Episode 227: The Importance of ‘Seriousness,’ or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide (Part II)
Citations Needed | August 13, 2025 | 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’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Adam: Yes, as always, if you like the show and you haven’t, please, please, please subscribe to our Patreon. It helps keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable.
Nima: This is the final full-length episode of Citations Needed for this season. This is our season finale. Season eight is now behind us. Adam, we have been doing this for eight years. Actually, July 12, 2025, marked our eight-year anniversary of doing the show. We started way back in 2017 and have, you know, hundreds of shows, hundreds of News Briefs, hundreds of guests, thousands of hours of this Citations Needed content for your listening pleasure. But, Adam, yeah, it’s been, it’s been quite a run, and we’re keeping it going. So no worries, everyone. But we do take a break in the summer, and we will be back after the show in the fall with more episodes for Citations Needed, season nine.
Adam: Yes, anyone who listens to the show knows that our breaks are not very long breaks, so we’ll be back soon, but we do want to thank you all for all your support over the years, and we very much are excited and looking forward to season nine. We have some very special things in store. We’re not going to reveal them yet, but we are doing new things for season nine. We are sexing it up.
Nima: I think that’s what shows have to do when they reach season nine. Are there season-nine tropes that we need to lean into here?
Adam: Yeah, we’re going to have a cousin from out of town come by.
Nima: Yeah, that’s right. The Harlem Globetrotters are going to stop by, too.
Adam: We have a natural disaster. We’re going to have an earthquake episode. That’s when you’re running out of ideas. Possibly alien visitors. We’re going to have what’s called ‘stalking the cougar,’ which is a trope from 24 where you have nothing to do for a character for a whole episode. You have them just being stalked by a cougar in the jungle.
Nima: And someone’s going to have twins.
Adam: You know what we should do for Sweeps Week? We should do a marriage. Can someone? I know we’re all married.
Nima: [Laughs] Yeah. We’re going to have a triple-marriage episode of Citations Needed.
Adam: Maybe we can find someone to get married. We’re all married, though, that’s the problem. We need to–
Nima: It’s like the finale of Fuller House. That’s right, folks, I said it.
Adam: We need to hire someone. Give them a will-they-won’t-they plot. They get married. Boom. Ratings, ratings gold.
Nima: So here we go, everyone. There are all of these myriad reasons to continue to tune into Citations Needed. We’ll be back after our very short summer break next month with more episodes of Citations Needed. So that will be for season nine. Stay tuned. But before then, here is our season finale.
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“Exclusive Look at Life in War-Ravaged Gaza,” reads the title for a CNN interview with correspondent Clarissa Ward. “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid,” report Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg for Haaretz. “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” argues Omer Bartov for the New York Times.
Adam: These stories all have something in common: They’re vital pieces of journalism about Gaza, or Palestine more broadly, in Western and Western-aligned outlets. This is obviously important. Reporting like this keeps Western audiences informed about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, fortifies sympathetic Westerners’ solidarity with Palestine, and serves as an essential counter to the pro-Israel PR machine powering so much of Western media coverage.
Nima: But while these pieces have made a splash among their audiences, in many cases, they’re building upon points that Palestinian journalists, writers, and activists have been making for weeks, months, and even years. So why is the reporting of Palestinian journalists, especially their reporting on what’s happening within their own country and their own cities and their own lives, so often ignored, only to be heeded after it gets the Western stamp of approval?
Adam: On today’s episode, the second and final part of our series, “The Importance of ‘Seriousness,’ or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide,” we’ll explore the discrepancies in alleged credibility between Western and Israeli journalists versus Palestinian and other Arab journalists, especially when it comes to reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We’ll look at how, by Western standards, journalists don’t seem to build legitimacy by being correct, or accurately reporting the news, but by their close proximity to the political and media establishment.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Kaleem Hawa, a writer and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. Kaleem’s writing on art, film, literature and culture has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, People’s Dispatch, Artforum, the Baffler, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. And later this month, from August 29 to August 31, the Palestinian Youth Movement will be convening the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Michigan, which will provide critical analysis on Palestine, the region and North America. All listeners of Citations Needed interested in journalism, writing, and culture are encouraged to check it out.
[Begin clip]
Kaleem Hawa: Normally, journalists would look around them and say, Okay, I should talk to the people of Gaza. I should talk to the journalists who are active there. But Western journalists have effectively done the opposite. They’ve come to rely even more heavily on the Israeli states, for which they do stenography. And they’ve come to rely on Israeli sources who are, as we know, structurally pro-genocide, and Israeli newspapers, who people forget are bound by a censorship regime.
[End clip]
Nima: As we just mentioned, this is the second part of our season-ending series on “The Importance of ‘Seriousness,’ or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide.” Now, we recorded this and spoke with our guest before the news this past weekend of the Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera journalists in a media tent near Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. This occurred on Sunday, August 10. The deliberate attack murdered six journalists and cameramen including 28-year-old reporter Anas Al-Sharif, one of the most well-known documenters of the ongoing genocide.
Adam: For months, Israel has been openly announcing their intent to kill al-Sharif and dozens of other reporters, in what is basically a hit list they announced on social media and elsewhere, under the thin pretenses of, you know, of course they’re all Hamas or whatever. Everyone’s Hamas. Doctors Without Borders, UN, everyone’s Hamas. This has obviously been rejected by every journalist organization, human-rights organization, international legal expert, and of course Palestinians themselves. But they have to kind of run through the motions to maintain this thin liberal pretense, it’s all very sort of perfunctory. Even within Israel, no one really cares because to them, again, every Palestinian by definition is Hamas. This Israeli claim that he’s a Hamas terrorist or whatever has been echoed mindlessly by the New York Times, CNN, NBC News. It’s been the lede in how his death was presented, of course painting the image that this is a credible accusation centering Israel as this kind of credible source, which, again, we’ll talk a lot about on this episode. We want to read one Reuters headline that, I think, is exceptionally egregious and, frankly, racist and dehumanizing.
Nima: Yeah, this was published on Monday, August 11, 2025, by Reuters. The headline reads, quote, “Israel says it killed Al Jazeera journalist,” end quote, and it begins like this, quote,
Israel’s military said it killed Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al Sharif in a strike on Gaza City on Sunday, accusing him of heading a Hamas cell.
“Anas Al-Sharif served as the head of a terror cell in the Hamas terrorist organization and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” the military said in a statement.
End quote.
Adam: So, again, this is something we’re going to be discussing in this week’s episode, which was recorded before his death, but this is, again, the most extreme manifestation of this incitement campaign, of this dehumanization of Palestinians, and of this broader pattern of not listening to Palestinians who were actually in Gaza, reporters and journalists and media outlets in Gaza.
Nima: Sami Abu Salem, a member of the Palestine Journalist Syndicate, told Drop Site News on Monday, as he stood in the cemetery in Gaza City where al-Sharif and others had just been buried, quote, “I think the Israeli Occupation Forces are very annoyed because the truth is coming from Gaza through Palestinian journalists,” end quote.
And like so many others in Gaza, especially the people reporting from there, al-Sharif had pre-written a final message, to be released upon the event of his death.
This is my will and final message.
it begins.
If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.
The message also reads this, quote,
I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification — so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
I entrust you with Palestine — the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.
I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.
End quote.
Adam: Now, there’s two things we want to avoid in this episode, because I do think it’s somewhat of a complex topic, which is, number one, it’s not so much a criticism of the journalism that we’re going to be covering from Western outlets, Clarissa Ward’s parachuting into Gaza, much of the reporting in Haaretz. It’s not as if that reporting is bad or we’re criticizing those journalists per se, although oftentimes they could do a little better job of referencing those who came before. And that’s part of the fulcrum, or the leverage, of how influence works in terms of convincing people. Obviously, on this show, we frequently cite Western reporters to say, you know, the kind of classic Chomsky, even the New York Times says, right? That’s a kind of general posture people take.
The goal is not to be a moral hipster. It’s not the sort of, Oh, I knew about this before you knew about this kind of stuff, right? The point is that, on an institutional, systemic level, almost every single major breaking story in Western media about war crimes in Gaza specifically–and this applies broadly, but we’ll keep our focus on Gaza for the purpose of this two-parter–has been reported before by Palestinian journalists, or Palestinian-run outlets, and at a certain point after the 50th time that happens, I think it’s worth asking why we have a certain systemic and widespread definition of credibility, and why certain outlets and certain journalists are given that credibility, and why some are not, and what the criteria for that is, and is it actually about the institutional reliability of the outlets and the reporters, or is it some perhaps something about their proximity to whiteness, proximity to sort of Western institutions and establishment institutions?
The second thing we want to avoid is that we’re not really doing the kind of squishy liberal listen to Palestinians stuff, because I think that can get a little problematic for the obvious reasons of, Jeffrey Goldberg went and hired five Palestinian writers to vomit out the Israel line, right, at the Atlantic. So you can find Palestinians who will toe a kind of liberal Zionist or Zionist line. Again, there’s millions of Palestinians. You can find one or two who will sort of affirm your worldview.
