Ep 207: US-Backed Killing of Journalists in Gaza and the Limits of Freedom of the Press Sloganeering AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Citations Needed
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Episode: Ep 207: US-Backed Killing of Journalists in Gaza and the Limits of "Freedom of the Press" Sloganeering
Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 01:32:26
Episode Shownotes
"Western World Observes Press Freedom Day," gloated the United Press International newswire back in 1961. "Trump v. CNN: lawsuit becomes test case on press freedom," declared The Guardian in November 2018. "The 10 Best and Worst Countries for Press Freedom," says US News and World report in 2022. For decades,
elite US media and government institutions have touted the sacred notion of freedom of the press. Our media, so we’re told, have the legally enshrined latitude and responsibility to criticize, to interrogate, to expose. According to this same high-minded rhetoric, freedom of the press preserves our media’s integrity and serves as a pillar of US democracy. This all sounds well and good. After all, media’s ability to keep the public informed without constraints or compromise is intrinsically good and essential to any society - that’s kinda the whole point of this show. But there are far more limitations to US-based frameworks of freedom of the press than our media, and our government, let on. Far too often, the concept of press freedom is limited by liberal formulations of negative rights, and even those, selectively applied depending on short term US interests. As the US-backed wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel enters its 10 month and more than 140 journalists have been killed in the assault –– many deliberately targeted by the Israeli military –– Western elite sanctimony over their alleged commitment to press freedom has been revealed as hollow, its ideological cracks and contradictions apparent for all to see. On this episode, our Season 7 Finale, we examine lofty American conceptions of freedom of the press, especially as it emerged in the middle of the 20th century, looking at how US media organizations are more willing to award rights, sympathy, and security to those journalists and institutions who help prop up the usual State Department line. Our guests are documentarian Kavitha Chekuru and journalist Hoda Osman.
Summary
In Episode 207 of "Citations Needed," the hosts discuss the stark contrast between the ideal of press freedom promoted by U.S. institutions and the harsh realities faced by journalists in Gaza, where over 140 have been killed amid a U.S.-backed assault. The episode critiques the selective application of press rights based on U.S. interests, particularly highlighting the media's failure to humanize Palestinian victims and journalists compared to their counterparts in Ukraine. Guest contributors elaborate on the historical manipulation of press freedom narratives and call for a reevaluation of support within the journalism community for those reporting from conflict zones.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Ep 207: US-Backed Killing of Journalists in Gaza and the Limits of "Freedom of the Press" Sloganeering) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker_00
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
00:00:16 Speaker_01
I'm Adam Johnson.
00:00:17 Speaker_00
You can follow the show on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast. All your support through Patreon.
00:00:28 Speaker_00
is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We don't run ads, we don't have commercials, we don't have corporate sponsors or anything like that. We are able to keep doing the show because of the generosity of listeners like you.
00:00:41 Speaker_01
Yes, please, if you can subscribe to the Patreon, it helps keeps the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable.
00:00:47 Speaker_00
This is actually the final episode of our seventh season, Adam. We started doing this show back in July of 2017, if you can believe it. We are now seven seasons deep.
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We're gonna be taking a very little break as we tend to do at the end of summer, and we'll be back in September with all new episodes of Citations Needed for season eight.
00:01:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, we've survived the Trump administration, the Biden administration, and whichever the next administration is, we'll survive them as well. We can't be defeated. We're unstoppable. We have tiger blood. So thank you all for supporting the show.
00:01:27 Speaker_01
We look forward to next season. We have many bangers ready to go. So we are very grateful for your support, as always.
00:01:37 Speaker_00
Western World Observes Press Freedom Day, gloated the United Press International Newswire back in 1961. Trump vs. CNN – Lawsuit Becomes Test Case on Press Freedom, declared The Guardian in November 2018.
00:01:54 Speaker_00
the 10 best and worst countries for press freedom," wrote U.S. News & World Report in 2022.
00:02:03 Speaker_01
For decades, elite U.S. media and government institutions have touted the sacred notion of freedom of the press.
00:02:08 Speaker_01
Our media, so we've been told, have the legally enshrined latitude and responsibility to criticize, interrogate, and expose those in power or government.
00:02:17 Speaker_01
And according to this high-minded rhetoric, freedom of the press preserves our nation's integrity and serves as a pillar of U.S. democracy.
00:02:24 Speaker_00
This all sounds well and good, of course. After all, media's ability to keep the public informed without constraints or compromise is intrinsically good and essential to any society. That's kind of the whole point of this show.
