Who Gets Journalistic Solidarity? (And Why It It Only Westerners?)
By stacy lee kong
Image: instagram.com/wael_eldahdouh
A note on language: As I have explained in previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers recently argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
I feel like I keep saying this over and over again, but it’s never not true, so: it is so disorienting, and even destabilizing, to know that we are all seeing the same things, yet are drawing such radically different conclusions. We’re all seeing Israel’s bombing campaigns (recent satellite analysis found 500 craters throughout Gaza, each consistent with the damage caused by a single 2,000-pound bomb, a density “not… seen since Vietnam”); the ever-rising death toll (now 22,835, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, or 1% of the entire pre-Oct. 7 population); the physical toll on Palestinian bodies (the Ministry says an additional 58,416 Palestinians have been injured since Oct. 7); the particular impact on Palestinian children (9,000 of the dead are children; among survivors, more than 10 children per day on average require the amputation of one or both legs—often without anaesthesia); the starvation; the blockade stopping water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza; the spread of disease; the genocidal language being used by Israeli officials; the physical destruction of neighbourhoods (which also has serious environmental impacts); the bombing of designated ‘safe corridors’; the internal displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians, and the potential for their external displacement into Egypt’s Sinai Desert; and, most relevant for this newsletter, the IDF’s targeting of Palestinian journalists.
This information is all readily available in written, photographic and video form, published for all to see on both mainstream news outlets, as well as on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. It has radicalized young people, helped push other global conflicts into the public consciousness and profoundly disrupted what has been the status quo on discussions around Palestinian liberation for decades. And yet, there’s a not-insignificant segment of the West that is perpetually trying to downplay or discredit it, or to justify these atrocities. Most infuriatingly for me, that group includes many Western journalists and newsroom decision-makers.
I’ve written about this before, but I feel even more strongly now, so… let’s talk about it.
Palestinian journalists are being threatened, targeted and assassinated, but their Western peers have nothing to say
As of yesterday, the number of journalists killed in this conflict is between 79, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based watchdog group, and 109, according to the Palestinian media office. Most of them are Palestinian. Many of them were killed alongside their family members. And honestly, it strains the limits of credibility to believe their deaths were a coincidence. (For comparison’s sake, 17 journalists have been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war since 2022, 283 journalists have been killed in Iraq since 2003, 63 journalists were killed over the Vietnam War’s almost 20-year span and 69 journalists were killed in WW2.) I mean, just look at what Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, has experienced over the last few months. On Jan. 7, an Israeli airstrike killed his 27-year-old son and fellow journalist Hamza, as well as another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya. There are also reports that al-Dahdouh’s nephews, brothers Ahmed, 30, and Muhammad, 26, were killed in a separate airstrike the following day. In December, al-Dahdouh was injured in an attack that killed his videographer, Samer Abu Daqqa. In October, yet another Israeli airstrike killed al-Dahdouh’s wife, Amna, 15-year-old son, Mahmoud, 7-year-old daughter, Sham and 18-month-old grandson, Adam.
And al-Dahdouh is not the only journalist who’s experiencing this. In both statements and media interviews, the CPJ and Human Rights Watch have expressed concern that Israel is deliberately targeting journalists, as has Al Jazeera. In October, reporter Youmna ElSayed said her husband received a call claiming to come from the Israeli army warning the family to leave their home because “in the coming hours it is going to be very dangerous in the area where you are at.” No one else in the building received a similar phone call, which to ElSayed indicated this was a specific threat. CPJ says this seems to be a pattern, citing another Al Jazeera journalist, Anas Al-Sharif, whose 90-year-old father was killed after Al-Sharif received multiple threatening phone calls purportedly from the IDF. Other journalists have been killed in airstrikes on their homes, while wearing jackets clearly identifying them as press, and “having no close contact to a crossfire,” Sherif Mansour, the CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program co-ordinator, told CTV in December.