Nima: You don’t want to do performative tokenism.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. And I think sometimes people can fall into that trap of saying, Listen to Palestinians. Well, I mean, okay, which ones? But obviously the vast, vast, vast majority of Palestinians–and poll after poll after poll will show you this–don’t parrot Jeffrey Goldberg’s line. He had to search long and hard for several weeks after October 7–I know because I did a study on this–to find Palestinian or Palestinian Americans or British Palestinians who will affirm his line about how we need to go to war against Hamas and blah, blah, blah, right? So we are not trying to do this sort of Listen to X format, because I think that could become a little bit liberal and easily exploitable. But broadly speaking, there’s a reason why the vast majority of Palestinian journalists and the vast majority of Palestinian writers in almost every single non-Western-aligned, non, kind of, Atlantic Council-funded Palestinian writer and institution is discredited per se and ignored prima facie.
And the reason why that is is because, which we’ll get into, they’re considered inherently biased, whereas Israelis and Americans are not considered inherently biased. Now they could sort of project or display biases which could discredit them, but by default, they’re considered capital V, capital S, Very Serious, and this concept of seriousness and objectivity, neutrality, unbiasedness, is central to what we’re going to be discussing today. Because what our argument is is that these concepts are highly selective, highly racialized, and very much are about proximity to imperial power, US and Israeli foreign policy establishment, versus some neutral or objective analysis of their history of being correct.
Nima: Well, right, because Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians have a role in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. So the idea that even an American journalist or, and especially an Israeli journalist, would somehow be objective in a way, displaying a certain kind of neutrality, a certain kind of removal, a certain kind of distance or disinterestedness that a Palestinian journalist automatically, inherently is not able to display, is itself discriminatory, right? And that is what we’re going to get into today, the idea that these shocking revelations that we read in the New York Times and The Washington Post, in Haaretz, that these somehow are what real journalism is. This establishes the truth. This is part of history, right? First draft, or maybe the next draft. But when we’ve already heard these things from Palestinians living them, they are not automatically entered into the kind of historical record. It is only when they get the imprint of authority from these other outlets, from these other journalists, are they allowed to be deemed real.
Adam: And then, to be clear, oftentimes when they do appear in Western reportage, they are watered down. Agency is removed from the headline and the lede. They’re kind of obscured. Israeli counterclaims without evidence are given disproportionate prominence in the article. The sort of emotionally charged nature of it, the kind of shocking nature of it, is usually downplayed, obscured, systemically. And more often than not, if not always, by the time the report has come out, politically, it’s sort of too late to do anything. It’s either a, quote-unquote, “fact on the ground,” which is what Israel is really good at establishing. They’re good at establishing so-called “facts on the ground,” which is to say they create a kind of inertia of war crime that is impossible or difficult to dislodge, versus when they first start doing something, there’s pressure and there’s kind of buildup internationally to rein in or to stop the evil that’s going on.
But they’re very good at kind of establishing that fact on the ground, whether it be mass starvation, whether it be invasion, whether it be dispossession, whether it be occupation, by the time we sort of get around to being outraged by it, and the New York Times releases internal documents talking about it, it’s already done. And so that kind of serves a function of liberal awareness politics, like we’re sort of aware of this crime, but there’s not really a call to action or anything you can really do about it, and this fits squarely within that milieu.
Nima: So we’ve been seeing this dynamic play out for over 100 years in Palestine, whether the word from the British government or occupying power in Mandatory Palestine, or from Zionist thinkers and militia leaders over the native Palestinian population. We have seen this play out for many, many, many years, but for the purposes of this episode and to keep us focused, we’re going to start about 20 years ago, in the late 2000s, during Israel’s so-called Operation Cast Lead, in which the Israeli military murdered an estimated 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, right before Barack Obama took office for his first term.
Now, even before this slaughter, Israel had been intensifying its yearslong siege and blockade on Gaza. But at the time, outlets like Electronic Intifada and organizations like the Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights reported on the blockade and attacks while also tallying death tolls themselves. But it would take months, if not years, for American legacy media like the New York Times and Washington Post to begin to publish its own articles that were in any way critical of the Israeli attacks.
For example, The New York Times published a March 2010 op-ed headlined, “Gaza a Year Later,” by Irish politician Micheál Martin, who was a foreign minister for the European Union at the time. Martin rightfully identified the grave immorality of allowing Israel’s assaults to continue, writing this, quote,
The tragedy of Gaza is that it is fast in danger of becoming a tolerated humanitarian crisis, a situation that most right-thinking people recognize as utterly unacceptable in this day and age, but which is proving extremely difficult to remedy or ameliorate due to the blockade and the wider ramifications of efforts to try and achieve political progress in the Middle East.
End quote. But the fact of the matter is that Gaza was already a, quote-unquote, “tolerated humanitarian crisis,” a point that Palestine-focused media and Palestinian organizations and observers had already been making in their own reporting from months, even years before. Consider statements like this from an Electronic Intifada report from March 18, 2009. Quote, “The humanitarian crisis in the wake of the war and the blockade affects nearly every other aspect of the daily lives of ordinary Gazans.” End quote.
Adam: Obviously, this happened again in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021 the various so-called ‘mowing the lawns’ of Gaza that Israel did, which you may not know about, because history began on October 7, 2023. Prior to that, there was literally no history. The world was simply conceived out of nothing. All of our memories were transplanted by some kind of demon. So let’s move to October 7. Let’s move to the 2020s. For a bit of a primer on top-level Western attitudes towards Palestine, let’s consider a statement made by former President Joe Biden. In late October of 2023, just a few weeks after October 7, then-President Joe Biden stated at a White House news conference that he didn’t trust the death toll numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry. Here’s a clip.
[Begin clip]
Joe Biden: I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war. But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.
[End clip]
Adam: So this was shocking to many human-rights and humanitarian groups as well as Palestinian groups, because the US State Department had been using the Gaza Health Ministry death figures from all previous conflicts, and studies showed that they only veered from the actual official Israeli death tolls by 4 to 7%. So the idea that the Gaza health ministry statistics were off was something that was just invented in mid- to late October by pro-Israel propagandists and echoed by the president himself. Now, again, these are numbers that have been used by the US State Department, by Human Rights Watch, by independent groups for years. Everybody knew, if they were anything, they were a huge undercount.
But quickly after the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17, 2023, which initially was reported as an Israeli bombing, which it was. The nature of the bombing, it may have been a shelling versus an airstrike, but the crybully campaign emerged to sort of claim pro-Palestinian bias in the part of US media, they sort of believe the Hamas-run officials in Gaza and that this was journalistically discrediting. Now, of course, it’s unclear why repeating, they repeated it with attribution, they said, according to Gaza Health Ministry officials, but this wasn’t sufficient for the ADL and other crybully or pressure groups who said, No, you have to call it the Hamas-run Health Ministry, or Hamas-run government. The obvious implication being, is that they’re just a bunch of cartoon terrorists and they can’t be trusted.
So then that subsequent crybully campaign introduced a new term, which was used propagandistically by every major outlet, the quote-unquote, “Hamas-run” Health Ministry. This was a way of vaguely casting aspersions on the death tolls that were coming out daily, and including, of course, the total death toll. One study shows that “Hamas-run” in the New York Times returns about 500 results. “Israeli-run” generates only 38. One study we did of cable news found that, prior to October 17, 2023 when the Al-Ahli Hospital was bombed and that whole fake controversy about it being a errant PIJ rocket, which it wasn’t, the term ‘Hamas-run’ had never been used prior to October 17 by CNN or MSNBC, not once. But after October 17, in a 100-day survey period, CNN used the term ‘Hamas-run’ 247 times, and MSNBC used it 137 times. So that crybullying campaign worked. But the point, of course, is to say, You can’t really trust these numbers. Palestinians are inherently shifty. They’re inherently untrustworthy. The implication, and sometimes the explicit claim, was that high death tolls are actually what Hamas wants, that they’re kind of a nihilistic, mindless jihadist death cult that is alien to the native population in Gaza, sort of separate from them, infiltrates their communities undercover, and seeks out their death and destruction to sort of garner Western sympathy.
And the idea is that if you have sympathy, if you’re part of one of the many patron states of Israel, you know, US, Germany, UK, whatever, and you see these horrific images, that your sympathy is actually their weapon. It’s being weaponized. And you’re playing into their hands. This conventional wisdom, of course, reported by everyone from Jake Tapper to Joe Scarborough, and the idea is that empathy is now considered not only suboptimal or bad, but it’s actually making you a Hamas weapon. That empathy needs to be set aside and one needs to have cold, hard logic at their hands. But the general idea is that the information coming out of Gaza is inherently suspect, and journalists who function in Gaza are there, especially if they’re Palestinian, or, really anybody, are considered inherently suspect, because the idea is that if they say something critical of Hamas, their tyrannical regime will come down on them, never mind the fact that over 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, many of them very clearly targeted.
Nima: Now this policy from CNN and other sources deciding to use this, quote-unquote, “Hamas run” epithet really came into practice immediately after the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17, 2023, and it was further codified in a memo sent out to CNN staff nine days later. As Daniel Boguslaw reported for The Intercept, CNN’s News Standards and Practices division sent an email to its staff on October 26, 2023, detailing the shift in editorial policy. It read this, quote,
Hamas controls the government in Gaza and we should describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict. If the underlying statistics have been derived from the ministry of Health in Gaza, we should note that fact and that this part of the Ministry is ‘Hamas-controlled’ even if the statistics are released by the West Bank part of the ministry or elsewhere.