00:02:36 Speaker_00
But there are far more limitations to U.S.-based frameworks of freedom of the press than our media and our government tend to let on.
00:02:45 Speaker_00
Far too often, the concept of press freedom is limited by liberal formulations of negative rights, and even those selectively applied depending on short-term U.S. interests.
00:02:56 Speaker_00
As the U.S.-backed wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel enters its 10th month and more than 140 journalists have been killed in the assault, many deliberately targeted by the Israeli military, Western elite sanctimony over the alleged commitment to press freedom has been revealed as hollow, its ideological cracks and contradictions apparent for all to see.
00:03:20 Speaker_01
On today's episode, we'll examine lofty American conceptions of the freedom of the press, especially as it emerged in the middle of the 20th century in the context of the Cold War, looking at how U.S.
00:03:30 Speaker_01
media organizations are more willing to award rights, sympathy, and security to those journalists and institutions which help prop up the U.S. State Department line.
00:03:38 Speaker_00
Later on this show, we'll be joined by two guests. The first, Kavitha Chakuru, an Emmy-nominated and Polk Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
00:03:48 Speaker_00
She is the director of the film The Night Won't End, Biden's War on Gaza, a new investigative documentary about war crimes against civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military and the Biden administration's relentless support for the war, which was released in June 2024.
00:04:05 Speaker_02
They say, you know, this war could stop today if Hamas wanted it to. And we know that's not true. But the problem is, is that for the most part, mostly, primarily, I would say, in the White House press room, there's not really any pushback.
00:04:19 Speaker_02
So I don't think that the political press in Washington has done as good a job as they could have at holding the administration accountable. Like, that's what they're supposed to do. That is their job. And they have failed with devastation.
00:04:33 Speaker_00
We'll also be joined by Hoda Osman, an investigative journalist and editor who is executive editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, or ARIJ, and currently the president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association.
00:04:47 Speaker_00
ARIJ partnered recently on the Gaza Project, an investigative series led by the organization Forbidden Stories that documents how the Israeli military has been deliberately targeting journalists in Gaza since October 7th.
00:05:01 Speaker_04
I want to give my testimony on how accurate, how professional the Palestinian journalists are, especially the journalists who are in Gaza right now.
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I've been in touch with them since the beginning, but recently, because of this project, I had to interview them for our stories. and they've been incredibly accurate in their information. They've been thorough in verifying anything.
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If they didn't know something, they would tell me, Hoda, I don't know, let me check. I've asked for time codes for pictures, the timestamps. They would take them and show me exactly when a picture was taken.
00:05:37 Speaker_04
So in addition to dealing with everything that is going on, with all the horrors, with not finding food for their families, they're still working and they're doing so very, very professionally.
00:05:50 Speaker_01
So we're going to kick off with the modern concept of press freedom.
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It's obviously an idea that does go back to some extent for hundreds of years, but we're going to sort of begin the clock in the 20th century for the sake of keeping this manageable.
00:06:01 Speaker_01
The concept of freedom of the press appears in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, theoretically allowing media platforms to publish or broadcast anything that doesn't break the law or specifically incite violence or insurrection.
00:06:14 Speaker_01
Of course, many laws have been written to restrict what the media can present to the public, chief among them the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. which effectively rendered it unlawful to publish criticisms of the U.S.
00:06:25 Speaker_01
government and the military. Press freedom became more publicly visible as a cause during and shortly after World War II.
00:06:32 Speaker_01
In 1943, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the AS&E, drafted a series of proposals calling for a, quote, world guarantee of freedom of the press, unquote, after the war.
00:06:42 Speaker_01
This was in part a business decision prior to AS&E's resolution to the U.S. government
00:06:47 Speaker_01
filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press, arguing that the news agency and Wire had violated antitrust laws because, according to the AP itself, many members of the ASNE viewed the lawsuit as, quote, threatening government control over the press, unquote.
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It was also relatedly a means of advancing US interests.
00:07:05 Speaker_00
Kent Cooper, the executive director of the AP at the time, advocated for, quote, free interchange of news among countries, end quote, as the AP put it, a laudable goal after a time of immense global conflict,
00:07:18 Speaker_00
Yet Cooper's proposals had a chauvinistic undergirding, arguing for U.S. models of news organizations, that is privately owned and free market oriented, to be exported throughout the world.
00:07:30 Speaker_00
Cooper, even while fighting what he perceived to be government overreach, garnered the support of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. the U.S. Congress, and most of the United Nations.