Day after day, journalists are being killed while they’re driving to assignments, or while covering the aftermath of airstrikes, or while they’re at home with their families. And day after day, their colleagues in the West remain largely silent… which is vastly different from the way Western media workers usually tend to approach attacks on the press, for the record. In 2015, when French-born Algerian Muslim brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi carried out a mass shooting at the editorial offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, the world—and particularly journalists—were called to use the slogan #JeSuisCharlie to express support for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The slogan has since come to highlight France’s increasing polarization, but for a while there, I distinctly remember that it was not only acceptable but, in some spaces, expected to express solidarity with the slain employees of Charlie Hebdo.
That same year, female journalists across Canada spoke out about the “fuck her right in the pussy” trend, which involved men and boys shouting that catchphrase at them while they were reporting in the field. This type of sexist harassment was widely decried on social media, and sympathetically covered by outlets such as CBC.
But now, I don’t see that many of my colleagues calling for the safety of Palestinian journalists. And those who are doing so are largely racialized or belong to another marginalized group. The power brokers, the decision-makers, the most senior among us, though? They seemingly have nothing to say. In December, a open letter began circulating condemning Israel’s continued killing of journalists in Gaza and calling for Canadian media organizations to demonstrate integrity in their reporting. It has been signed by 291 people, including me. For comparison, when a similar letter circulated in 2021, more than 2,000 people signed.
Why are so few people willing to speak up?
I think there are a lot of reasons for that decline in public support. For starters, it’s scary to take this particular stance at this particular time. I’ve written before about the response I get when I write about Palestine; Canadian journalists are, as a whole, in a more precarious place than they were even three years ago. Fewer of us have full-time jobs, institutional support or steady sources of income, so it’s not that surprising to me that people are scared to jeopardize their professional networks, especially as Canadian outlets indicate their stance by continuing to demonstrate anti-Palestinian bias. I’ve also had many offline conversations about the ways people are trying to support Palestinian journalists, and Palestinians in general, and it’s important to remember that just because people aren’t posting doesn’t mean they aren’t saying anything, ever.
But. It would be embarrassingly naïve to pretend Canadian journalists’ own unexamined racism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian bias and Western privilege aren’t also factors. Last week, The Breach (which has been publishing really excellent analysis on the biased linguistic and editorial decisions being made in Canadian newsrooms) revealed that CBC straight-up knows it’s using sanitized language to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, and doesn’t see a problem with it. Writer and contributing editor Emma Paling’s reporting was based on the organization’s response to a reader—retired Humber College professor Jeff Winch—who submitted four complaints about its coverage of the conflict to the CRTC pointing out that often, CBC stories described Hamas attacks with “toxic” adjectives, while Israel’s actions were described without adjectives at all.
“This use of language attempts to minimize the ugliness of Israeli atrocities and get maximum hatred out of the Hamas attacks,” Winch wrote in one complaint. “It also serves to skew the reader’s empathy towards Israel and away from Palestinians—a further dehumanizing of an already downtrodden people.”
In response, Nancy Waugh, senior manager of journalistic standards at CBC, said, “Different words are used because although both result in death and injury, the events they describe are very different. The raid saw Hamas gunmen stream through the border fence and attack Israelis directly with firearms, knives and explosives. Gunmen chased down festival goers, assaulted kibbutzniks then shot them, fought hand to hand, and threw grenades. The attack was brutal, often vicious, and certainly murderous. Bombs dropped from thousands of feet and artillery shells lofted into Gaza from kilometers away result in death and destruction on a massive scale, but it is carried out remotely. The deadly results are unseen by those who caused them and the source unseen by those [who] suffer and die.”
Among the many things wrong with that statement, one stands out: as The Breach’s managing editor, Martin Lukacs, pointed out on X, CBC has absolutely described ‘remote’ killings using words such as “brutal.” Just… not in this conflict. Saying the “slaughter of innocent Ukrainians” is okay, though. So is describing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent war as “the most vicious, destructive conflict in Europe since the Second World War.”
Canadian journalists need to be honest with themselves about their silence
This is a clear double standard, and it’s equally obvious that racism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment contribute to these differing approaches. I know I talk a lot about ‘outlets,’ as in, ‘the editorial choices outlets are making,’ but to be clear, what I really mean is the people who work at those outlets, and who make the individual decisions that build into an overall approach. Individual reporters, writers, editors, producers, etc. decide, every day, what words to use in their articles and headlines and social posts, what experts to interview, who is considered an expert, how those people are treated when they share their expertise, if they get to be humans mourning lost colleagues, friends and family members and if they are expected to represent all Palestinians, all Arabs, all Muslims.