End quote.
Adam: This double standard of casting aspersions or being shady about everything coming out of Palestine, whereas Israeli officials are trusted, per se, was manifested in glaring double standards and editorial practices. The New York Times especially engaged in an extremely glaring double standard when they counted how many people had died, when they’re counting the dead. Our study of the first year of coverage after October 7 found that in 52 different articles, the New York Times used a very odd qualifier when mentioning the Palestinian death tolls, they would write, quote, “The death tolls did not distinguish between civilians and combatants,” unquote, without noting that their Israeli death toll, almost always cited side by side with the Palestinian death toll, didn’t either. This is from February of 2025, this is just kind of one typical example. Liam Stack at the New York Times would write, quote,
Hamas and other groups killed roughly 1,200 people and took 250 hostages during a surprise attack on Israel.
In the war that followed, Israel…killed more than 47,000 people, according to local health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
But of course, the 1,200 total that was given for the Israeli death count doesn’t distinguish between military and civilian. In fact, 379 of the 1,200 killed were military, and dozens of the captives taken by Hamas on October 7 were also military. When I asked Liam Stack about this, I sent the New York Times an email, and I asked them on Twitter about this several times, they never got back. They didn’t really have an answer for that question, because it’s such an obvious, glaring double standard. The implication being, is that, Well, they don’t distinguishing civilians and combatants, so kind of use your imagination to fill in the blank of the 47,000 that are dead.
Nima: Probably about 46,000 are militants, and then 1,000 collateral damage deaths. Yes, boohoo, but look at those 46,000 terrorists that are now dead.
Adam: And repeatedly, the revised death toll from the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17 was presented as per se evidence that Hamas was kind of up to something. Now, why they would therefore then revise it down doesn’t really make any sense, but it went from 500 to 250. I think the US official number was 150 to 200 or something, but this was seen as somehow shady or suspect. But of course, for two weeks, the death toll on October 7 was 1,400. Then that later went down to 1,195, but that at no point was said as being suspect or seen as propaganda. Death tolls are revised all the time. You recall the September 11 death toll for the first couple weeks was 10,000 and then, of course, it went down to 4,000.
Nima: When there are mud slides in Texas, there are massive casualty tolls, until people are then accounted for, which then revises down the number initially, when more information comes out.
Adam: The Hamas-run Health Ministry is suspect by definition, because it’s the Hamas-run, Hamas-run, Hamas-run, Hamas-run, Hamas-controlled, Hamas-controlled. There’s an evile terrorist with, like, a ski mask in the back as the civilian guy fills out the form, hovering over them, threatening and menacing them. I need higher numbers. Give me higher numbers!
Nima: Now, similar issues were apparent when the BBC recently decided to shelve one of its own documentaries. The documentary, entitled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, was narrated by the 13-year-old son of Hamas’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture. Because of this, and this alone, the BBC decided to pull the entire film because it, quote, “breached editorial guidelines on accuracy,” end quote. The implication, of course, here is that even if one person with a connection to Gaza’s government–remember, a 13-year-old–if even they are involved in any piece of media anywhere, that piece of media is now deemed inherently biased. It is too skewed, it is too unreliable, it is too personalized to be trusted. Yet, of course, it’s not disqualifying in any way when journalists have familial connections, to, say, the Israeli military, or have served in it themselves. Consider, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine. He was himself an IDF prison guard in occupied Palestine.
Adam: And to be clear, casually admits in his own memoirs to help him commit torture, committing war crimes. And he volunteered, by the way, he’s not Israeli. He’s from Long Island. He decided to go to the IDF. He made a sort of active choice to fly all the way to the Levant to go kill Palestinians. That does not bias the Atlantic’s coverage.
Nima: Exactly that is not disqualifying. The New York Times has had many, many reporters covering Israel-Palestine whose own children serve in the Israeli ministry. They include Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner, both former Jerusalem correspondents for the New York Times, as well as longtime columnist David Brooks. All of their kids have served in the Israeli military, yet their reporting in the New York Times, the paper of record, the Gray Lady, is not ever questioned for undue bias. It is never thrown out. It is never disregarded because of their connections. Yet, if a 13-year-old who’s from Gaza narrates a BBC documentary, well, I guess that can’t be aired.
Adam: Yeah, well, he’s got hereditary guilt. Now, Western journalists have received plaudits for merely entering and reporting on Gaza, despite the fact that Palestinian journalists have been reporting from Gaza post-October 7, nonstop. In one example, CNN’s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward was allowed into Gaza after months of Israeli forces blocking international press from entering. In December of 2023, Ward appeared on CNN to speak with Gayle King and Charles Barkley. Let’s listen to that clip right now.
[Begin clip]
Gayle King: It may be hard to believe, but we are now 67 days into the war between Israel and Hamas, and our next guest has been crucial in bringing our reporting to you. I have to tell you, her name is Clarissa Ward, and I used to work with Clarissa Ward back in the day. I have always admired her reporting because she is a badass and she is fearless, especially her desire to be on the ground, where the biggest and often most dangerous news is breaking. There she is. And tonight is no different. Thanks to Clarissa, CNN is the first Western media outlet to get access into southern Gaza and report in Gaza, rather, and report independently. She has footage you won’t see anywhere else, and this is the first time she’s talking about it since returning.
[End clip]
Adam: So here we have a couple, little interesting verbiage here. We have ‘exclusive.’ They repeatedly refer to it as ‘exclusive’ several times, which, of course, it’s not exclusive. It’s exclusive for a, quote, “Western” reporter, but it’s not exclusive in any objective sense. But also, she throws in the idea of ‘independent.’ There’s this idea that this is the first time there’s been an independent reporter in Gaza. That word independent is very–
Nima: Not Palestinian.
Adam: Well, right. And the idea that CNN is somehow independent, which, of course, we know is 100% not true. It’s in name only, right, independent of the US national security state. CNN’s payroll is flooded with former US military, current US military, former IDF. The idea that Westernness, whiteness, in her case, but specifically a kind of official CNN international stamp, right? Someone who’s kind of been to Syria, been to Ukraine, done all these war zones.
Nima: Well, Gayle calls her badass, right? So that alone, if you are surviving and reporting on a genocide yourself, that is not apparently badass. But if you’re a white Western journalist who decides to go there to report, you become badass.
Adam: Now, to Ward’s credit, she acknowledged that there are Palestinian journalists in Gaza, many of whom have been killed by Israel. To her credit, she’s not really playing into this, but CNN’s PR department, CNN’s, the way they framed it, the way the anchors oriented the story, very much played up this idea that what came before kind of doesn’t count. That it’s sort of Al Jazeera, it’s Palestinian media, it’s Hamas-linked, Hamas-associated, that it’s sort of suspect. But this which, by the way, again, Ward was not showing us anything that dozens of Palestinian reporters in Al Jazeera and others had not already covered. But it got the kind of official, Very Serious, capital-V, capital-S, Very Serious stamp of approval. Therefore, it was seen as significant. And I think that rather than sort of say this as an indictment on Ward or even really CNN, what are the institutional factors that make it such that it’s just taken for granted that nothing really counts as being true until a Western white person parachutes in and says so?
Nima: Now, in recent months, journalists have sounded the alarm about the US-backed and Israeli-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, as it’s known. Now, GHF which began, quote-unquote, “operations,” if you can call it that, in late May of 2025, was initially promoted as a food and a distribution organization that would, quote, “work in partnership with NGOs and local Palestinian communities,” end quote. Early reporting indicated many causes for skepticism, however. GHF’s board included executives from MasterCard, Facebook, and a venture capital firm, and it relied heavily on private contractors. Even worse, though, by the time GHF launched, Israel had been imposing a blockade on aid to Palestinians in Gaza for approximately three straight months. And, as is fairly well known by now, GHF oversees only four, quote-unquote, “aid distribution sites,” a dramatic reduction from the hundreds of installations overseen by the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which we discussed in the last episode, part I of this series. In reality, then, GHF, which is a US- and Israeli-backed front group, was really designed to give Israel complete control over aid distribution to Palestinians, which is to say to continue its genocidal tactic of blocking aid, strangling the population there, and causing mass starvation.
Adam: GHF was also a means to line Palestinians up for IDF soldiers so they can shoot and kill them, sometimes just for target practice. A bombshell exposé by Haaretz dated June 27, 2025, detailed this, noting that IDF soldiers were ordered to shoot deliberately at Palestinians waiting for food at GHF checkpoints. The Haaretz report received widespread attention from major news outlets, including the following: Rolling Stone, Forward magazine, CNN, NPR. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Democratic Congress members also made note of the Haaretz report on their social media. The Haaretz report is an indispensable piece of journalism. Again, the point is not to criticize Haaretz necessarily. But weeks before the report, Palestinian journalists and writers had been alerting readers to the dangers of these very same tactics.
Nima: For example, on June 17, 2025, Gaza-based writer Malik Hijazi wrote for the Electronic Intifada this, quote,
Israel has been starving us for months. It cut off all aid to Gaza in March, only to recently approve a US-led, militarized aid site run by the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.”