00:07:41 Speaker_00
A number of publications worldwide took issue with this, including, oddly enough, The Economist.
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The magazine noted the following in late 1944, quote, Mr. Cooper, like most big business executives, experiences a particular moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.
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In his ode to liberty, there is no suggestion that when all barriers are down, the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world.
00:08:13 Speaker_00
His desire to prevent another Goebbels from poisoning the wells will be universally applauded. But democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for the AP.
00:08:25 Speaker_01
Throughout the 1940s, the U.S. State Department, again helmed by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius continued to advance US-centric notions of freedom of the press in concert with the ASNE.
00:08:35 Speaker_01
In the years and decades following, institutions like the Associated Press and Inter-American Press Association and the International Press Institute would publish surveys on, quote, World Press Freedom, unquote, consistently ranking US-allied countries as the freest.
00:08:48 Speaker_01
On June 7, 1961, UPI syndicated article headline, quote, Western World Observes Press Freedom Day.
00:08:54 Speaker_01
unquote, quoted Dr. Ricardo Castro Beach, the president of the Inter-American Press Association, which established the Press Freedom Day, not to be confused with World Press Freedom Day, in 1953.
00:09:05 Speaker_01
The article stated this, again quoting Beach, quote, when the press is free, it helps to make democracy a reality. When the press is obstructed and access to sources of information is curtailed,
00:09:15 Speaker_01
There exists an authoritarian government of a type the IAPA has repeatedly denounced and against which it has permanently fought," he added, end quote.
00:09:24 Speaker_01
Then he would go on to cite Cuba, which then of course recently became a communist country in 1959. This was just about 18 months prior. He sees Cuba as case number one about why press freedom is important.
00:09:34 Speaker_01
The article would go on saying, quote, he called attention particularly to the plight of the Cuban press and said the free press of the new world should pledge anew to continue the struggle until one day the Cuban press is again in the hands of legitimate owners, unquote.
00:09:47 Speaker_01
Now, to be clear, the piece did rank some countries under right-wing regimes, such as Paraguay, low on the press freedom list, but this conflation was strategic.
00:09:55 Speaker_01
Reporting in the Washington Post in the 1970s noted that the IAPA, the Inter-American Press Association, received funding in many ways was curated by the CIA.
00:10:05 Speaker_01
In January of 1976, the Washington Post published an investigation headline, quote, CIA Funding Journalistic Network Abroad, unquote.
00:10:13 Speaker_01
The paper cited a Senate Intelligence Committee report and stated, quote, on September 14th, 1970, according to the Senate report,
00:10:19 Speaker_01
The 40 Committee of the National Security Council authorized a covert CIA propaganda operation to focus attention on, quote, within quote, the damage that would befall Chile under an Allende government, unquote, within quote.
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Salvador Allende, a leftist, was then a candidate for the president of Chile.
00:10:35 Speaker_01
Less than one week later, an Inter-American Press Association, the IAPA, news release was issued in Washington charging that freedom of the press was being jeopardized in Chile by the, quote, the communist and their Marxist allies, unquote, within a quote.
00:10:49 Speaker_01
The release, according to the Senate report, was a CEA product, quote, unquote, through its covert active resources, unquote, unquote.
00:10:56 Speaker_01
Now, this is kind of an example of the way you can selectively use these lofty notions of press freedom, like we can selectively use anything, human rights, democracy, to punish threats to U.S. hegemony while overlooking or downplaying
00:11:08 Speaker_01
or minimizing those that are allied with the U.S. government. This kind of liberal negative rights-based approach is a good way of delegitimizing threats to U.S.
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hegemony in the region, and specifically in Chile, when Salvador Allende was, of course, not a Soviet stooge or allied with the Soviet Union.
00:11:23 Speaker_01
He was a classic non-aligned socialist within the context of a tradition in Latin America, but that, of course, would not be tolerated by CIA and Kissinger.
00:11:31 Speaker_00
Now, probably the most prominent purveyor of the rankings of press freedom around the world is currently Reporters Without Borders, abbreviated RSF based on its French name, which first lauded its own press freedom index in October of 2002, placing the United States at 17 in the world and exclusively European countries and Canada were featured in its top 10.
00:11:57 Speaker_00
RSF has produced loads of valuable work. I want to make that clear, some of which we're even going to be citing in this episode. But it also continues some of the more chauvinistic traditions of organizations like the IAPA and others.
00:12:10 Speaker_00
As of 2005, RSF had received funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy and from Cuban exile groups, according to a report from The Guardian.