I also want to highlight a dynamic that’s perhaps extra fraught in this case, but super common in journalism, and that is the way Western media perceives its counterparts in the Global South. As poet Lina Alsharif said on X over the weekend, “Western journalists never look at Palestinian journalists as peers or colleagues. To them, Palestinian journalists are nothing but ‘fixers,’ ‘translators,’ ‘middlemen.’ To them Palestinian journalists are an accessory to get sources that they will later edit and twist.” And it’s not just Palestine; in 2019, Indian journalist Priyanka Borpujari wrote an article in the Columbia Journalism Review about journalists around the world who were “frustrated by being seen as on-the-ground logisticians for parachuting foreign correspondents sent to cover stories that they, the locals, had been reporting for years.”
“The difference between a correspondent and a ‘fixer’ is not one of experience or qualification, but of geography. Local journalists hired as fixers by foreign journalists are often established reporters and can offer in-country expertise in the form of helpful contacts and language skills—and, again, may well have already covered the story in question,” Borpujari went on to write. “Overwhelmingly, foreign reportage still relies on a model of Western, and largely white, reporters hiring local journalists in subservient roles.”
To reiterate what Alsharif said so eloquently: Part of the reason so many Western journalists don’t feel called to condemn these attacks on their colleagues is that they don’t believe these people are their colleagues. They don’t see them as equals, or as people doing important work, or maybe even as human beings. Instead, at least some of them perceive Palestinian journalists as amateurs and unreliable storytellers.
This isn’t just about Palestinian journalists
I don’t think it’s a surprise that people who experience marginalization see their own struggles reflected in Palestinians’ oppression and are therefore particularly invested in Palestinian liberation; similarly, journalists who belong to marginalized groups understand how it feels to be perceived as less-than. Recently, journalist Anam Latif posted an interaction she’d recently had with Rod Frketich, a former colleague at the Waterloo Region Record, about the culture at the Record. Frketich seemingly took issue with Latif saying, “If three non-white folks, two of them women, and two white women leave your newsroom in a 15-month period, it should be very obvious who and what the problem is. You can blame ‘the internet,’ ‘advertising losses’ and ‘company changes’ for only so long.” She also explicitly mentioned a “gaslighting boss who favours white men.” His response? “It’s complex why people leave jobs” and, much worse, “you do realize the hoops a number of us jumped through so you had the news editor job right?”
The implication was so clear: Latif wasn’t really qualified for her role, and was only hired because the ‘real’ journalists at the paper wanted her there for non-journalism reasons (i.e. the appearance of diversity). That’s why, he said, “things were done to make that happen.” Seeing this was a bit of a gut-punch; in fact, when a friend shared Latif’s post in our group chat, I immediately wondered how many people have thought the same thing about me. And that’s not me being dramatic—I promise, every single non-white woman, if not person, working in Canadian media has been explicitly or implicitly told that we’re not as good as we think we are.
Equally clear: there’s a connection between the way Frketich spoke to Latif and the way the industry at large continually declines to advocate for, or even speak up in support of, Palestinian journalists. And that’s just another sign that liberation can only ever be collective.
And Did You Hear About…
Amanda Mull on why we’re currently in the “golden age of gadgets for girlies.”
The New Yorker’s fascinating essay on American Poly, a new book by historian Christopher M. Gleason, about the mainstreaming of consensual nonmonogamy in American culture, why it’s having a moment in pop culture right now—and some surprising links to wealth and capitalism.
This heartbreaking profile of Jordan Neely, the young Black man who was killed by a former Marine on a New York subway car last May.
Why people are so obsessed with UFOs. (Particularly timely considering the recent—and debunked, obviously/sadly—rumours of aliens wandering around a Miami mall.)
The Cut’s longread on NYC nanny wars.
What feels like a brewing backlash to Taylor Swift’s winning 2023.
This walk down memory lane of internet main characters.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Join Club Friday, our membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts, Friday merch and deals and discounts from like-minded brands.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and even (occasionally) TikTok.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.