2023 photo of Gaza war damage via Wikimedia Commons
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has a thorough roundup of how news organizations covered Israel’s killing on Sunday of six Al Jazeera journalists, observing that Anas al-Sharif, who was apparently the target, had predicted his death.
As Jones writes, Israel claims that al-Sharif had been actively involved in Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Al-Sharif had denied the allegation, and the killings were condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which issued a statement saying, “Israel is murdering the messengers.”
Al Jazeera called the killings a “targeted assassination,” as they surely were. The right-wing Jerusalem Post ran a headline that said “Israeli military kills Hamas terrorist doubling as Al Jazeera reporter near Shifa Hospital,” claiming: “Documents shared by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] included personnel rosters, lists of terror training courses, phone directories, and salary documents for Al-Sharif.”
Ironically, the Post’s story is attributed to its own staff and to Reuters, the international wire service for which al-Sharif shared in a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2024.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz runs a straightforward account of the killings. The Times of Israel’s live blog currently leads with a story about media organizations that have condemned the attacks as well as a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he is “gravely concerned.”
CPJ reports: “With Sunday’s killing of six journalists, 192 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israeli-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. At least 184 of those journalists were Palestinians killed by Israel.”
I rarely write about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza because I would be speaking mainly out of ignorance. Other than following news coverage, I have no more insight than anyone else. As with everyone, though, recent reports of mass starvation have left me horrified and appalled. The fighting between Israel and Hamas has to end. Israel must uphold international law by allowing aid to get through. Hamas must release the remaining hostages.
What moves me to write this morning is that I learned over the weekend that the International Rescue Committee continues to prove assistance to people on the ground. Mohammed Mansour writes in The New York Times (gift link):
I am a senior nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee, one of the few organizations that is still able to deliver aid in Gaza. On a typical day, my colleagues and I screen hundreds of children for malnutrition at mobile clinics across the territory. We provide therapeutic food for kids who are at risk of starvation and counsel parents who are doing their best to care for their daughters and sons under unimaginable conditions.
More than 100 organizations have warned that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza. Not that journalists have any special claim to be exempt from that suffering, but it’s notable that hunger among reporters in Gaza has become so widespread that the Committee to Protect Journalists has issued an alert.
But this is about what we can do to help. To donate to the International Rescue Committee, just click here. I’m going to do it as soon as I publish this item.
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.
I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.
One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.
This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.
Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.
I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:
While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.
Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.
Public media’s last stand
I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.
As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.
So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.
A curious omission
There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.
It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.
News organizations are loading up on stories about Donald Trump’s ridiculous and offensive proposal that the U.S. take over Gaza, relocate its Palestinian residents to Egypt and Jordan, and turn it into a beach resort. At the moment, for instance, The New York Times homepage leads with five stories about Trump and Gaza. The lead headline in The Boston Globe’s print edition is “Audacious Gaza idea has officials scrambling.” (Audacious?)
But we’re also hearing warnings not to get too caught up in Trump’s latest outrage of the day. The real news, we’re told, is that Elon Musk and his merry band of 19-year-olds are illegally taking a wrecking ball to the government, blowing a hole through privacy protections and potentially interfering with federal payment systems.
For instance, Patrick Reiss, who produces a daily newsletter for Vox called The Logoff, writes:
Beware the shiny object: So often, Trump says something wild that takes everyone’s focus and stirs up outrage — and then it gets walked back. It takes all of our attention, but we end up right where we started…. Trump right now is attempting to massively expand his power over the US government, and he’s using that expanded power to make policy moves with ramifications at home and all over the world. That’s the Trump story to keep tracking.
If you’re not familiar with The Logoff, it’s a short daily newsletter that focuses on one Trump story in the news. It’s designed to help you avoid doomscrolling through an endless stream of updates about Trump’s latest shockers. I learned about it from Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab, and I recommend it. You can sign up here.
All that said, I’m not so sure that Trump isn’t serious about Gaza, and shame on the news media for paying so little attention when he brought it up last fall. What? You don’t remember? I do. To his credit, John T. Bennett wrote a long news analysis for Roll Call last October after Trump. Here’s how it began:
A Middle East Monaco? That was what former President Donald Trump recently floated for post-war Gaza — but there are reasons why the concept has yet to gain traction.
Prompted by a conservative radio host earlier this month, the Republican presidential nominee and real estate mogul suggested the obliterated strip one day could rival the ritzy city-state that has become a playground for the world’s rich and famous along the French Riviera.
Trump made those remarks in an interview with right-wing talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt, in which he lied (according to PolitiFact) about having visited Gaza at one time. He told Hewitt: “You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place — the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East, but it could be one of the best places in the world.”
