This article was published by The Jewish Independent. Check out its website and sign up for its newsletters. It is committed to ethical journalism.
Since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, hundreds of foreign journalists from across the world, including journalists and film crews from Japan and China and Russia, have filed countless news stories, analysis pieces, filmed interviews with suffering Palestinian women and children and above all, an endless stream of the most heart rendering videos of the daily carnage in Gaza.
These hundreds of journalists are based in Israel from where they do their reporting. Their film crews are based in Israel. Some of the big US television networks have teams of 20 or more—reporters, camera operators, sound recordists— producing the network news coverage of Gaza. They are all based in Israel.
There are no foreign journalists in Gaza. The videos of carnage are taken by Gazans. A lot of the videos shown on screens across the world have been taken from social media. Some videos have been filmed by local journalists in Gaza and they are paid by the foreign media companies for it.
All the reports of what is happening in Gaza come from local journalists employed by the foreign media companies. Some of these journalists have proven to be members of Hamas. All of them do their journalism at the pleasure of Hamas. Was their reporting to displease Hamas, they would be forced out of journalism. One way or another.
Some of the local journalists have been killed by Israeli air strikes. The number is disputed. It is even in dispute how many of them were journalists and how many were killed doing journalism. I do not believe there is any credible evidence that shows Israeli pilots deliberately targeted journalists.
Why am I writing about this, why does it matter when the people of Gaza are suffering so unthinkably, when so many women and children are being killed by the Israeli air strikes that have reduced much of Gaza to rubble?
It matters because the hundreds of foreign journalists and film crews and international affairs journalists, in effect, do not want their audiences to know that they have only limited knowledge of what is happening in Gaza.
In fact, they hardly know anything that is based on their own first-hand reporting. They are all based in Israel, in Jerusalem in the main, which in the context of this war, is a lo way from Gaza.
On top of that, the vast majority do not speak Hebrew or Arabic. As a result, most of them, even those who are based in Israel and are not visiting `firemen’ who have flown in to cover a `hot’ story about which they have read a bit on the flight to Tel Aviv, know few non-English speaking Israelis or Palestinians. As a result, in their reporting, Israel and Palestine, Israelis and Palestinians, exist only as actors in a bitter, century long, seemingly forever conflict.
How many of the hundreds of foreign journalists have told their readers and their television audiences anything about this, about how their lack of Hebrew and Arabic restricts their reporting?
Since October 7, I have written a fair bit about how the ethical standards that I thought most mainstream journalists had signed on to are being discarded, thrown out with yesterday’s news.
The many petitions and group letters that have circulated since October 7 signed and in some cases, instigated by journalists, with the support of the MEAA, the journalist’s union, in essence, call for new ethical standards in journalism. No longer was there to be a commitment to fairness, factual accuracy, open-mindedness, to journalism that was not agenda driven, that was in essence, a search for truth no matter how elusive and impossible to find the truth may be.
Instead, according to the letter signers and petition signers—the many thousands of them in the US, Canada and Australia—journalist were to be commitment to social justice , to supporting the oppressed against the oppressors, to preferencing the voices of the oppressed-- Palestinians which sometimes includes Hamas—over the voices of the oppressors- Israelis and their Jewish supporters and lobbyists in the US and Canada and Australia .It was okay—more than okay—for journalists to be activists for a cause.
I have written virtually nothing about the coverage of the war basically because I think the short-comings of the journalism—its shallowness, its sameness, its cliché-ridden commentary and analysis- is self-evident.
What is not self-evident because journalists are not prepared to talk about it, is that they do not really know whether the news they are reporting out of Gaza is anywhere near factually accurate. They do not really know what is happening because they are not there and they are relying on statements coming from Hamas or from local journalists who have to work by rules determined by Hamas. In truth, they cannot vouch for accuracy of their reporting and commentary, and they cannot check facts: they really don’t know what is true and what is false.
And yet the group letter writers and petition signers ignore all of this and instead, insist that Hamas’s version of the truth of what is happening in Gaza—the number of civilians killed and wounded by the IDF, the brutal treatment by the IDF of innocent Palestinians, the deliberate killing by the IDF of children and women, the deliberate humanitarian crisis in Gaza engineered by Israel – is essentially to be believed.
Perhaps it is accurate, this stuff coming from Hamas but here are some questions that any journalist with even a modicum of experience and with an open mind would want the leaders of Hamas to answer, questions that simply have not been asked:
*Is it true that you deliberately hide fighters and weapons in schools and hospitals and mosques? If it is true, why do that?
* Why do you have your missile batteries located in the densest urban areas of Gaza?
*Why, as the rulers of Gaza, did you not provide the residents of Gaza with bomb shelters to protect the innocents against Israeli airstrikes—you surely could have used some of the billions of dollars in aid for that purpose?
* What are you holding old people and children hostage? Is that not a war crime?
* How many of the people killed in the war in Gaza were Hamas fighters? How do you arrive at a daily death toll, distinguishing so quickly between fighters and civilians?
* What is the outcome you want from this war? What outcome could end it?
As far as I can tell these questions, rudimentary as they are, have not been asked of Hamas by the local reporters in Gaza. How could they ask these questions and remain journalists? Nor have these questions been asked by the foreign reporters of the Hamas leadership in Qatar who have given any number of soft `interviews to Al Jazeera.
I think journalism is in crisis. I think more and more people believe that the mainstream media traffics in fake news. With social media awash with conspiracy theories and lies and malign fantasies, with Tik Tok the main news source for millions of young people, there is a desperate need for journalism that is fair, factually accurate and honest. Dispassionate but not heartless.
This is not the sort of journalism that the petition and group letter signers are urging on those covering the war in Gaza. The lines between the ethics of the social justice warriors on social media and the ethics of journalists in the mainstream media is becoming unclear. That is disastrous for journalism and journalists. And not to be too pompous, for liberal democracy as well.
Postscript: Israel does not allow foreign journalists—nor Israeli journalists for that matter- into. Gaza. Some Israeli reporters have gone into Gaza with the IDF, embedded in the way American and even Australian journalists were embedded with US forces during the war in Iraq. Clearly, Israel could and still cannot, guarantee the safety of reporters in Gaza. As a journalist, I support those reporters who despite the risks, want to enter this very dangerous war zone.
But I completely understand why Israeli authorities, especially the IDF refuse to allow foreign reporters into Gaza. Imagine the response from journalists and from pro-Palestinian activists if a foreign reporter was killed covering the war.
How I wish this article was circulated very widely! Thank you Michael Gawenda.
I read this article and have waited until you published it again here to comment. What you wrote was desperately needed to be written. Many remain ignorant to the state of ‘news’ because of the convenience of believing things remain as they once were, when clearly they do not.
Also finished your book. The last two lines, for me, were worth the challenge of past politics. I look forward to one day reading more of your self discoveries.