The consequences are not abstract — they are visceral, immediate and devastating.
On 27 May in Rafah, thousands of hungry and desperate people surged toward the site seeking food and water. They had no option.
When security contractors lost control of the site, Israeli forces reportedly opened fire on the crowd as people scrambled for anything they could grab.
End quote. The following week, on June 25, 2025, Eman Hillis wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera headlined, quote, “I’m in northern Gaza. I would rather starve than take GHF aid.” End quote. Hillis wrote this, from the first day GHF began operations. Quote,
The scenes from the first day, May 27, were horrifying. Several Palestinians went missing; three were killed, and dozens injured after Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowds. Some argued that limited fire was necessary to maintain order, but the subsequent massacres, in which more than 300 have been killed, cannot be justified.
End quote. Hillis would go on to write this, quote,
A survivor of the Tuesday massacre at the GHF distribution point in Rafah told me that shortly after the appointed distribution time, Israeli soldiers were near the road to the site, “hunting people as if they were ducks”.
End quote. Now these reports, from Al Jazeera and Electronic Intifada, written by journalists based in Gaza, did not receive the same level of attention as the subsequent Haaretz report, and certainly no writeups in Rolling Stone or NPR, New York Times, CNN, etc. And again, as, Adam, you keep mentioning this is not to say anything negative about the Haaretz report. It is essential. It is a very valuable piece of investigation.
Adam: Well, yeah, it’s not like the world’s improved by them not reporting it, right?
Nima: Right, exactly. But the point is that this had already been reported on, and it was not deemed sufficiently authoritative, credible, or newsworthy, until an Israeli outlet did the report themselves.
Adam: Now, nowhere has this delayed liberal catchup game been more apparent than warnings of a genocide. The New York Times published an opinion piece on July 15, 2025, headlined, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” The author, Omer Bartov, is an Israeli American historian and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Again, it’s, of course, perfectly fine that he decided to realize this almost two years into it. Morally not optimal, but whatever. I guess, better late than never.
Nima: But there were other genocide scholars who, very close to the beginning of the genocide were saying the same thing.
Adam: Yeah. But an implicit part of legitimacy is that he grew up in Israel, so he therefore has credibility. He’s not considered one of the biased, unreliable, hyperbolic, hotheaded Arabs who sort of can’t be trusted. He’s one of the good ones.
Nima: Any Palestinian would say it’s always been genocide, but until we have an Israeli historian saying something, now it’s credible.
Adam: He wrote, quote,
My inescapable conclusion has been that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes in the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
Unquote. Now, there’s a couple things going on here, objectively speaking, if a truth makes you feel sad as an intellectual, as an academic, that should have no bearing on whether or not that is an agreed-upon truth. That is how toddlers think. I mean, does Omer want a binky? I’m sorry it makes you sad. I’m sorry it pains you. But that doesn’t matter. People are dying in Gaza. Your personal pain is irrelevant. Now, one can make the argument he’s doing a kind of negotiation tactic by building up credibility, saying, I don’t do this lightly, you know, with a heavy heart, to sort of lend it some mainstream gravitas. And I’m very sympathetic to that position, because again, better late than never, I suppose.
But on a systemic level, one has to ask the question both of Western media validators and New York Times editors and people who repeated it or discussed this op-ed on MSNBC or CNN, in what other context? We don’t need Russians to sort of acknowledge that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine. When it’s an enemy state, it’s just taken for granted that those subject to, obviously, there’s a racial component as well, but those subject to the war crimes are perfectly reasonable narrators of those war crimes. It’s really only when, there’s the racial component, but also when they’re on the wrong side of American US foreign policy that there’s all these kind of elaborate, exotic steps of validators in sort of Israeli validators that are necessary to kind of lend it power and purchase. And again, I understand why, in Israeli saying, My country is committing genocide has more leverage, because, obviously, in Israeli society, especially, doing so is somewhat of a risk, right? They will jail you for that. They’ll shun you for that, whatever. So maybe it has more credibility in that sense. But this would all have been avoided if people just listened–
Nima: And you nominally have, like, more control over that, right, because you’re a constituent of that state.
Adam: Sure, but again, if a Russian came along and said, Putin’s committing war crimes, this would be novel, but it wouldn’t really be any more meaningful than the thousands of Ukrainians who said it. It’s sort of the idea that we have to wait until Israel, even though, by the way, there was an Israeli genocide scholar on October 13, 2023, who published in the Jewish current saying it’s a genocide, Raz Segal, who later lost his job at the University of Minnesota, or a prospective job at the University of Minnesota for writing that opinion column. And I think that took way more courage than this shit. That was five days into it. This was 22 months. And he even says it didn’t even start till spring of 2024, which is fucking batshit, because, again, they made dozens of genocidal statements prior to that and did the actual genocide acts.
But again, we could have, on a systemic level, had we actually not engaged in this racist double standard, perhaps these things could have just had more gravity because we gave them more gravity. Things have gravity because the media says they matter, right? CNN and New York Times and MSNBC and the Washington Post, they create reality. This is kind of one of the broader themes of the show. It’s not like these are organic processes that emerge through natural selection. These are contrived from the top down. The Palestinians saying this was a genocide by just simply pointing out the Israeli statements in English and saying, See, that’s genocidal intent. They issued an evacuation order on October 13, 2023, which has genocidal intent, has intent to ethnically cleanse. They lied about this. They lied about that. You know, if you read their speeches in Hebrew, they’re very genocidal. This could have been avoided. We could have had this kind of rally around this sort of consensus around genocide a year and a half ago, and maybe save some lives, but because there’s this kind of delayed liberal, racialized process of validation, by the time there’s sort of consensus it’s genocide, well, the genocide is halfway done, so you can’t bring those people back to life.
Nima: And so you have the New York Times elevating a piece by Bartov, in which Bartov himself notes that numerous other sources have already defined Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide, including other legal and genocide scholars, the government of South Africa, Amnesty International, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who now happens to be sanctioned by the United States for merely telling the truth about the genocide. But Bartov does not note in his piece that he could have written this piece, as we’ve been saying much, much earlier. And to use two of Bartov’s own cited sources, the UN stated on November 2, 2023, I’ll say that again. The UN stated on November 2, 2023, that quote, “Time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza,” end quote. And the government of South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention and initiated proceedings at the International Court of Justice back in December of 2023.
So now we are midway through 2025, and we get this handwringing validation in the New York Times. Of course, sure, better late than never. It all helps making this case to a wider audience, one that is maybe less prone to hear about or care about what the government of South Africa is doing or what the UN is saying, but at the same time, it absolutely conditions authority on racial and ethnic and geographical credentials. That is how the authority for these news pieces is determined. That’s why we are getting that kind of piece handwringing about genocide from a genocide scholar in the New York Times in mid-2025 even though we’ve been hearing about this for nearly two years.
Adam: A related piece published in the New York Times on July 28, 2025, headlined, quote, “In a First, Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Gaza Genocide,” unquote. The report noted that the rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights had publicly concluded that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, though still referred to the matter as a, quote, “debate.” But Palestinians living through the post-October 7 siege and bombing campaign were using the term ‘genocide’ obviously much earlier. For example, journalist and poet Ahmed Abu Artema, who lived in Gaza and is one of the founders of Gaza’s mass nonviolent mobilization, the Great March of Return, called Israel’s attacks a genocide by mid-October 2023. And in a piece published on November 4, 2023, from Mondoweiss, Asmaa Abu Mezied, an economic development specialist, made a reference to her and other activists’ efforts to “[speak] out against the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” unquote.
Which, again, the Israelis themselves were making genocidal statements. On October 9, Yoav Gallant said they were going to have a full siege, not allowing food, fuel, water, proceeded to then call them “human animals.” Obviously, in late October, Benjamin Netanyahu had his infamous Amalek speech, where he used biblical references to mass killing of women and children. You had President Herzog, who said there were no innocents in Gaza in his speech, and again, in English. The genocidal intent was very clear from the beginning. Now, whether or not that manifested into a genocide, we can debate when exactly that happened, but certainly by November of 2023, December of 2023, it was very clear that there was both genocidal intent and a genocidal plan being carried out. We had evidence, of course, of mass expulsion, of depopulation in Gaza by late October, op-eds in Jerusalem Post, public comments by high-ranking officials of depopulating Gaza, again, a plan that we are now carrying out to the T.
And again, the point is not to be a moral hipster. That’s not the point. The point is that there is something fundamentally rotten and racist and flawed in how we deem information and opinion and reporting to be valid and to be serious versus unserious. And now we’re on the 15th iteration in my lifetime, where the so-called Left is, Oh, well, it turns out they were mostly correct. Well, okay, but what’s the sort of lesson here? Why do we need the New York Times and CNN and Washington Post again, as much of these outlets may be relics that fewer and fewer people watch, but they still serve their primary social and ideological function of validating opinions. And it seems like, I mean, Gaza more broadly, is the kind of death of liberal institutionalism. I think that’s very clear, especially this kind of so-called liberal rules-based order.