Axios mentioned it but put the emphasis on Trump’s lie about having visited Gaza. The much-maligned Newsweek published a story about it. But there was very little mainstream pickup. After all, Roll Call isn’t exactly breakfast-table reading in most homes. The Times even reported on the Trump family’s plan to build a luxury hotel in Israel without making any reference to Trump’s Gaza musings.
Given that this has been rattling around Trump’s head for months, maybe we ought to take it as something more than a distraction from President Musk’s activities. And given that his son-in-law Jared Kushner had previously talked about moving the Palestinian residents out and building and that its waterfront property was “very valuable,” as Patrick Wintour of The Guardian reported in March 2024, maybe we ought to take it very seriously indeed.
Is it going to happen? To quote Patrick Reiss again, “almost certainly not.” As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman report in the Times (gift link), Trump simply blurted out his idea in a joint appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without any preparation. “There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” they wrote.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to do it. The media simultaneously give Trump too much and too little credit at moments like this. Too much: Oh, he’s a mastermind, blurting out crap to distract us from what’s really important. Too little: He’s an idiot, he doesn’t really mean it, don’t worry about it.
I hope this crazy story will fade away in a day or two. But I wouldn’t be so sure.
Count me among those who are perplexed as to why CBS News morning anchor Tony Dokoupil has been reprimanded by his bosses for the way he conducted himself in an interview with the journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates has written a new book called “The Message,” part of which comprises a harsh critique of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In a recent interview with Terry Gross of the public radio program “Fresh Air,” and again on “CBS Mornings,” Coates called Israel an “apartheid” state. He also questioned Israel’s existence on the grounds that he opposes the notion of any state based on ethnicity.
Now, I’m not writing this item to take sides. I’ve long been an admirer of Coates, although I disagree with him strongly on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within secure borders — and agree with him about the Netanyahu government’s brutal prosecution of the war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
My point is that there was nothing wrong with Dokoupil’s interview. It was tough but polite. Probably Dokoupil’s one statement that I’d regard as out of line was this:
I have to say that when I read the book I imagine that if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.
But what of it? Coates parried Dokoupil deftly, and the conversation ended a few minutes later on an almost friendly note. Yet CNN media reporters Brian Stelter and Hadas Gold write that CBS News staff members were told at a meeting that Dokoupil’s manner did not meet the network’s editorial standards, adding:
In wake of the criticism, CBS News and Stations president and CEO Wendy McMahon and her top deputy Adrienne Roark enlisted the network’s standards and practices unit to conduct a review of the discussion, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news division’s race and culture unit was involved as well.
Management concluded that “the problem was Tony’s tone” in the interview, one of the sources said. McMahon and Roark didn’t say so on the Monday morning call, but they emphasized the importance of network standards and the need to have “courageous conversations.”
This is absurd. At the most, maybe Dokoupil should have been taken aside and privately told that the “backpack of an extremist” comment was inappropriate. But why do we expect television audiences to be treated like children, with everyone making nice rather than engaging in some tough talk?
As a sign of how clueless CBS managers are, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullins of The New York Times report, “Executives who discussed the interview on Monday’s call had asked staff members to keep their remarks confidential.” Uh, huh.
Neither Dokoupil nor Coates acted like anything untoward had happened, and that’s because it hadn’t. They had an enlightening though brief exchange. I’d like to see more interviews like it and less happy talk — but that’s not going to happen if journalists fear they’ll get in trouble just for doing their jobs.
Al Jazeera logo, with its code of ethics in English and Arabic. Photo (cc) 2009 by Joi Ito.
BBC News reports that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has followed though on longstanding threats to shut down Al Jazeera, accusing the Arab news service of acting as a propaganda arm for the terrorist group Hamas. As the story notes, though Al Jazeera is now off the air in Israel, it is still available through Facebook and other social media outlets. The Committee to Protect Journalists has denounced the action, quoting a statement from CJP Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna:
CPJ condemns the closure of Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s websites. This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.
Al Jazeera has called the action a “criminal act” that “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law.”
Shutting down Al Jazeera strikes me as an ill-considered move, not least because it will have little more than a symbolic effect. Al Jazeera is based in Qatar, and both it and Hamas receive some funding from the Qatari government. But Al Jazeera also enjoys a reputation for reliable journalism. Certainly it’s sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but that’s not a reason to ban it in Israel or anywhere else.
This commentary by Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz, a liberal Israel newspaper, notes that Arab governments, too, have closed Al Jazeera from time to time, adding that Israel should have held itself apart from that repressive attitude toward freedom of the press. He writes that “closing its offices cannot prevent or frustrate the network’s operations, which are aired in more than 90 countries and reach 350 million potential Arabic-speaking viewers and millions of English speakers worldwide,” and adds:
Al Jazeera may not be able to broadcast from its offices in Israel, but it doesn’t need offices in Tel Aviv or Ramallah in order to continue showing the world the destruction, death, and hunger in Gaza. It broadcasts this reality directly from the Strip, as it did when it reported from the field during the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or when it reported on the authoritarian regimes of Egyptian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Saudi kings, and the draconian regime of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, before and after the Arab Spring revolutions. It did so even after these states shuttered its offices.