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One might argue it's hard to remain independent while you're on the State Department payroll.
00:12:26 Speaker_00
Indeed, in 2002, RSF ranked the country of Colombia at 114 on its list, ahead of Cuba, which was sitting at 134, and consistently has done so despite the fact that 54 journalists have been killed in Colombia as opposed to zero
00:12:44 Speaker_00
being killed in Cuba since 1992, according to statistics from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
00:12:51 Speaker_01
And this is true more broadly. So let's talk a bit about Latin America in the 1980s.
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Given this history, of course, freedom of the press in Latin America hasn't been nearly as valued when the press in question represents interests contrary to those of the U.S.
00:13:03 Speaker_01
A stark example of this double standard arose in the second half of the 1980s when the right-wing anti-Santinista Nicaraguan newspaper La Prinza. In 1986, the Santinista government suspended the paper for its support of U.S.-backed contras.
00:13:16 Speaker_01
Upon the suspension, U.S. media rushed to defend the paper and its publisher, Villaleta Barrios de Chamorro.
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In April of 1986, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard awarded Chamorro the Lewis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism for, quote, her newspaper's efforts to keep press freedom alive in Nicaragua, unquote.
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Foreign Affairs published an essay in December of 1986 by Chamorro headlined, quote, The Death of La Prensa.
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Chamorro would write in Foreign Affairs, quote, La Prensa has already experienced four consecutive years of brutal censorship, in which 80% of the material submitted for publication was suppressed every day by order of the Santanitsa military censors.
00:13:52 Speaker_01
I tell of this not as a long complaint of melancholy, but rather as testimony for all democracies. Unquote. The paper reopened in October of 1987.
00:14:01 Speaker_01
On October 7, 1987, upon the paper's relaunch, the New York Times called La Prensa, quote, defiant and exultant, unquote.
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In a piece headlined, quote, a newspaper of valor, the Washington Post added that Chamorro and her newspaper, quote, deserved 10 awards, unquote.
00:14:16 Speaker_00
Now, Noam Chomsky wrote about this in his book Necessary Illusions, contrasting it with the treatment of publications and journalists who weren't so aligned with U.S. foreign policy aims.
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Among other examples, Chomsky cited the elimination of independent media in El Salvador under the U.S.-backed Duarte government, quote, not by intermittent censorship and suspension, but by murder, mutilation and physical destruction, end quote.
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Yet, Chomsky noted that, quote, the New York Times had nothing to say about these atrocities in its news columns or editorials then or since. And others who profess their indignation over the treatment of La Prensa are no different.
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This extreme contempt for freedom of the press remains in force as we applaud our achievements in bringing, quote, unquote, democracy to El Salvador, end quote. Chomsky also cited the example of La Epoca, a center-left Guatemalan newspaper.
00:15:13 Speaker_00
In the 1980s, continuing its decades-long campaign of brutal intervention, the United States sponsored right-wing military massacres during the so-called Guatemalan Civil War. Chomsky wrote the following, which occurred in the year 1988.
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Quote, on June 10th, 15 heavily armed men broke into the offices of La Epoca, stole valuable equipment, and firebombed the offices, destroying them.
00:15:40 Speaker_00
They also kidnapped the night watchman, releasing him later under the threat of death if he were to speak about the attack. Eyewitness testimony and other sources left little doubt that it was an operation of the security forces.
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Chomsky would go on to write, quote, these events elicited no public response from the guardians of free expression. The facts were not even reported in the New York Times or Washington Post, though not from ignorance, surely, end quote.
00:16:12 Speaker_01
So moving on to two thousands this kind of preening focus on freedom of the press apps and any other context would continue and it would reach a nader during the trump administration, when trump's attacks on the press which you know occasionally were admittedly quite better very scary right a lot of a sort of excitement language.
00:16:30 Speaker_01
And this concern for freedom of the press would not manifest in solidarity with January 20th protesters who were arrested during the inauguration of Donald Trump for literally just being at a protest.
00:16:40 Speaker_01
They later were awarded monetary compensation by the federal government for their unlawful arrest. And in fact, the prosecutor is now under scrutiny for withholding evidence and using a James O'Keefe video, but they were arrested.
00:16:53 Speaker_01
Again, we talked about this at the time in 2017 when this happened.
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And media completely ignored that oppression of journalists and instead focused on traditional professional solidarity amongst people that were in the club in ways that were pretty fast.
