Club Friday Q&A: Inori Roy and Fatima Syed on Mourning Palestinian Journalists

 
 

By Stacy Lee Kong

Image: Lito Howse

 
 

A few weeks ago, I spent a chilly Thursday evening standing alongside some of my fellow Canadian journalists at a vigil for our counterparts in Gaza, who have been killed at an astounding rate since Oct. 7. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of Feb. 21, 88 journalists and media workers have been confirmed dead. Most (83) of them are Palestinian, while two are Israeli and three Lebanese. And, an additional 25 have been arrested, 16 have been injured and four are missing—and CPJ is still investigating other, as-yet-unconfirmed reports of “journalists being killed, missing, detained, hurt or threatened, and of damage to media offices and journalists’ homes.”

For organizers Ginella Massa, Inori Roy, Fatima Syed and Pacinthe Mattar, it was important to honour these journalists’ deaths, and necessary to give the journalism community in Toronto a chance to gather and be in community with one another. I recently chatted with Inori and Fatima about why this group stepped up to organize, what it has been like navigating Canadian media during this time and what happens next.

I want to start by asking how you both are, acknowledging that’s kind of a weird question to ask right now.

Fatima Syed: The world just seems like a big fat contradiction in my brain right now. I am watching everyone fawn over Taylor Swift and then say stupid things about what’s happening in Palestine and I am just deeply struggling with reconciling all of that—and that’s as someone who does like Taylor Swift. But, at this moment in time, in the order of things that I care about, she’s not at the top at all. The world wants to push me there, though, and I’m resisting. It’s just a constant mental battle lately.

Inori Roy: No shade to Fatima, because I don’t like Taylor Swift, but I’ve been trying to understand what are the best ways to engage with community on the subject of Palestine, because the problem is, a lot of times when you enter social media spaces where you try to find community, you’re getting force-fed a diet of other things that you don’t care about, and that feels very purposeful—[these are] tools of distraction and tools of levity.

In the sense of how I’m doing, being a journalist in the industry… I always feared that the industry didn’t really care about the same things that I do. I knew going into it that we’re part of this new generation that is more willing to articulate our stances on particular moral and political questions and that understands you can have certain moral beliefs and still be a fair and accurate reporter, and that the Old Guard doesn’t feel that way. But I underestimated how much presence and power the Old Guard have, because I work in a very specific, small newsroom that is very progressive. So, it was a punch to the gut to be reminded of how far behind we are as an industry and how much we have to do, and how unwilling people are to move even a tiny increment. We’re trying to talk about some very basic moral principles: journalists shouldn’t be killed; we should be talking about the things that are happening in a war; we should be talking about state-sanctioned violence clearly and openly and accurately. It’s extraordinary to see how much people have to be dragged along to do the most basic things. So, that’s been really disheartening. It has really made me wonder where I would fit in the industry, and whether there would be a place for me if I didn’t have the job that I do.

Always worrying that this was the case and feeling awful to be proven right is too real. I’ve been in the magazine industry for a long time, and for most of that time, I didn’t really talk about politics, race or gender at work. But probably in the mid-2010s, it felt like things were starting to change. It’s funny, because in 2019, I remember feeling like the pendulum was already swinging away from covering ‘diversity,’ and then we had a bit of a course correction in 2020, and now the pendulum is swinging away again. I understand that that is the way that progress works, that it’s never linear. But it is so terrible to have a brief moment of hope, only to realize we are actually further behind than I even realized. Sometimes I feel like we’re further behind than we were in 2021.

Inori: It does feel that way. 

Fatima: I have worked in legacy media and new media and I have freelanced and I have worked in journalism organizations, and I completely agree with everything Inori already said. It is deeply disheartening that we haven’t done better. But I think for me, the thing I struggle with the most is the fact that no one’s learned anything. I have been a journalist since 2016, and the same people who were editors when I started are still editors now. The same people who were reporters when I started are still reporters now. And in that eight years, we have had this very same discussion so many times. At some point, there were written commitments, there were verbal commitments, there were firings, there were letters to readers acknowledging that we would serve them better. There were all sorts of words thrown around. I do try very hard to look at the glass as half-full, so I did give the benefit of the doubt that learning is a process, it is a journey, it takes steps, that unlearning is hard and it takes time. But then you get to this moment, and it’s the moment that they all talk about. The worst kind of conflict, the worst kind of war, the worst kind of attack on humanity. The one they taught us about in history class, the one that we’re reminded of every Remembrance Day, every time someone puts a poppy on. The whole “never again” concept that was so widely spread by white people. And here we are; it’s again.

