media priorities are.
Kavitha Chekuru: Sure. I mean, I guess I’ll start from how we approached it. I guess, you know, the first part was getting to her mother Wissam. The only reason we were able to do that was because our team in the north went. The cell communications are really bad. She doesn’t have steady cell communication. So, they actually had to walk a couple of hours to get to her when it was safe and ask her if she would do the interview. And that’s how all of that happened. So, it wasn’t like picking up the phone and saying, hey, can we come by? So, I feel the need to point it out just because they do so much extra work that I don’t think people realize. In any case, so, they did the interview with her, and then we worked with one of our colleagues in Ramallah to interview a number of the Red Crescent workers who took the call.
The way we approached it, it was forensic, right? You kind of have to, especially when it’s a more high-profile case and just kind of starting with the facts with all of those key people, then going through the phone calls, first with Layan, Hind’s 15-year-old cousin who had the first phone call with Omar, the dispatcher from the Red Crescent in which you hear at the very end six seconds of gunfire, when it’s 64 shots, and then she screams, and the line goes dead. And after that, when Omar finally calls back, even though I’ve had to listen to all of this many times and watch through our different cuts. But I always feel like a chill goes through me when I listen to the first time Omar gets ahold of Hind, and you just hear that young voice. And it just takes everything out of me. And I think about that first call with him. And then he brings in his colleague, Rana, and she starts talking to Hind, and this audio was put out on the same day by the Red Crescent. And you hear Rana saying, can you see the tank? And Hind says, yes. And she asked her where it is, is it moving? Where is it? Is it in front? And she says, it’s in front. And she asked, how close is it? And Hind says, it’s very, very close. And the Red Crescent put this out that same day.
And, you know, thinking about the media coverage of this, I think that if this had been a Ukrainian girl who was being attacked by the Russian military or if it was an Israeli girl being attacked by Hamas or other Palestinian fighters, I think that this would have been breaking news, rolling coverage on CNN with live updates and constant news alerts from the New York Times and The Washington Post and AP. None of that happened. None of that happened. One thing I will say about the Washington Post, they did do in-depth coverage and a really good investigation of this, you know, in essentially the kind of months that followed. But the Times didn’t. They barely reported on it. And, you know, something I’ve seen online from pro-Israel supporters is that they actually question if this even happened. And it’s, you know, they say it’s “Hollywood,” which is what they refer to, Palestinian Hollywood. They think that these things are made up and filmed and created as though all these people could do this, had the time to do this. It’s insane. It’s completely insane.
But it’s really shocking to me how little media covers. Even, you know, at the State Department, because everything kind of has to start with them when it comes to Israeli investigations, the only person who’s really been asking has been Prem Thakkar from The Intercept. He has repeatedly asked since this happened on January 29, but nobody else really has, I don’t think anyone’s really pressed the White House in the White House press room about it. I think it’s come up a couple of times but not really.
Adam: I want to talk about this idea — I think it’s not just about the lack of quantity. It’s a lack of quality, which is what we call and what we’ve talked about, it’s what Adam Curtis calls, “oh dearism,” which is a kind of mode of journalism or what I’ve referred to as the natural disaster-izing of Gaza where there’s not really any particular moral agent or primal or primary cause of any of the suffering. Israel obviously does airstrikes, but obviously, it’s kind of passive, and it’s presented as kind of two warring sides and people caught in the middle.
Now, what y’all did, I thought very effectively, was you avoided that kind of agency-free framing, in fact, in the title “Biden’s War” because that’s the primary patron of the war, right? Israel is actually a fairly poor country. It can’t really operate. It’s obviously relatively much more powerful, but it’s a fairly small country that can’t get out of bed in the morning without asking permission from the US and framing it as a US-authored and US-funded and US-backed war, I think, is something you just never see, or rather, you see it as done kind of passively.
I want to ask you about this kind of “oh dear-ism” framing that’s popular within liberal highbrow media. The New York Times has kind of mastered this. Their headlines never ascribe agency. And again, as we talked about on the top of the show, this asymmetry is not at all how they report on Russian war crimes in Ukraine, It’s Russia attacks this. Russia goes after hospitals, you know, using hunger as a weapon, all this kind of stuff. If you could, could you comment on this kind of professional norm surrounding this “oh dear-ism?” Why you deliberately avoided it and what purpose you think this kind of natural disasterification of Gaza serves?