00:17:06 Speaker_01
So in november of twenty eighteen the trump administration temporarily denied a press pass to seeing him correspondent jim acosta after a confrontation between trump and acosta.
00:17:15 Speaker_01
In response, CNN filed a lawsuit against Trump and some members of his administration. They eventually dropped the suit two weeks later when the administration restored his White House access.
00:17:25 Speaker_01
During that two-week period, media across the spectrum, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, were aghast with indignation. Outraged, incensed. Right.
00:17:36 Speaker_01
They characterized Acosta's suspension as a threat to freedom of the press and a rising authoritarianism.
00:17:41 Speaker_01
On November 19th, after Acosta's press pass was reinstated, the New York Times called CNN's lawsuit, quote, a test of press freedom in the Trump era, unquote, and published 37 articles mentioning Acosta in November alone.
00:17:52 Speaker_01
The Guardians similarly described the lawsuit as a test case for press freedom, the hypocrisy from CNN.
00:17:58 Speaker_01
is of course staggering for a number of reasons, chief among them being their lack of caring about journalists in Gaza, which we'll get to in a second, but also at the time and up to this day, CNN takes millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf dictatorship, which ranks at the bottom of many of these press freedom indexes.
00:18:15 Speaker_01
And they've pried themselves on being champions of press freedom. CNN's former president, Jeff Zucker, during the Trump years, promoted himself in many puff pieces as a network standing for free press against the hostile Trump administration.
00:18:27 Speaker_01
Their chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, at the time he since left, had numerous segments criticizing the quote, creeping authoritarianism under Trump.
00:18:35 Speaker_01
A Forbes puff piece on Stelter said he was quote, defending journalism's role in a democracy, the importance of international press freedom, At the core of it all, truth. But of course, Stelter and Sinan didn't mention the J-20 arrest.
00:18:47 Speaker_01
They didn't mention the arrest made by the United Arab Emirates against several journalists.
00:18:52 Speaker_00
Yeah. If you can get an invite to the White House Correspondents Dinner, then the press is going to rally around you. If you don't, if you're not on that list. And, you know, as you said, you're not part of the club.
00:19:03 Speaker_00
The solidarity is only going to reach so far.
00:19:06 Speaker_00
And as we have already been documenting and will continue to document, especially in the case of Palestinian journalists, oftentimes that solidarity is not only nonexistent, it is denied to the point of aggression.
00:19:20 Speaker_01
Yeah. And so CNN never once reported on a 2018 imprisonment and later death of Jordanian journalist Tasir al-Najjar, who was imprisoned for three years for, quote, insulting the state symbols by the United Arab Emirates.
00:19:33 Speaker_01
According to Human Rights Watch, the conviction was based on, quote, Facebook posts written before he moved to the UAE to work as a culture reporter for Dar newspaper in April of 2015.
00:19:42 Speaker_01
The trial judgment also cited comments he made to his wife on the telephone that were critical of UAE, which UAE had recorded and used against him in his trial.
00:19:51 Speaker_01
According to reporters without borders, the UAE is 131st for press freedom out of 195 countries with a score of zero. So it's not totally clear. And CNN, of course, did not report on this, never reports on this.
00:20:02 Speaker_01
And they get paid millions of dollars to do these travel puff pieces, which I reported on in 2021 and 2022.
00:20:07 Speaker_00
And they don't even disclose that they're getting that money. Yeah.
00:20:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, they don't disclose that they're puff pieces. And when reached for comment, they refuse to comment on it. So this is all kind of very saccharine and very sort of shallow, right?
00:20:19 Speaker_01
It's press freedom when it's somebody in the club and when they're not in the club, like whether it's J-20 protesters or this Jordanian journalist. And as we'll see, Palestinian journalists, they don't give a shit.
00:20:30 Speaker_00
As of July 22, 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, at least 108 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
00:20:44 Speaker_00
Additionally, 32 journalists were reported injured, two were reported missing, and 51 journalists have been reported to be arrested.
00:20:54 Speaker_00
CPJ has called this the, quote, deadliest period for journalists, end quote, since the organization began gathering information on this back in 1992.
00:21:05 Speaker_00
At the time this data was presented, CPJ stated that it was investigating, quote, almost 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests, and injuries, end quote. Now, one wouldn't know any of this, judging by elite media coverage.
00:21:22 Speaker_00
We've actually discussed this on the show.
00:21:23 Speaker_00
And Adam, you, along with a data scientist and researcher, Uthman Ali, which is a pseudonym that he uses to do his work, you have done analysis on this that was published in The Intercept in January of this year, 2024.