And again and again and again and again.

Fatima: I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve learned how to be a better reporter. For a long time, I didn’t know how to speak to Indigenous communities. I never incorporated Indigenous voices in my coverage as a climate reporter. But I learned. I got the books, I spoke to people, I actively started to go into communities, I’m learning from them. If I can take the steps needed to be a better reporter, why can’t they? Why can’t every other reporter and editor in this country realize how they’re failing a whole community of people? Not even a whole community—they’re failing Canadians, quite frankly. Like, all of them.

We are. I’d argue that the way that newsrooms are covering Palestinians and Palestine are completely reflected in the way that they cover racialized people, disabled people, poor people, Indigenous people. It’s all the same language, the same framing. The reason that I keep feeling frustrated that we’re having the same conversation is because it’s literally the same words. We have had this conversation about anti-Blackness and about decolonization and Indigenous people, and about racialized people in general.

Inori: It’s also frustrating because have a literal term for what is happening right now. I don’t think we’ve been using it enough, but there’s a term for when you are in a profession and the integrity of the profession does not match the standard that you expect it to [meet]. It’s called moral injury, and it has a massive impact. We know when journalists who care about this particular issue are not given the space to turn that care into good reporting, they are experiencing a moral injury. I’m too young to have remembered the Iraq War and the presence of Canada and the U.S. in the Middle East, but I cannot imagine how journalists came out from under that without feeling this profound sense of having failed the world in their coverage of it. And it just feels like that again. That was two decades ago, and we haven’t really learned anything about the way we should be covering the Middle East as a whole, and the profound dehumanization with which we approach conflicts in that region. It feels so regressive.

And yet, we’re now having much more sophisticated conversations about journalists’ well-being and mental health. We’re putting together toolkits, we’re doing presentations. Every year, there’s a journalist mental health session at the CAJ conference. But we’re conveniently not having conversations about how these things might be related, and the things we need to do in order to prevent moral injury in the workplace by demanding better of ourselves when we’re covering topics like this. 

I don’t know if it’s that journalists didn’t learn anything, honestly. I think we have to also acknowledge the ways that journalism and media uphold Western imperialism. We talk about the function of journalism in terms of these noble goals of informing people and telling the truth, of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the powerful—but that’s not the only purpose of media. It’s also to tell a collective story about who we are and what matters to us. And that is about upholding a particular worldview. Within that white supremacist and patriarchal system, we can only be so honest about what’s happening in Palestine. So, at a certain point, that system pushes the loudest voices out. Lots of people learn lots of things, but it doesn’t serve the purposes of media as an industry and this society to actually engage with those ideas.

Fatima: I’ve always felt like what’s interesting about Canada is we are proud of our diversity, yet we don’t know how to contend with it. We don’t know how to actually create pathways to success, to stability, to all the good things that some portions of our society have a lot of and others don’t. What we’re talking about isn’t the media’s failure to cover this massive attack on Palestinian people, it’s all about the cascading impacts on Canadian society as well. It’s about immigration, and the disparity in the immigration system that is so obvious, but seems very difficult for our industry to acknowledge. This is about a systemic failure, where the immigration system favours a certain kind of immigrant over another, but we don’t even know how to define what that immigrant is because it would mean saying white people. We still favour white people over others.

It means realizing that this cascades into impacts on mental health and community mental health. There is a whole generation of people who take the streets every weekend, who are facing emotional burnout and who are also losing their faith in democracy. How do you talk about democracy without thinking about the people who participate in that democracy? That includes people of all faiths, of all races, of all colours, who are currently struggling to grapple with the failure of institutions like media to accurately represent what is happening in the world. It’s all of it, right? In my time serving as a reporter in this industry, I don’t think anyone has properly contended with how to cover issues of race beyond boxing it up: ‘this is a story about a Black person who created a business and it’s doing so well.’ ‘This is a story about a Muslim immigrant who figured out how to help his community.’ Not realizing that they both did those things because of institutional barriers that we don’t know how to talk about.