But it seems like Gaza should be the final nail in the coffin of this capital-V, capital-S, Very Serious media ecosystem, because it, I don’t want to say failed, I think it did so deliberately, to do the kind of one thing you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to sort of index things as genocidal after or towards the end of the genocide. You’re supposed to do it prior to it taking place. That’s part of the, one of the key things you learn in genocide studies, that there’s conditions for genocide. There’s ideological conditions. And again, the ideological conditions of genocide in Gaza have been around for decades, right? This is not new. And then there’s the, most important of all, the capacity for genocide, the sort of military apparatus for genocide, which obviously Israel has and has had for a long time. And none of that really factored in. It was kind of, the sterile ‘Hunt for Hamas’ narrative was the default media framing for months. In many ways, it still is. This feigned credulity, this kind of Zero Dark Thirty, they’re just going to go after the baddies. You would think that issuing a mass evacuation order for half of Gaza on October 13, 2023, would have been your first clue that this was not some targeted, scalpel, precision-like smart bomb, right, sort of Zero Dark Thirty thing. This was an effort for mass depopulation and expulsion.
Nima: Destruction campaign. This was a mass destruction, mass slaughter campaign. This was a campaign for genocide. If you issue an evacuation order, is the assumption that people affiliated with Hamas aren’t getting that order as well? That they’re glued into place?
Adam: Well, no, it was framed as humanitarian. They were, they were actually, again, CNN did this. New York Times this. They were expelling people from North Gaza to help them, to save them from the bombs that they themselves were about to drop. And then presumably, the civilians leave, and the evile Hamas terrorists, they just stay. They don’t know. They can’t, yeah, the Hamas terrorists are stapled to the floor, right.
Nima: Now, let’s do one more example, Adam, before we get to our guest. In what may be the most cynical of examples of double standards of this kind of credibility narrative, and only in recent weeks in this credibility narrative, is that of the starvation, the famine that has been imposed on Gaza, which only in recent weeks seems to have come to the attention of Western media and gone mainstream. Now, in last week’s episode, part I of this series, we discussed Israel’s campaign of deliberate mass starvation of the people of Gaza, and media’s broad efforts to portray this as an accident, a mere product of mismanagement, bad planning, rather than an intentional part of its genocidal project. Now, pundits and government officials have now finally begun, sort of, to decry Israel’s actions about 20-plus months too late, of course, as we’ve been saying. On July 24, 2025, The New York Times published a story headlined, quote, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” end quote. It gained a massive amount of attention, with the likes of former Senator and Saturday Night Live writer Al Franken and former President Barack Obama talking about it on Twitter. Obama posted this on Twitter on July 27, 2025, quote,
While a lasting resolution to the crisis in Gaza must involve a return of all hostages and a cessation of Israel’s military operations, these articles…
The Times article, for example.
…underscore the immediate need for action to be taken to prevent the travesty of innocent people dying of preventable starvation.
End quote. And at the same time, Bari Weiss’s own conservative outlet, the Free Press, conducted an interview with Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who insisted that since late 2023, there had been no reason to believe reports of starvation in Gaza–until now. Now, now they are to believed. Up until now, lies. Hamas-controlled. But now, there is reason to worry. Let’s listen to what Gur said to the Free Press.
[Begin clip]
Haviv Rettig Gur: And so for 22 months, we had been hearing about catastrophic, famine-level hunger, crisis-level hunger, serious. There are different official levels that hunger researchers and agencies dealing with this stuff categorize. And none of it has ever materialized. And now, at this very moment, as I speak to you, saying this thing that sounds super rah-rah, pro-Israeli, Everyone’s lying to you about hunger in Gaza, I have to tell you that we are very close to real, actual, desperate hunger in Gaza.
[End clip]
Adam: So the impetus for this statement was not the horrific images emerging from Gaza, dozens by the day, or by the reports from independent, whatever, quote-unquote, “independent” journalists and the New York Times. It was actually the fact that hunger just sort of emerged randomly, emerged suddenly overnight, as an emergent property. It had no antecedents. It had no precursors. There’s not levels of starvation. There’s not different pockets of Gaza that have been starving and others that haven’t. There was suddenly an overnight mass starvation in Gaza. So one can use their Occam’s razor. Which is more likely, that everyone was crying wolf and that the hunger suddenly emerged out of nowhere, or that what changed was the optics of the mass starvation as it relates to children and people with disabilities, that this kind of began to look bad? So those preserved with protecting the left flank of Israel needed to rush to kind of own the space and push out critics and say, Actually, this is sudden. We didn’t know, to absolve themselves for a hunger campaign that they themselves had been cheerleading for months. Which of those scenarios, Nima, do you think is more likely?
Nima: Yeah, fascinating. Can’t imagine. Now, this interview in the Free Press with Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur prompted Matt Yglesias, one of our favorites, to state this on Twitter, promoting that interview, right, as essential listening, something that people who follow Matt Yglesias should also check out. And Yglesias wrote this to kind of promote this piece. Quote,
I would recommend this from @HavivRettigGur and @theFP to skeptics.
There has been some crying of “wolf” that has unfortunately poisoned the waters to an extent, but the wolves are now in fact here.
End quote.
Adam: Ah, okay.
Nima: That’s right. So, the crying wolf, not real, not real, not real. That is what Palestinians and those who were observing this prior to the kind of official imprimatur of mass starvation lent to the situation by, say, this one Israeli journalist who is speaking to a conservative outlet, who writes for conservative outlets. Now it’s real, right? So all the crying wolf up until now, well, now we’re here. Now it’s to be believed because of who is allowed to narrate it.
Now, of course, there have been reports of deadly malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza, engineered deliberately by Israel, since at least February of 2024. That’s being generous to Israel. And at that time, UN agencies found that 5% of children under the age of two in southern Gaza were found to be acutely malnourished. Officials from the World Health Organization, the WHO, found, quote, “children dying of starvation,” end quote, in northern Gaza hospitals. By the start of April 2024, 32 people, including 28 children, had died of these causes at hospitals also in northern Gaza.
And before that, as we noted in our previous episode, part I of this series between November 24 and December 4 of 2023, Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 displaced Palestinians in Gaza. One person who left northern Gaza told Human Rights Watch, quote, “We had no food, no electricity, no internet, nothing at all. We don’t know how we survived,” end quote. That same month, December 2023, Human Rights Watch stated officially, quote, “The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime,” end quote.
Adam: Now, to be clear again, there are degrees of starvation, and when you’re malnourished, severely malnourished, tens of thousands of children in Gaza are and have been for over almost two years, you are more susceptible to disease. You’re more susceptible to other long-term chronic conditions, obviously diabetes, complications. You die and suffer from many other things, stunted growth, reduced health, reduced life expectancy. The life expectancy in Gaza has dropped by more than 20 years since the beginning of the genocide. So this idea that there’s this binary state of starvation and not-starvation, and then suddenly, in mid-July of 2025, there was this bimodal thing where, you know, someone turned on a binary switch and it went from perfectly fine, healthy to starving, is, of course, the only excuse you have when you’ve been supporting and cheering on the genocide for almost two years, because you can’t deny the starvation because of the pictures, the images, the consensus among humanitarian global groups, even those that are, you know, sympathetic to Israel.
So you do the next best thing, if you’re David Frum, Matt Yglesias, Bari Weiss, Haviv Rettig Gur, there’s really only one thing you can do, which is to say, Oh, you know what? Just now, just now, there was starvation. I’m getting out ahead of this. Don’t worry. I have the courage and decency to sort of admit when it’s actually happening, but ignore the previous 21 months when I said it wasn’t just ignore that. That was true in that context, but it’s changed. There’s been a meaningful escalation. Someone turned on the starvation switch, and we’ve gone from zero to 100, and for that, clearly, this is just PR ass covering. But again, it speaks to this broader issue of, things don’t become things until the Matt Yglesiases, and to some extent, Bari Weiss, who really should have no credibility whatsoever. She’s just a complete naked Israeli propagandist. They don’t have credibility until they’re kind of said by these media validators, by these organizations, which are validators, by bookers at CNN, by editors at the New York Times.
Again, the fundamental claims being made here by Palestinians, Palestinian civil society, of course, not all of them. Again, you can find sort of Zionist Palestinians here and there, but for the most part, the vast majority of Palestinians and Palestinian reporters and Palestinian writers and Palestinian poets and Palestinian activists, everything they’ve said has been validated. Everything they’ve said has been validated. Weeks, months, years later, it’s been validated 100%. And the reason for that is obvious, because they’re the ones being genocided. So they are both witness to it, but also have a stake in sounding the alarm. And the question is, moving forward on a systemic level, will this change who is seen as being credible? Will this change the fact that Palestinian organizations and the so-called “Hamas-run” Health Ministry is lightyears more credible in terms of death counts, malnutrition, displacement, genocidal intent?