Kavitha Chekuru: I mean, I feel like this “oh dearism,” as you put it, stems from the fact that so much of the Western media is primarily white people and white people who have never interacted or really experienced war or violent conflict. And so, it’s almost that Palestinians or Arab countries, that war is inevitable and that they’ll just take it, and that’s just how it has to be. And there’s a moment, this is pretty early on, it’s in the film, John Kirby says, this is war. It’s bloody. People are going to die. Why did nobody in that press room say it doesn’t have to be like this? There’s this idea that war is inevitable, and it’s not. And I cannot believe how long this has been going on. It’s really staggering. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Western media, which has power to push, you know, hold the Biden administration accountable, they have just treated this as inevitable, and I think that they bear a lot of responsibility for the state of the war.
Nima: Yeah. I mean, I think this film should be required viewing for not only everyone certainly in this country but for John Kirby, the John Kirbys and the Joe Bidens and the Anthony Blinkens. You know, they should be forced, like Clockwork Orange style, to watch this film again and again. Just really can’t thank you enough for making it as well as all the other filmmakers that you worked on this film with. What are you working on next? Not only, of course, they can find this film at Al-Jazeera Fault Lines, but what else are you working on these days? How can people follow your work?
Kavitha Chekuru: That is a great question. I just became an independent journalist so I guess the first place they’d have to go is Twitter. But right now, I’m kind of focused on making sure we could get this film out and then also, just trying to kind of find ways to continue reporting on Gaza with journalists on the ground.
Nima: Well, I think that’s a great place to leave it again. Can’t thank you enough for joining us. We’ve been speaking with Kavitha Chekuru, an Emmy-nominated & Polk Award-winning journalist & documentary filmmaker. She is the director of the film, The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza, a new investigative documentary about war crimes against civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military and the Biden administration’s relentless support for the war, which was released in June 2024. Kavitha, thank you again so much, not only for making this film, but for joining us on Citations.
Kavitha Chekuru: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Adam: Yeah, I can’t recommend the film enough. It is gut-wrenching. It’s sort of exactly what reportage should be in its platonic form. The thing we’re sort of told it should be that it never is or that it rarely is. You know, there’s been stuff here and there, but it is an exquisite combination of humanization backed by cold, hard analysis and data. It has the pathos, the ethos, and the logos. It has the golden triangle.
Kavitha Chekuru: Another recent investigation follows a similar trajectory. Adam, the recently launched investigative series The Gaza Project documents how the Israeli military deliberately targets journalists even when and especially because they are clearly identified as reporters and wearing press vests. A consortium of 50 journalists from 13 news organizations around the world, including outlets like +972 magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Just Vision reviewed nearly 100 cases of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, incorporating testimonies from over 120 witnesses in Palestine and analysis by over two dozen ballistics weapons and audio experts.
Among the Gaza Project’s findings are that at least 14 journalists have been wearing press vests at the time of their death or injury in Gaza since October 7. Similarly, at least 40 journalists had been killed by Israeli arms while they were in their own homes, which contradicts the Israeli claims that journalists are just simply caught in the crossfire. It also found that 18 journalists had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones.
To discuss this more, we’re going to be joined by Hoda Osman, investigative journalist and editor who now serves as the Executive Editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), one of the partners of the Gaza Project. She is also the president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association. Hoda will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: We are joined now by Hoda Osman. Hoda, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Hoda Osman: Thank you for inviting me to talk about this.
Adam: I want to begin by talking about some of your findings. You write that “one in 10 reporters in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s military campaign,” which is obviously extremely high. This was as of June of 2024. So, I want to begin by talking about your organization, the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. They’ve been documenting the killing of journalists. And I want to ask you, generally, what you’ve uncovered in your reporting. Now, obviously, a non-trivial percentage of those 120, 140 plus deaths of reporters in Gaza have been intentional. They’ve been targeted such that you write “dozens of journalists said they believe that they were being targeted by the Israeli military. Many were afraid to wear press vest and helmets.”