To go back to what you were saying about losing faith in democracy, it is also deeply ironic to me that we have endless conversations about what we need to do to save media, how we need to make sure that we can demonstrate the value of journalism, and here’s a way, but no one is acknowledging it. People are always telling me in my DMs that they have completely turned away from mainstream media. I am usually banging the drum of why it’s so important, but I don’t know that I can, in good faith, do that when I can see that if you only look at mainstream media, you don’t get the whole picture.

Fatima: You know what I do? I say support journalists, don’t support journalism. There are hard-working reporters in newsrooms that are pushing back and trying to do the best coverage they possibly can within those limitations. I feel so bad saying that, because I am a journalist and I’m telling people not to support journalism. But I can’t in good conscience say that we’re great when we really are not. I can tell you specific reporters who I think are amazing and deserving. But I cannot support the industry as a whole right now.

Shifting gears slightly, I want to talk a little bit about why it was so important to organize the vigil for journalists who have been killed over the past five months. I can’t remember who said this, but at the vigil, one of you said that there was a point where you worried that it would only be the four of you in attendance. So, I really want to talk about a) how that feels and b) why it was still important for you to host and organize this event.

Inori: It was a strange experience because I think we kept waiting for someone, or some organization, with the platform, the reach and the legitimacy to do something. We kept thinking ‘Someone’s going to do something, someone’s going to say something, right?’ And then we realized that no, nobody was going to do anything. It was up to four individuals who just happened to care to put something together. It was really bizarre. But there was a sense of needing to create a space where people could grieve and articulate their feelings, knowing that they weren’t being given that space in their newsrooms, or through the news. And, we really wanted to create a space where people could collectively express their grief knowing there’s strength in numbers. So, even if 50 people showed up, the grief of any one individual journalist wouldn’t be spotlighted or targeted or treated as hostile by their newsrooms. They would be able to blend into a crowd of people within their own industry with whom they felt safe.

Fatima: Through our networks, there were so many group chats where people were expressing dismay, feeling discouraged by their bosses and their newsrooms or dealing with racist attacks or comments, and looking for that community. We do get to be a community at galas and awards once a year, but in such difficult times, there needed to be something. Still, the fear was so palpable; how do you even do a thing like this when everyone’s scared of losing their jobs or getting attacked by the public? So, we made it a total private invitation process. We painstakingly emailed every news director and editor that we could think of across all the newsrooms in Toronto to invite them to the vigil, and asked them to invite their colleagues. We emailed the unions, we emailed individual reporters. We emphasized that this was a private invitation, that it was a journalists’ for journalists event. You won’t be surprised to hear that we did not hear back from a single news director or editor in response to any of those emails. I don’t know if any of them attended the vigil, to be honest with you. I am aware of at least one newsroom putting the invitation in their Slack, but I don’t know if that invitation got passed on to the newsrooms, as we had asked, because if your boss shares it, it’s almost as if it’s a green light to go.

Right before the event started, I got four messages from journalists who couldn’t come, who privately DM’d me and said, ‘I wish I could be there, but I’m so scared of losing my job and someone seeing me, but I’m so glad you’re doing this.’ And afterwards, a journalist there told me that they felt joy at the event, which is a weird thing to say. But it was the idea of community, and knowing we’re not alone. Even though we might be the only ones in our newsrooms, or we might be the only ones in our team or department, this is actually an emotion being felt all across the industry. We’re all feeling the same thing, we’re all crying over the same thing—and maybe in this collectiveness, we can find permanent change. 

Inori: We were very lucky; we had a department liaison, Sonya Fatah, who’s a professor at TMU, who did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to the logistics of organizing. The fact that we’d be on the campus, equipment, the space, the security, she really handled all of that. But it was not without its challenges. She had been trying to organize something since before the vigil, and was really struggling to find any momentum amongst the department. There was a culture of fear around being labelled as antisemitic, saying something that might scare off funders or upset other departments, or that might bring scrutiny from Honest Reporting and other lobbying groups that are known for their aggressive tactics. It was a very delicate balancing act that hindered the process at some points, but ultimately we were able to get all the right people on board. And I think that came from the amount of institutional support we were given from other organizations like Inspirit Foundation and Amnesty. We took pains to not say anything that might get anyone in trouble for being there, or that might turn a vigil into a political gathering. There were so many tight ropes to have to walk simultaneously, while at the same time making sure that people didn’t water down the message: this is about largely Palestinian journalists being killed. We also got some support from the Jewish Faculty Network, which was lovely because it added to the sense that you can have concerns about both Israeli and Palestinian journalists dying, and it’s not antisemitic. That was a really valuable partnership to have, and they were really supportive. 