These organizations, these Palestinian organizations, activist organizations, Palestinian Youth Movement, what have you, pro-Palestine organizations, the so-called Left, Doctors Without Borders, these groups that have been sounding the alarm for genocide. Will everyone who’s been saying that be considered more credible than the people who’ve denied it, obfuscated it, downplayed it, justified it over the last two years? And if our history with the Iraq War is any, any indication, the answer is no, that institutional credibility and capital-V, capital-S, Very Seriousness, has nothing to do with being right. It has everything to do with proximity to and fidelity to and propagandizing on behalf of power. That is all that matters. And institutional credibility has zero to do with either being predictive or being accurate in one’s reporting.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’ll now be joined by Kaleem Hawa, a writer and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. His writing on art, film, literature, and culture has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, People’s Dispatch, Artforum, the Baffler, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. Kaleem will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Kaleem Hawa. Kaleem, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Kaleem Hawa: Thanks for having me.
Adam: This episode is focused on the nature of objectivity, impartiality, journalistic credibility, and the ways in which this selectively applied, along what we argue in the introduction is racial and imperial lines. There’s nowhere this double standard is more apparent than the genocide in Gaza and how it’s been covered, where Palestinian journalists have both been systemically killed by Israel in the United States, over 200 since October 7. But they’re also unable to witness their own genocide, their own extermination, and are deemed inherently suspect, inherently compromised and terroristic, etc., etc. So I want to begin by talking about this popular line, even sometimes said among sympathetic kind of Western liberals, that there’s no journalists in Gaza, that there’s this sort of hidden element of it. It’s kind of shrouded in mystery.
Now to some extent, that may be true, just by virtue of the lack of resources on the part of Palestinian journalists to be able to cover something that’s both ongoing and increasingly a kind of historic crime that has to be documented. But there’s a sort of tinge of erasure there, a sort of tinge of racism and erasure about like, Well, wait a second, there are journalists in Gaza. There have been journalists in Gaza since day one. They’re just not considered capital-R Respectable. I want to talk about this dynamic, this idea that Clarissa Ward has to kind of parachute in from CNN for these things to be taken seriously. What are your thoughts on this, and how do you sort of view this as being just another extension of dehumanization?
Kaleem Hawa: Look, I think there is an element to this that is a product of the reality in Gaza. The situation there is one where the Israeli military has banned journalists from the rest of the world from reporting on the conditions there. Normally, journalists would look around them and say, Okay, I should talk to the people of Gaza. I should talk to the journalists who are active there. But Western journalists have effectively done the opposite. They’ve come to rely even more heavily on the Israeli state, for which they do stenography. And they’ve come to rely on Israeli sources who are, as we know structurally pro-genocide, and Israeli newspapers, who people forget, are bound by a censorship regime. For example, the Israeli military’s drone warfare program had a standing censorship order in place for over two decades, so Israeli media were not allowed to report on the fact that their military was using drones to target Palestinians. And so you basically have this structural overreliance that has been produced by the war of annihilation in Gaza and the deliberate targeting of journalists.
But I think what’s important to flag here is that the decisions being made by Western journalists and media outlets are actively contributing to the targeting of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Because the West and Western media class have been totally regurgitating the Zionist propaganda, this has actually left Palestinian journalists exposed as a precious few who publish the truth, and therefore targets. So when we say that Western journalists are responsible for the martyrdom of Palestinian journalists, it’s not a slogan, because the more everyone reports the truth en masse, the less value there might be in killing any single one of the truthtellers, and we’ve seen the total impunity of the Israelis in directly addressing and speaking to Palestinian journalists in Gaza and threatening them and their families. The Israeli military spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, threatened a Palestinian journalist two weeks ago in a post on social media, and so this has become par for the course.
I think the second part of your question, though, is whether the reality in Gaza has become somewhat hidden as a result of this. And I think my response to that is to ask whether it is hidden or being hidden. I think you read the Western media right now and you wouldn’t have any sense that what is happening right now is that 2 million people have been under total siege for more than four months, and that this is directly a war of starvation against the Palestinian people in Gaza and an effort to ethnically cleanse them south and eventually push them into the Sinai. I think nothing makes this clearer than how the Western media has covered the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which, I mean, even the name is propaganda.
Some of the reporting from Palestinian journalists and Arab journalists have shown in reality how this structure functions. Basically, it’s active for a few minutes a day, after which people are shot by American mercenaries, while much of the food aid is stolen by collaborator militias that the US and Egypt have financed. This is per longstanding reporting on the situation. So this is in addition to all the structural forces that have conspired to use this mechanism for ethnic cleansing, whether it’s Boston Consulting Group or Blair’s people in the UK or this network of Democratic Party-aligned comms people, this is a total Western collusion in the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. But were you to read the Western media, or, say, the Times, you would get a completely different picture, I think. Basically the framework that they’ve gone with is that this is like a chaos in which people die.
Adam: Well, Patrick Kingsley at the New York Times is saying that the, quote-unquote, “failure to plan.” The dog ate Israel’s homework, and they were going to plan in good faith, but they just forgot to do it. They just, slipped their mind. That’s the narrative, which is obviously, the default presumption is that everything Israel does is in good faith, and that they’re just kind of bumbling into a genocide. Because now you have to acknowledge the starvation, right? The New York Times has found Israel standing over a bloody body with a murder weapon in its hand, and it’s trying to get them off on manslaughter, right? It’s saying, Oh, well, yeah, there’s starvation, but that’s because they sort of neglected the plan, or the pressure from this far-Right that’s always sort of leveraging control, but never actually in charge of anything. There’s an excuse-making industry, as you know, like to sort of rationalize the liberal Zionist coping industry.
Kaleem Hawa: Totally. And I mean, when Patrick Kingsley says that it displays the failures of Israel’s transition plan for Gaza, that’s a linguistically really fascinating statement, because failure indicates something that is occurring that is a diversion from the true objective of a policy. So hence we are told that the true objective is to feed Gaza, and the killing is an unfortunate byproduct, rather than the true objective being forced transfer and extermination. And aid is the spin.
Adam: Which, literally every single organization on Earth is determined is what’s going on. The New York Times is existing in a bubble that is now just the New York Times in Washington, DC, and the Washington Post, and that’s it.
Kaleem Hawa: Right? But I think we have to understand that in the case of people like Kingsley, they’re also lying. So there’s journalistic malpractice.
Adam: He knows he’s full of shit. This is not credulity. This is feigned credulity, right.
Kaleem Hawa: For sure. In a different report with this journalist, Lauren Jackson, she’s saying, this is, quote, “a chaotic rollout.” Kingsley is quoted there, and he says, you know,
It’s hard to say with certainty how these incidents have unraveled, but our interviews have left us with the impression that these surges have alarmed Israeli soldiers, prompting them to open fire.
And, you know, a man like Kingsley, he’s not in this role because he possesses superior skills or insights or anything like that. I mean, we’re at a stage where Western journalism is not just complicit in the genocide and not just committing journalistic malpractice, but they are culprits in the genocide. Malpractice is insinuating they’re doing a bad job, but they’re not. They’re doing an excellent job of their longstanding role as a handmaiden to Western imperialism. And Kingsley, in this case, is passing with flying colors.
Adam: And I think this gets to the issue of the hidden narrative, because I think, to some extent, you’re right. The hidden narrative kind of absolves people or absolves Western audiences, American audiences, because you’ll be flipping through the channels and CNN will be like, Some news broke out of Gaza. And we’re going to our journalists live in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv. And then you flip the channel, and then they’re like, Al Jazeera, live from Khan Younis, or live from Gaza City. It’s like, well, they got a guy! You could just find a guy. Like, half the population speaks English. Just, you know, they have hundreds of journalists who will work for you. Clearly, there’s a decision that’s made that they’re not going to find actual Palestinian journalists. Now they use them as stringers and translators sometimes, but that is a deliberate choice that’s being made. It is being hidden. It is not sort of incidentally hidden because of, obviously, Israel does put blockades on foreign journalists, but that always felt like a little bit of a cop out, because, again, it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of Palestinian journalists who will happily do that job.
Nima: Because it gets to the idea of who a reliable narrator is allowed to be.
Adam: Yeah, we need Fareed Zakaria from the studio, otherwise, it doesn’t count.
Kaleem Hawa: Right.
Nima: Well, Kaleem, this actually gets to something else that I want to touch on, this other kind of double standard, which you’ve written about, you’ve noted in the dossier that you worked on, that we’ve talked about previously on the show, that outlets like the New York Times, just to stay on the Times for a sec, and also others like CNN, can have dozens of former Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, ex-US military, on their own reporting and commentary staff, but any vague association with any Palestinian resistance or, God forbid, “militant,” quote-unquote, would be an automatically disqualifying credential for someone to have as a, you know, reporter, as a commentator for these major news outlets. One is allowed even in courage, right, because it affirms or kind of confers some sort of experience, expertise, authority, right? If you’re former IDF, if you’re former US military.
But the other way obviously does not work. The implication being that no matter how many crimes that the Israeli or US commits, whether it’s killing, you know, nearly 20,000 children, forced starvation, displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, rape, whatever it may be, the IDF is still going to be deemed an official and serious military right that can never lose institutional credibility, whereas unsanctioned military actors, not under this kind of US-Israeli security architecture, are seen automatically as illegitimate, cartoonish terrorists, and any link or association that they may have, even in a civilian capacity, is automatically disqualifying. That’s why you also see, you know, the oftentimes dismissal of, Gaza health officials say such and such. It’s like, Oh, you mean, Hamas says? It’s the same exact thing. Can you talk about this kind of double standard, which seems to get even more absurd with each new war crime that is being broadcast live in 4k from Gaza.