I want to start by talking about how your organization and others make this distinction between intentionally killed versus incidentally killed. But of course, incidentally still does not morally absolve Israel because, again, if they’re killing journalists at such a high rate, it means they’re kind of just indiscriminately killing everybody. Or the more likely scenario is from the IDF perspective, which has been reported on, which you can talk about, they simply view any reporter who’s Palestinian as a military target.
Hoda Osman: Just to give this some context, the investigations that we worked on were part of a larger collaborative investigative project called the Gaza Project. It involved 50 journalists from 13 different organizations, and it was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, which is a nonprofit based in Paris. And what they do is make sure that these stories of journalists who’ve been either threatened or jailed or killed are told and reach a global audience. Having said that, let me start by speaking about our work in investigating the killings of the journalists in Gaza. So, at ARIJ, at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, my organization, we started working on this since the early days. I think it was November, and the number of journalists that had been killed there was already staggering. I think it was over 30, and it was record-breaking even then. And today, we’re talking, as you mentioned, about over 100 journalists who’ve been killed. It’s the highest number ever of journalists killed in any war. And you know, you can mention any conflict, World War Two. We can talk about Vietnam or even the Iraq War. And these wars lasted years, and still, the number of journalists who were killed during these wars was less than that.
So, back in November, we were in shock. ARIJ works with Arab journalists on a regular basis because actually what we do is teach or train journalists on how to do investigative journalism by working with them on actual investigation. So, we have all these contacts and relationships with journalists in many, many Arab countries, including in Palestine and in Gaza. Early on, when I started speaking to some of them, some of my colleagues in Gaza, they already had lost family members or had been displaced even, you know, a couple of weeks into the war.
So, we started thinking about investigating these killings, and we collated the names of the killed journalists from various organizations. We didn’t do the work of collecting the information ourselves. We were getting them from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, and other organizations and basically just putting all the names in a spreadsheet and looking into each case. Who can we speak to that can tell us more about it? What’s been written about this? Has the Israeli military responded? What have they said? And to try and identify some of the cases that we could start working on.
And then we started conversations with Forbidden Stories. Initially, we were speaking about just one investigation, but then I have to give Forbidden Stories full credit for taking this project to this level that we’ve seen. They invited the other news organizations and together, we worked all of us collectively for four months, day and night, we interviewed over 120 sources, including many weapons experts, and we used visual and audio, investigative forensic techniques to come to some of the conclusions.
One of the challenging things was doing the interviews inside Gaza. But in spite of the difficulties that many of our sources, of course, were journalists themselves because we’re investigating the killings of journalists so we’re talking to their colleagues, we are talking to their family members and doing these interviews. We did about 50 interviews in Gaza alone, and it was quite difficult with the daily horrors that they go through but also with the communication problems, the phones, the eSIMS if they’re using any, and the sensitivity of having to be mindful of what they’re going through and when to talk to them about what.
Together, this consortium, we published 20 investigations about journalists in Gaza and the West Bank. It was published in five languages. I think it was 16 countries, many news outlets. And it truly was an example, and it demonstrates the power of this collaborative journalism, because at ARIJ, we would have been able to do some investigations but not at this scale. So, the partners and the management and coordination by Forbidden Stories was critical. So, this is just to give you some context about this project and about these investigations.
Now, if we talk about the targeting, I think that it’s important to start responding to this question about whether or not the journalists are targeted by speaking about what the journalists themselves are telling us. As you mentioned, so many journalists in Gaza believe that they are being targeted to the extent that they stay away from their own family so they don’t put their families in danger. I’ve spoken personally to many journalists who say they have problems. You know, renting a place is difficult because people don’t want to rent to them, knowing that they are journalists and feeling that they would be targeted. Transportation. One journalist told us that the taxis wouldn’t allow them to get in because they’re wearing their vest. People fear being near them so that’s what the journalists themselves believe. They are being targeted.