In the U.S., the National Press Club came out against the move as well. Here’s part of a statement by Emily Wilkins, the club president, and Gil Klein, president of the club’s Journalism Institute:
The decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to shut down Al Jazeera operations in Israel is the wrong one. It is wrong for the people of Israel, for the people of Gaza, for people in the West Bank, and for the rest of the international news network’s millions of viewers around the region and world who rely on Al Jazeera’s reporting of the nearly seven-month Israel-Hamas war. We fully support Al Jazeera’s decision to fight this in court.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who’s been an indispensable voice of reason since Oct. 7, has another must-read column (free link), this one urging Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia rather than proceed with an all-out assault against the Gazan city of Rafah.
Protest in Tel Aviv against the Netanyahu government last June. Photo (cc) 2023 by RG TLV.
CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote an important analysis last week about journalists who have been killed by Israeli forces in the the Gaza war. Citing figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Darcy observes that at least 95 journalists have been killed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel last Oct. 7, and that all but five of those journalists are Palestinian — the highest death toll for members of the press since CPJ began tracking such casualties in 1992.
In addition to deaths that might be attributed to the fog of war, there have also been killings that Israel carried out despite what appear to be clear indications that it was targeting media workers. Darcy writes that the United Nations recently finished a report showing that Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah had been killed in southern Lebanon after a tank fired at a group of “clearly identified journalists.” Israeli officials responded to the U.N. that it “does not deliberately shoot at civilians, including journalists.”
In addition, The Washington Post last week found that a Jan. 7 missile attack resulting in the deaths of two Al Jazeera journalists and two freelancers in southern Gaza may have lacked any military justification. The Israeli military claimed it had “identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to IDF troops” — but the Post found that the “aircraft” was a drone apparently being used for reporting purposes.
Darcy includes accounts of Palestinian journalists who have alleged been abused by Israeli forces as well — a topic that is the subject of a new report from CPJ, which “found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank” as well as the deaths of journalists’ families.
CPJ has posted an open letter signed by 36 leaders of top U.S. and international news organizations calling Israel to end its attacks on journalists. Among the Americans the letter are Julie Pace, the executive editor of The Associated Press; Mark Thompson, the chair and CEO of CNN; A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times; Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Washington Post; Kim Godwin, the president of ABC News; and Rebecca Blumenstein, the president of editorial at NBC News. Significantly, the international news leaders signing the letter include Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The letter includes this:
Journalists are civilians and Israeli authorities must protect journalists as noncombatants according to international law. Those responsible for any violations of that longstanding protection should be held accountable. Attacks on journalists are also attacks on truth. We commit to championing the safety of journalists in Gaza, which is fundamental for the protection of press freedom everywhere.
This weekend, as NPR reports, tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netananyu, calling for a deal with Hamas to release the more than 100 hostages the terrorist group is still believed to be holding.
The horrendous situation in the Middle East began with Hamas’ attacks, claiming some 1,200 lives and leading to Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which have killed more than 30,000 people, mostly civilians. Starvation looms. President Biden has been ever-so-slowly been backing away from the Netanyahu government, allowing a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire and the release of the hostages to take effect.
Israel’s targeting of media workers is a small part of a much larger picture — a horrendous problem that would seem to have no good solution. But let’s start with this: Journalists are the world’s eyes and ears. They need to be able to tell us what is taking place on the ground without fear of being killed.
Like many of you have no doubt been doing, I’ve been tracking a story about a possible massive failure on the part of The New York Times. It’s about a story the paper published in December headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It is a harrowing and horrifying report on how Hamas terrorists sexually assaulted women in the most violent ways imaginable during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which claimed some 1,200 lives.
Parts of the story came under serious scrutiny on Feb. 28 in an investigative report published by The Intercept. It’s a complicated critique, because no one, including The Intercept, doubts that the terrorists engaged in sexual brutality. But the Times relied in part on a freelancer whose social media activity suggests that she is anti-Palestinian and who has little in the way of journalism experience. The Intercept has also called into question some key details in the Times story. The Times, it should be noted, stands behind its reporting.
The Intercept has also reported that the Times canceled an episode of “The Daily” concerning the sexual violence story after internal and external critics raised questions about its veracity. That, in turn, has led to an investigation inside the Times to determine who may have leaked that news. The NewsGuild of New York has accused the Times of targeting employees whose backgrounds are Middle Eastern or North African, which the Times denies.
This is a developing story. For now, I highly recommend this overview at Semafor by Ben Smith, which not only lays out the details but offers some valuable background and analysis.