Kaleem Hawa: Yeah. I mean, there’s an element of this that’s racism, which is that I can’t be seriously accused of antisemitism if I’m only quoting Israeli sources or Jewish sources. But I mean, just to focus a little more on the structural aspects of this. I mean, first, I think every journalist that’s working in the West, their objective right now should be to be disqualified from reporting for some of these outlets, because I don’t think it’s valuable to create a distinction between them, as if they’re a separate entity from the key military planners in the US Department of Defense and State Department, but rather to think of them as having an organic unity. So they’re not identical, obviously, but they have a structural connection between them, and their actions support one another, right? A political decision is made, and the media gives cover to it. They quote the Israelis or the Americans, using their preferred framing. But also the media makes these actions themselves more permissible because of the a priori function of setting the landscape for what we understand to be true and/or inadmissible in the narrative about Palestine. And so our purpose has to be to break that unity. That’s the structural side of it.
But I think you mentioned the dossier that was published by Writers Against the War on Gaza about the New York Times. And it tracks the material connections between many of the Times’s journalists and Zionism, whether it’s working for lobbying outfits or having children who served in the Israeli military, etc. And I think what’s actually very useful about this type of research receiving more popular attention than it ever has before, is it’s actually broken the siege, so to speak, on talking about the vanguardist function, basically the disciplining function that exists within these newsrooms around Palestine. It’s not good enough to just focus on the structural. Absolutely, that’s the core basis of the media’s relationship to Zionism and imperialism. But also, it used to be forbidden to talk about this. There are people who are an asymmetrically interested cadre in every institution whose job it is to discipline others around Palestine and who are directly invested in Zionism. They should be excluded, basically, from covering the situation in Palestine because of that. But of course, they’re not.
So to give an example, Adam Rasgon, who is one of the Times’s journalists, has spent years at the New Yorker under David Remnick’s wing. He first worked at a Jerusalem-based center called the Shalem Center, which was founded by one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisors. And then he went on to work for the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, which is very tightly connected to AIPAC. So this person has an ideological project, right? He’s not just structurally invested in Zionism because of his paycheck from the Times, but this is someone who, from a very young age, has been committed to the project of death and ethnic cleansing that is Zionism, and we should treat them as such, basically.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. It just goes back to this idea of double standards, because so much of the advocacy of Zionism, and it’s just even kind of overt anti-Palestinian racism, is laundered through antiracism discourse. And I feel like we would both internally in terms of how it’s disciplined within the newsroom, because we, for a project I’m working on, I spoke to over a dozen journalists, I would say the majority being Arab or Muslim, but not necessarily, who talked about discrimination in the workplace around Palestine and the way they were disciplined. And the one recurring theme we got was, it wasn’t saying, it wasn’t just that you’re biased per se because you’re Arab or Muslim or whatever, or even if you weren’t, that, you know, they scoured some social media posts where you said something like, Please stop killing children or something problematic like that. It was sort of done in this kind of like, mopey, I’m oppressed. You’re not sensitive to my needs. You’re being an antisemite. You’re being anti-Jewish. And that kind of gives it this extra weaponization in terms of being able to cloud out liberal spaces, because liberals kind of reflexively, and I think for good reason, don’t want to be perceived as being racist, right?
It’s seen as a form of prejudice, without an understanding that, if your ideology is predicated on dispossession in widescale child murder, that’s an ideological choice. That’s not an identity. It’s certainly not an identity that needs coddling, especially when it’s a hegemonic identity or political ideology, right? So what I’ve noticed in talking to people is this idea that, when you interweave one’s ethnoreligious status with an ethnoreligious state, it obviously becomes hard to disentangle that. But also it becomes a kind of reverse racism argument. It’s a Bill O’Reilly reverse racism argument, really, that’s kind of socially acceptable in liberal spaces, and it gives it this extra energy, I think, that it would otherwise not have. And again, this is not an identity. It’s a fucking ideological choice. It’s a choice you make every day you wake up. There’s nothing inherently Jewish about Zionism. It is just a thing you decided that you believed in because of whatever various propaganda reasons or your own personal moral failings.
And the other side, such as it is, is not allowed to have any of that. Again, you have to sort of scrub your social media account to even acknowledge that you may be Palestinian. This is what people talk about. They have to go scrub it so they’re kind of just this, like, generic Arab. Can you talk about this very obvious double standard, and how you perceive that some of this kind of mopey rhetoric is starting to lose its purchase? Because I believe that it has, and I believe it’s also very generational. I think that was very powerful for people of a certain age. And I hate to make generations discourse, but from what I understand, for people under the age of 35, this is sort of not working anymore.
Kaleem Hawa: Yeah, there’s layers to this question. I think what you have basically is a shift that I think has been driven primarily by the criminalization of support for Palestine and support for Palestinian resistance that I think has in turn, when mixed with a politics of credibility and careerism, led to a sort of convenient marginalizing of the real imminent truth of the struggle, the national liberation struggle, and the situation of Gaza. And it didn’t always used to be this way. I mean, we’re spending time talking about the New York Times because of its sort of outsize role in journalism. But I think even institutions and magazines on the Left are guilty of these same logics. You look at an institution like the New Left Review, and they are–
Adam: Are they still handwringing about whether it’s genocide? Sorry, go ahead.
Kaleem Hawa: Well, no. I mean, that was a particularly egregious thing, but I think is perhaps made up for by some of the essays that they’ve published. More what I’m thinking about is just how they can help index changes within the Left and how it’s treated the Palestine question. You look at some of their older issues in the ’60s and ’70s, and they were publishing interviews with the PFLP, for example, which is an armed resistance group and political party in Palestine. They have an interview with Ghassan Kanafani. And so it was permissible then to quote these people. And the question is, what’s changed? Because now, when you look, who are the two interviews that the New Left Review have done to sort of canonize the genocide and share with us what’s going on globally, it’s, one is with Rashid Khalidi, who’s a historian, and the other is Arielle Angel, who is an editor at a Jewish magazine. That’s how much things have changed.
And that’s why I think organizations like Electronic Intifada or Drop Site, or others like them who have taken a decision to report on what the resistance in Palestine is saying, not as a form of glorification, but because it is core to and essential to reporting the story truthfully, is an incredibly important decision. Otherwise, what you get is basically a bunch of institutions where somehow, I guess, they’re waiting for some sort of permission to report on a particular story. And the pressure builds and builds and builds because of the pioneering work of Palestinian and Arab journalists and the work of movements to put popular pressure on these institutions. And then the dam breaks, and then they’re forced to cover the story and give cover to it as well. And you see that tendency repeat a lot.
I think of Sde Teiman as a good example of this, where it sort of explains the logics that I’m breaking down here, because this was an industrial camp for torture and sexual violence targeting Palestinian prisoners. But because so many people in the prisoners’ movement are affiliated in some way to the Palestinian resistance, a lot of media institutions wouldn’t touch it. They didn’t think those people were reliable. They were worried about the legal and political risks of quoting someone who is in the resistance or has family in the resistance, and so the story was structurally excluded from the media, despite being openly reported on by Arab and Palestinian journalists, until it was broken open by an Israeli newspaper.
Nima: Yet another example of who is allowed to be reliable.
Adam: Yeah, because I know that the BBC, when they ask people for an interview in Gaza, they specifically say, Are you affiliated with, or is anyone in your family affiliated with, anyone in Hamas? which is, again, obviously not a standard they would ever use for, because then we would never talk to any Israeli ever. So it’s like you have to do everything 10 times as good and in high heels and backwards. And there’s this idea that the IDF, institutionally, can never be discredited. It is wanted for the most unfathomable war crimes ever. They killed far, far, 18,000-plus children. That’s just documented. The number is almost probably, certainly twice that. I mean, just ungodly war crimes, and yet your affiliation with them just doesn’t discredit you as a source for anything, ever.
I mean, if that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is. I mean, I’m sorry to pontificate here, but the double standard is so nakedly egregious, especially 22 months into this thing, that there’s no justification other than, I mean, maybe in Britain, they’re worried about running afoul of certain legal sanctions, but within the United States, there’s no justification for that kind of double standard. I mean other than just, obviously, they don’t want to hear things that may challenge their perception. Because you can always kind of go find your token liberal Zionist Palestine. I mean, this is what Jeffrey Goldberg did at the Atlantic. For the first month, they didn’t publish any Palestinians, and then they went and found John Aziz and, like, a handful of guys who will be like, Hamas is evil. And it’s like, Well, okay. That’s why one must be careful not to say just Palestinian voices. But it’s like, yeah, you can go find those who will kind of reaffirm Jeffrey Goldberg’s line.