And then there are certain cases where there is clear and strong evidence of targeting. And I’ll mention quickly a few. Issam Abdallah, a Lebanese photojournalist who worked for Reuters in October on the border between Israel and Lebanon was killed, and there are multiple investigations showing that he was directly targeted. Hamza Dahdouh, the son of Wael Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya. These two journalists were killed in January, and we know that the Israeli military targeted them because they have admitted to doing so, and they claim that they were members of a militant group without really providing enough proof. There was an important visual investigation by the Washington Post which debunked some of these claims made by Israel with regards to this particular case. In addition to that, Reporters Without Borders filed three cases with the International Criminal Court, and they mentioned, I think it was 20 Palestinian journalists. In these cases, it’s about war crimes against Palestinian journalists. And in the filings, they mentioned that this is “an eradication of Palestinian media.” They said they have reasonable grounds for thinking that some of these journalists were deliberately killed.
Then, we come to the numbers. If we just look at the numbers, and if we take the number by the Committee to Protect Journalists, it’s at 103 Palestinian journalists killed since October. This idea, this notion that this is simply a natural and expected result of the war really doesn’t stand. Working on these investigations and looking through these cases, this was one of our main findings. But let us also look at this: 103 journalists, over half of them were killed at home. So, the idea that journalists during wars are in areas where there’s fighting, and these areas are more dangerous than the areas where the civilians are, it’s not true. Most of the journalists are actually by the hospitals. So, this claim that it’s a natural result of the war with over half of the journalists being killed at home, many of them with family members, it just does not hold.
Another element to address this question is the drones. One of the excellent pieces that was done that was part of this investigation was done by Forbidden Stories is about targeting by drones. Drones are supposed to be highly precise in their targeting. Eighteen journalists and media workers were reportedly killed or injured by precision strikes, likely by drones. If you speak to anyone in Gaza or you see some of the videos, you’re going to hear this buzz constantly in the background. I hear it all the time. The Gazan journalists refer to it as “zanana” because of the buzzing sound. It’s an Arabic word, and it refers to the buzzing sound that they make. So, they’re constantly there, collecting information they see, they hear and yet, 18 journalists were killed or injured by a drone. How do you justify or explain that?
And finally, I’m going to say one last thing, the press infrastructure. We have definitive evidence as part of our investigations about the targeting of media offices. So, altogether, it provides a clearer picture. You know that the question of targeting journals, there’s a consistent and alarming pattern of attacks on journalists in Gaza that cannot be dismissed simply as collateral damage of the war.
Nima: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the scale of this is so stark, and the Gaza Project and Forbidden Stories has done such a remarkable job here. I want to kind of look into how we got here or where this idea of journalists as “legitimate targets” — certainly being targeted deliberately — really evolved in our own media here in the United States. So, back in early 2002, Atlantic magazine contributor and high-status centrist pundit, also a board member of the Pulitzer Prize awards Anne Applebaum actually wrote an article in Slate with this headline: “Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war.” And in this piece, Applebaum advocates that Israel should kill Palestinian journalists for the crime of making Israel look bad. Essentially, she doesn’t even really try and link any specific people to any specific groups. I mean, obviously this is just a few months after 9/11, she doesn’t kind of link this to this idea of, you know, a war on terror. She really just openly writes that publications promoting anti-Israel and anti-American views are inherently fair targets in Israel’s bombing campaigns across Palestine. And she, of course, has suffered no professional or social consequence for this from openly advocating the killing of reporters. She is herself a reporter. She is herself a writer. Has no solidarity across there, only this kind of murderous intent. What do you think, Hoda, this tells us about the state of even just being a Palestinian or Arab journalist working here in the United States, let alone in Palestine or elsewhere? And do you think anything has changed for the better or potentially for the worse in these past 22 years?
Hoda Osman: I am an Arab journalist working in the US, and I tell you, it is painful, deeply painful, and troubling and dangerous to see a journalist advocating for the targeting of journalists, no matter what nationality they are or where they come from. And it underscores the biases that exist and the dangers that the Palestinian journalists face. Imagine if the roles were reversed and someone advocated for targeting journalists working for official media in any other country. I mean, understandably, it would provoke condemnations and outrage. So, it’s really sad.