Fatima: And all of the journalist organizations ended up coming. You can make of that what you will.

Last question: I feel so distraught over the state of this industry and the potential repercussions of mishandling this. The threat to democracy is profound. But is there anything about the experience of organizing the vigil or where you are right now that is giving you if not hope, at least some kind of path forward? And it’s okay if the answer is no.

Fatima: It’s such a hard question to answer. On the one hand, look, there’s always hope to be found. Not to sound cheesy, but there is. At the vigil, there were many journalists who came up to me and asked, ‘How do we keep this going? How do we find more spaces for us to keep coming together and figuring this out?’ That’s a cause for hope. The thing that keeps me going is that there is a whole community of journalists, and it’s bigger than you think, who really do care about journalism, and the public’s right to access information and to be reflected in the stories that are told about them. That is incredibly hopeful.

Inori: There was a genuine moment of hope in seeing how many people came to the vigil. That was very deeply moving to see, and it bolstered a continued drive to push for these sorts of open conversations in the industry, because there are people who [can’t] openly call for them, but who really do want and need them. The thing that brings me the most hope is that the generation of students who are coming out of journalism school now are approaching the craft with a moral clarity that we have not allowed ourselves. We pretend like we’re not allowed to have particular perspectives, and I think it’s becoming more and more clear that you can’t really do your job well if you’re not willing to have some form of moral clarity on issues. It’s been really lovely to see the number of young journalists or early career journalists who were willing to put their name on the open letter, or who were willing to come to the event or volunteer their time, or who spoke to us afterwards and asked about how they can help facilitate things in the future. There [indicates] we are very slowly, excruciatingly slowly, moving towards an industry body that is made up of people who are willing to be much more honest about their perspectives and the need for approaching conversations and reporting with an equity focus. Not to put too much pressure on the kids of tomorrow, but I really appreciate the clear-eyed approach that a lot of them took in understanding this issue and their role as journalists. And there are publications that are doing that and are succeeding at it, including, both Fatima’s and my newsroom. 

Fatima: I want to bring it back to the journalists in Palestine, because that’s what this is about. The voice that I will never get out of my head for the rest of my life, for as long as I’m a journalist and even beyond that, is Wael Al-Dahdouh at his son’s funeral, saying that [journalism] is his duty, and irrespective of what happens to his family, they made a sacrifice so that he could keep telling the truth. If someone like that can remain committed to journalism, in spite of all he has been through, I can’t quit, Inori can’t quit, none of us can quit. [But] tag.The editors are it. It’s their turn to stop realize that the country they’re responsible for covering is evolving and changing and very different from the world that they know, and they need to come to terms with how to report on it in a fair and accurate way.

Inori: In the last decade or two, we’ve seen the world moving in a very specific direction. We have more fascist governments now than we did 10 years ago. We have political regimes in countries that very deeply impact populations here, speaking as someone who is Indian seeing what is happening in India. There is a very urgent need for genuine, complex, uncomfortable reporting on the things that are happening in the world and how they affect people here. And I have seen in Canadian media’s lethargic approach global issues that have impacts here at home, we are not prepared for what’s coming. To Fatima’s point, newsrooms are choosing not to cover the country as it exists, but as they understand it. I do genuinely think we are not moving at a fast enough pace to keep up with a shifting political barometer worldwide. and it’s very scary and very concerning. And when you look at the incredible work happening in the States around covering the rising far-right, we have no excuses. We really need to be moving at a faster pace.

Fatima: Not to sound like a climate reporter, but I am one. So: if we figured out how to cover climate change, which is such a global problem, in a local way, why is this any different? Global politics and global social movements are not silos. What happens in one end of the world will impact Canada because look at the society that lives here. I am deeply afraid of what happens next. I’m deeply afraid that we’re going to head into an election where all the people that you see on the street every weekend are not going to vote. And if that happens, where do we go from there, and are we able to cover it? Are we able to inform people? Because that’s our job—it’s to inform people of the truth, and we’re neither informing them nor engaging with the truth, and that’s scary.

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Club Friday Q&AStacy Lee KongInori Roy, Fatima Syed, Pacinthe Mattar, Ginella Massa, Palestine