Kaleem Hawa: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as we know, there’s a comprador class in Palestine, and Palestinians were willing to collaborate with forces of Zionism, and so that’s always a risk. But I think what I might disagree with or expand on is that, I mean, they do have a reason to report on this differently, which is that they’re at war. The reason why Haaretz can report on Sde Teiman and The New York Times won’t, or some of the left-liberal magazines in the US won’t, is because for the former, I mean, because the regimes of control operate differently between Israel and the US. For the former, there’s no risk of undermining the popular fabric that supports extermination in Gaza. So you can observe the most egregious things if you choose to. But here in the US, it is a battleground, and many of these people have been hand-selected for their roles, or have slotted into these roles because of the class formation that they’re in. And so things like Sde Teiman are sort of an example of the black heart of coverage of Gaza because to represent it accurately would be to show that every Zionist accusation is a confession, and it would unravel so many of the logics of manufactured consent that were turned out in the early months after Al-Aqsa Flood. That’s what can’t be countenanced about this, because then all the stuff about weaponized mass rape, all the stuff about the human shields narrative, around hospital bombings, basically, they’ve done a very good job to convince the average liberal reader that there is no amount of body count that they can’t accept, and that work has taken years of ideological management. And yeah, we have names for the men and women who are responsible for this, basically.
Nima: Yeah, I think drawing those connections between the words and the bombs is so critically important, that they don’t happen in isolation, that they support each other, which is why the kind of focus on how media operates, how language operates, how these narratives operate or, you know, are embedded and perpetuated, is so critical. I think you’ve been laying that out. I want to also talk, Kaleem, about something you said about movements, and you are an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. Would love for you to talk a bit about PYM’s work, and also, of course, the upcoming convening that you have at the end of August in Detroit, the People’s Conference for Palestine. Let us know what y’all are working on.
Kaleem Hawa: Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. I think, about PYM right now, we are focused entirely on ratcheting up the pressure on the Arab states that are collaborating with Zionism on this genocide, fundraising, holding protests and pursuing an international arms embargo campaign that’s targeting the maritime transfer of arms to the Israeli military, and those are the main pieces of work right now. We’re doing everything we can to organize our communities and fight back.
You mentioned the People’s Conference for Palestine, which is going to happen on August 29 to 31. It’ll be in Detroit. We encourage everyone to come out. Part of the logic of the conference is to have a space for the movement to come together and share strategies, align on the coming year’s work, and the urgent need right now to continue to put pressure to end this genocide. There’s going to be a panel for those who are interested in reporting, journalism, writing from the ground, basically how we can produce counter-narratives in the face of the situation that we’ve been talking about on the show. We will have different journalists from across the US and the world and writers come together for a few different panels. They’ll all be at the conference. And so we encourage everyone to join us in Detroit.
Adam: What’s a website where people can check that out? People who want to come by and join or visit?
Kaleem Hawa: It’s PeoplesConferenceForPalestine.org.
Nima: Well, all right, we encourage everyone to check that out, and, of course, to follow and support the work of Palestinian Youth Movement. We’ve been speaking with Kaleem Hawa, a writer and organizer with PYM, a transnational, independent grassroots movement for young Palestinians dedicated to the liberation of their homeland and people. As just discussed, they are also convening the People’s Conference for Palestine this month in Detroit, August 29 to 31. It will provide critical analysis on Palestine, the entire region, and, of course, North America and its role. Everyone is certainly encouraged to check that out and attend, if possible. But Kaleem, it has been so great speaking with you today. Thank you so much for joining us on Citations Needed.
Kaleem Hawa: Thank you all so much.
Adam: So, a quick insert. This is the second insert in the episode. The first one we did at the top of the show, where we mentioned the killing of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues at Al Jazeera that happened after we recorded the interview and we did the introduction to the episode. So we recorded a little insert to sort of acknowledge that. But our guest, Kaleem, wanted us to read a statement about the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist. He sent us this statement to read. Quote,
Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues and friends Mohammed al-Khalidi, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa were martyred by the Israeli military on Sunday. They are heroes, revolutionaries, and above all, Palestinians, fighting against their displacement into an ever-shrinking concentration camp and extermination field. As we discuss at the outset of this recording, the blame for these murders lies squarely on the Western media, who left our Palestinian journalists exposed through their cowardice and complicity. This will not stop until we confront these institutions — we hope this episode will help others to understand the functionings of Zionism and imperialism within the media as we continue our struggle.
Unquote. We just wanted to let him say his statement on that. We are very glad that he sent that to us, and we were very happy to read it. Thank you so much.
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Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think this gets to the fundamental question that we get a lot from people listening to the show, which is, Do you think the media that we criticize, namely, you know, the New York Times, the CNN, MSNBC, these kind of big liberal signifiers, Do you think they’re reformable? And maybe we’ll end the season on this note. And if we haven’t been explicit about this, I think I should be, at least me, and you can speak for yourself, Nima, I know we don’t always agree. But I think the answer is no. I think that if we had to have a world where there was no CNN or New York Times tomorrow, would the world be improved? I think moderately, yes. I think yes, it would be. I think they’re actively harmful. I think they’re malignant. I think they’re sinister. I think they know what they’re doing. If I said that about Fox News, I don’t think most people would really bat an eye. They’d be like, Oh, yeah, Fox News needs to go. Obviously, the world would be better off if we didn’t have Fox News and NewsNation, right? And all these others.
But an organization like the New York Times, they cross the threshold from, yeah, are they doing decent reporting here and there? Sure. You know, I know they soak up some huge percentage of journalists and journalistic resources. They’re pretty much one of the few profitable journalistic outlets. But I think if Gaza has proven one thing only, it’s that these institutions are fundamentally not reformable by their very nature, their very ownership structure, what their kind of point of existence is. That if they weren’t promoting genocide, that one of their key social and ideological functions would cease to exist. And the answer is, and I’m going to be explicit here, and I know we’re not usually prescriptive on the show, but I think they are a net bad. And this is why one is tempted to say, like, Here are 10 things you can do in a newsroom to improve your Gaza Palestine coverage, but I think that assumes a level of bumblingness and good faith that is simply not the case when it comes to an organization–
Nima: When it comes to these huge entities, yeah, for sure.
Adam: Yeah. And I think there are edge cases. I don’t think every mainstream media outlet is necessarily a net harm to society, but I think that’s the issue, is, how do you reform something that is so existentially and fundamentally racist and colonial? Because gatekeeping is their key function.
Nima: Right. Exactly. It really all comes down to this kind of institutionalization of news-making, right, and the meaning that is allowed to be made, and then the consensus that is supposed to be established by making that specific meaning through specific news outlets. And when it comes to Gaza, for sure, and other kind of imperial projects and colonial projects, it becomes clear that the consensus that is supposed to emerge, the kind of deliberate meaning that is made out of the way that this is being reported on, who is allowed to be deemed an authoritative and credible narrator, who is capital-V, capital-S Very Serious as a voice, as an authority. Yeah, when it comes to these legacy outlets, to these mainstream corporate media publications, it is very painfully clear what we’re supposed to believe. I mean, not to get too kind of dorm-room about it, it’s not that everyone’s being brainwashed. It’s that this is the purpose of these outlets when it comes to their coverage, I’m not talking about, say, their, you know, arts coverage or their culinary coverage necessarily [chuckles], but their, quote-unquote, “news” coverage and a lot of their editorials really toe this line. I mean, that is the purpose. And so, yeah, to say, Can we reform them? I don’t know if you can, you know, bodycam your way toward better journalism at the New York Times, Adam.
Adam: No, absolutely not. The way in which they’ve crossed the line to outright incitement to genocide, as we discussed in the previous episode, is, what I would say is the alternative media outlets we’ve mentioned here, the people we think are doing good work, and I hate to name-check because I feel like I’ll leave someone out, but I urge you to please give your resources and time to those outlets. Look at the journalistic outlets, whether it’s, you know, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, whatever. I know Al Jazeera has its own problems with respect to Qatar, but they mostly do good reporting on Gaza. But look at those outlets that have been correct and reward them with your patronage. Reward them with your readership. Reward them with your money.
Nima: Zeteo and Drop Site News are doing better work than the mainstream outlets, for sure.
Adam: Right? And again, we hate to drop names because we’ll leave someone out. We’re sorry if we do. But these institutions exist to validate and police the ideological barriers that permitted the crime of crimes for the last two years, and they’ve obviously done bad stuff before that, and they do other bad stuff, but that feels like it should be disqualifying, that those who made decisions at the New York Times should be on trial for war crimes, not saying, Oh, well, you know what? We kind of got this one wrong. Here’s a kind of half-assed mea culpa. Let’s all move on. That’s just my sort of prescriptive opinion. You can take or leave it, but we’ll leave the season on that note.
Nima: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to leave this season. And just want to thank all of you again for continuing to listen to the show, to support us and our team and our work. We are now closing out our eighth season of Citations Needed. We are going to take our usual short end-of-summer break and be back in September with more episodes of Citations Needed, beginning season nine of Citations Needed after releasing over 220 episodes in the past eight seasons, more than 175 News Briefs, welcoming over 330 guests. We are able to do this because of the generous support of listeners like you. So thank you so much again. On behalf of myself and Adam and our whole team, Florence and Julianne and Trendel and Marco and everyone else who has helped us over the years, just thank you so much for your ongoing support. We will be back soon, but until then, of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed. Please do become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated. It is what helps this show keep going, and keep going into its ninth season next month. So thank you all again for listening, but that will do it for this season of Citations Needed.
Thank you all again. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. Have a wonderful end of the summer. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, August 13, 2025.