And let’s go back to the numbers again. The over 100 journalists on CPJ’s list. Thirty percent of those journalists listed by CPJ were working for media outlets that were affiliated or grossly tied to Hamas. And there’s the one story that was part of our investigation, written by Harry Davies of The Guardian that I can speak more about, if you’d like, but it raises this issue about whether or not they are legitimate targets. And we had an excellent interview with Carlos Martínez de la Serna from CPJ, and we asked him about this, and he said if they are not engaged in violence or inciting violence, they are journalists. So, he said, we draw the line. If they are not engaged in violence or inciting violence, they cannot be targets. And he said they thoroughly examined the cases. They have these names of these journalists on their lists. And you know, he called out Israel. He said that they systematically use propaganda to discredit journalists without providing proof and that in all the years of CPJ doing this work of collecting records of journalists who’ve been killed, they’ve never had to change or remove a name because of information provided by the Israeli military. So, you know, it’s harmful too, of course, first to the journalists who are there, who are working there, whether in Gaza or the West Bank or in Israel but of course, also to journalists here who are Palestinian or Arab and are more maybe, you know, exposed more closely because it’s coming from an American, a fellow American journalist.
Adam: Yeah. And, of course, the whole thing’s absurd because CNN, ABC News, New York Times routinely in bed with the IDF. Obviously, the New York Times employs several reporters who are formerly IDF.
Nima: Or whose kids are current IDF.
Adam: Yeah, but I mean, just assuming we focus solely on the journalist itself. I mean, the idea that if a reporter has “ties” with a military, they therefore become conscripted in that military by proxy, is a standard that does not apply to any other country, really, that we’ve seen. I mean, especially given the revolving door between the US military and reporters. I mean, Jim Sciutto at CNN worked for the US State Department, between his stint at ABC News and CNN. So, the whole criteria, of course, is a double standard that is not applied evenly.
And I want to talk about this kind of militarization of the press because I think this is the key racist slight of hand that’s done, and you see this all the time. There was this idea that people say there’s no media really in Palestine, or they’re not letting reporters into Palestine. The assumption is that Palestinian reporters, especially Gazan, for want of a better term, that are in Gaza are somehow inherently untrustworthy. One sees this with reflective skepticism of reporting coming out of Gaza, that Palestinians are sort of seen as too close, too biased. By definition, they don’t have the kind of Western, detached worldview that supposedly makes reporting, a reportage trustworthy. Now, obviously, this is kind of just racism and chauvinism. And the corollary to this, of course, is that when they get killed, they’re sort of militants, so their deaths really don’t really count as reporters because they don’t really count as reporters. They don’t really count as journalists. I want you to talk about this casual racist assumption that they’re inherently biased or inherently Hamas partisans or whatever and how this dehumanization effort both makes information coming from these reporters seen as unreliable and discredited but also, of course, opens them up for summary execution by Israel.
Hoda Osman: You know, I want to start answering this by speaking about my experience working on the Gaza project because I have to say that not all Western media perceive Palestinian journalists this way, and it’s important for me to make this point now, especially as we’ve just finished this project. It involved 50 journalists, as I mentioned, most of them were Western, and we had four Arab journalists, me included, and three of us were Palestinian. They showed a lot of respect and appreciation for the journalists in Gaza but also for our editorial judgments and for our participation and contribution. But having said that, it doesn’t mean that what you just described doesn’t exist.
And I want to give my testimony on how accurate, how professional the Palestinian journalists are, especially the journalists who are in Gaza right now. I’ve been in touch with them since the beginning but recently, because of this project, I had to interview them for our stories, and they’ve been incredibly accurate in their information. They’ve been thorough in verifying anything. If they didn’t know something, they would tell me, Hoda, I don’t know, let me check. I’ve asked for time codes, for timestamps, they would take them and show me exactly when a picture was taken.
So, in addition to dealing with everything that is going on, with all the horrors, with not finding food for their families. They’re still working, and they’re doing so very, very professional. Definitely one of the key issues here that’s been raised over and over again is of course, Israel is banning any foreign journalists from entering Gaza and if they do enter, it has to be with the military, and they are restricted in where they can go and what they see. There have been calls, including recently, just last week, for Israel to allow foreign journalists in. And sometimes Palestinian journalists take offense in the way that these calls and statements are made because it makes it seem as if Palestinians are unable to tell their own stories or to cover and report accurately, and that the foreign journalists are needed to do that. But the calls for foreign journalists to enter Gaza and to report, I would like to see them coming from a place to lift the burden off of these Palestinian journalists who have been exhausted by what is going on.
Nima: To Adam’s point and then to your response, I think that the perception, not even by fellow journalists, right, but by people consuming the media — so, the news readers, people watching cable news, people seeing these reports come through on their phones. This idea of kind of inherent bias in one way and then moral objective journalism on the other. And if you’re reading someone who works at CNN and their name is John Smith, then oh, well, that’s going to be straight down the line unbiased reporting. But if you read a report by someone who is in Gaza, who lives in Gaza, then that is inherently going to be biased. And this false idea even of objective journalism to begin with, as a teacher and a trainer and a coach of journalists, Hoda, how do you view the idea of what even being objective means and what the role of the journalist is in telling people’s stories and being that holder of both current events and then history?
Hoda Osman: Thank you for asking because I was gonna point to that. What is objective journalism? I think what’s happening right now has changed a lot. I think we should all reconsider how we do journalism, the rules that we’re supposed to follow as someone who is experiencing what we see in these videos and pictures and the stories that are supposed to be objective. I mean, even if they pretend to be objective, don’t we really know that they’re not objective, that they must have an opinion about what they’re suffering from or struggling with themselves? I’d rather journalists be honest and tell me what they think and report while also expressing what they think. And I think it’s just made us all reconsider what does objectivity mean, especially when you are reporting on a war, and you’re part of this war yourself. I feel it’s irrelevant to talk about objectivity and objective journalism.
Nima: Yeah, and what are you even hearing from the reporters that you talk to who are in Gaza in terms of, I don’t know, maybe the sense of fatalism or I mean, there’s only so many vivid images and horrifying stories, personal testimonies, eyewitness accounts that can come out, whether it’s obviously over the past century or 75 years or 50 years or the last nine months, this idea that this immense human suffering nonstop on display is still not changing the minds of those who are able to continue this genocide? Or even those who continue to justify and support it. So, what are you hearing from people in Gaza and how that may affect the way that they are still diligently telling these stories and recording the truth?
Hoda Osman: I remember one journalist in an interview we did. His name is Hani, and he talked about feeling “qahr.” It’s an Arabic word. And I had to translate this interview to English, and I couldn’t find a direct translation, and it made me realize the genius of some of these deeply nuanced words in Arabic. So, I asked a friend who’s a translator, and I said, how do you describe “qahr?” So, here’s what she said. It’s a mix of anguish, helplessness, being frustrated, resentful, plus a sense of injustice. It’s impossible to put it in one word. So Hani, in this interview, says, “maqhoor.” He feels “qahr.” And she said it means I feel crushed by the injustice of it all. I think this encapsulates how they feel crushed under the weight of this unjust war, the circumstances and the unjust treatment.
But while, you know, many of the journalists are understandably feeling this and frustrated by the lack of action and more recently, even the lack of attention and coverage in the West, they continue reporting and primarily because they are committed to journalism. They report not just to see or to affect change but because they want to document and to inform. And I think they feel a duty to report, even if there’s no change. So, we see them, day in and day out, continuing to do it.
And as part of our reporting, we did a survey of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, and we got over 200 responses. And let me share some of what we found. Out of the over 200 who responded, many had lost family members. Forty-nine had lost an immediate family member. Eleven tragically lost one or more of their children. I spoke to one journalist who lost all four of his children. Can you even imagine? And they continued to work. There were five journalists who lost 40 members of their families or more. And 98% have been displaced. As you can see, you know, everyone has been displaced, but what’s shocking is that there were several who had been displaced 20 times or more. Imagine, in 10 months moving over 20 times. The homes of 183 were partially or totally destroyed, and 195 had lost their equipment, the equipment that they use for reporting, their cameras, their laptops, they’re losing this. And many of the journalists I speak with, they write full reports on their phones. They type them up on a phone. So, you know, horrific conditions, and they’re still going. Quite heroic, if you ask me.
Nima: Yeah, no, it’s incredible, incredible resilience and strength to continue to do this amid all these horrors and for so long with such inaction on their behalf if not even worse. But Hoda, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you also for the Gaza Project. It’s really important. Can you just tell our listeners what else ARIJ is up to and where folks can find your work?
Hoda Osman: Thank you very much for having me and for giving this the time and attention that it deserves. You can find all the stories we’ve worked on on ARIJ’s website, arij.net. Also, our stories have been published in The Intercept and The Guardian. And Forbidden Stories, if you go to their site, you’ll find all the over 20 investigations that have been published. You can find them there in the many languages that they were published in.
Nima: Well, thank you again. We’ve been speaking with Hoda Osman, investigative journalist and editor. She is the Executive Editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and the president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association. Hoda, thank you again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Hoda Osman: Thank you.
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Adam: I think one thing that the US-backed genocide in Gaza has done, I think, pretty unequivocally, has pretty much pissed away any credibility these kind of fart-sniffing lofty Western liberal platitudes have. I mean, again, I think to some extent, they can be credible here and there but for the most part, it’s clear that they are only really important in the abstract. But when the rubber hits the road and it can actually challenge one’s own national security state or one’s own career, then suddenly they just go out the window. I mean, I can’t tell you how many freaking articles and pieces — I mean, we did tell you — were about Jim Acosta getting his press credentials taken away versus the fact that CNN has done basically no segments on the systemic killing of journalists. They’ve mentioned them briefly. One of the CNN stringers is one of the people killed. Jake Tapper brought it up once. But it’s just not an issue they ever talk about. It’s not something that gets sustained coverage. It’s not framed as intentional even though, of course, we know it is. And of course, the reason is that it’s about who’s in the club. There are liberal rights for those who are in the club, who are in the right class status, who have the right credentials, who went to the right school.
Nima: And that includes who’s doing the killing, not just who’s killed.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. And so, it is very much press freedom with a big asterisk. And if you’re in my class status, if you’re aligned with US national security interests, if you’re the right racial makeup, Ivy League schools. And if you’re not that, if you’re seen as grimy, if you’re one of the J 20 journalists because you know, you write for independent news outlets, or you’re, God forbid, on the business end of a US military campaign, then you simply don’t count. You’re not human, much less a journalist.
Nima: Right. Your motives are questioned, if not automatically deemed dubious or suspect. And you are not owed the honor —
Adam: If you’re even thought about at all.
Nima: Right. I mean, totally. And if you are thought about, you are immediately dismissed. It’s almost like what happens when cops kill a young black person, and it’s like, immediately going to, well, you know, they were no angel, right? If they live in Gaza, it’s like, well, you know, I mean —
Adam: They knew a guy who knew a guy.
Nima: They knew a guy who knew a guy maybe whose name was Mohammed and so therefore, you know, chances are he’s Hamas. That’s that same kind of tangential reasoning, which really is purely just racist, right? It’s just racist and imperial, and it has everything to do with who is in who is out. This is one of the starkest double standards that we see.
And of course, as a show dedicated to media, and one that has as much as we have been able to has, you know, been talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza ever since last fall, thought this was a fitting way to end our seventh season of Citations Needed. Thanks so much to our guests, Kavitha Chekuru and Hoda Osman for coming on. And thanks to all the guests that have been on the show. I guess over these past seven seasons, we’ve had about 300 guests, Adam, over the course of what is now, if you kind of add up episodes and News Briefs and live shows and Begathons and stuff like that, over 375 releases.
And so, just can’t thank you, the listeners, enough for staying with us, for sharing and supporting the show, for writing reviews when you’re able to, for helping us out through Patreon or by going to Bonfire and getting some Citations swag, it all helps the show keep going. And of course, on behalf of the Citations Needed team, thank you so much for continuing to support the show.
Adam: Yes, thank you so much. We very much look forward to coming back in September. We have some bangers lined up so stay tuned for that.
Nima: That’s right. We are going to take an end-of-summer break. We will be back in September with new episodes of Citations Needed. So, stay tuned. But until then you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener-funded.
Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you in September.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, August 14, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