00:21:37 Speaker_01
So in our report, we studied 1,100 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times from the first six weeks of the so-called war in Gaza.
00:21:46 Speaker_01
We found that the words journalist, reporters, and photojournalist only appeared in nine headlines. Additionally, only four of the nine articles that did contain that word were the journalist and reporters in question about Arab reporters.
00:21:57 Speaker_01
So at the time, Israel had killed 48 media workers in Gaza. The number, again, is now much greater. But there was scant mention of them.
00:22:05 Speaker_01
Meanwhile, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times focused much more on the risk to journalists in Ukraine war.
00:22:11 Speaker_01
running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting the war up over a dozen in the first six weeks of Russia's invasion.
00:22:17 Speaker_01
Now six journalists died in that war in the early days compared to 48 which as i mentioned died on Israel's bombardment of Gaza.
00:22:25 Speaker_01
And as of January 2024 the number of journalists killed in Gaza was more than four times the number of journalists that were killed in Ukraine.
00:22:31 Speaker_01
despite the fact that Ukraine, again, during the first six weeks got far more coverage for journalists that were killed because again, journalists like women and children, like healthcare workers are justifiably and understandably more sympathetic victims.
00:22:42 Speaker_01
They're how you kind of elicit feeling and sympathy from audiences. So not focusing on journalists in Gaza is an editorial choice because they're generally considered to be sympathetic victims of war.
00:22:52 Speaker_00
Right. Also reporting on their deaths, on their killings during bombardment is also a way to define the villains in a particular story. Right.
00:23:04 Speaker_00
And so women and children killed, first responders killed, emergency workers, media workers and journalists, these kind of protected classes, at least in our perception of innocence and victimhood. If
00:23:18 Speaker_00
You're hearing again and again that russia is, you know killing women and children killing journalists It is clear who the villain in that story is right?
00:23:26 Speaker_00
But if you're not getting similar coverage when it has to do with journalists in gaza It is clear why because the villainy would be so apparent and therefore media avoids putting that kind of scrutiny, putting that kind of label on Israel.
00:23:44 Speaker_00
An analysis by FAIR.org, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, studied New York Times articles between October 7th, 2023 and April 2024. Articles that contain the words Gaza, journalist, media worker, news worker, reporter, or photojournalist.
00:24:02 Speaker_00
and found that the Times, as Harry Zaner wrote, quote, wrote just nine articles focused on Israel's killing of specific journalists, and just two which examined this phenomenon as a whole, end quote.
00:24:16 Speaker_00
And the Times took a month to publish an article dedicated to the immense risks journalists face when reporting from Gaza. And even that piece didn't bother to directly ascribe any responsibility for the deaths or danger to journalists to Israel.
00:24:35 Speaker_01
And of course, it's not just killing journalists, it's obviously firing, deplatforming and otherwise punishing journalists in the United States in particular, or in the West in general, for even supporting a ceasefire or being vaguely sympathetic to Palestinians.
00:24:49 Speaker_01
In May of this year, the National Writers Union released a detailed report called Red Lines, Retaliation in the Media Industry During the War in Gaza.
00:24:58 Speaker_01
that found, quote, 44 cases of retaliation that impacted more than 100 media workers in response to the perception that they support Palestine cause or are critical of the Israeli government.
00:25:08 Speaker_01
The survey, which covered the period of October 7, 2023 to February 1, 2024 in North America and Europe, found that workers faced deplatforming, firing, suspension, and other forms of discipline with journalists of Middle Eastern or North African descent, and those who identify as Muslim were especially impacted.
00:25:24 Speaker_01
The report would say, quote, Western media workers have faced a wave of retaliation for speaking up or critically covering Israel's war on Gaza and in particular for voicing support for Palestinians. The report summarizes.
00:25:35 Speaker_01
They use a very conservative criteria. And of course, for every person who's fired, deplatformed, or suspended for showing sympathy towards Palestinians, there's, of course, 100 who just don't say anything.
00:25:45 Speaker_01
They don't want to suffer the professional consequences of that. And we've seen this, of course, with a lot of these witch hunts for universities, professors smearing obscure people.
00:25:53 Speaker_01
Of course, there's a ton of pros real doxing of journalists trying to intimidate them.
00:25:58 Speaker_00
It's all about the chilling effect, which is working.
00:26:01 Speaker_01
Yeah which works and that's of course the point just as you know people in gaza you want to make sure you kill them because you don't want them to report your crimes you're doing in broad daylight but be of course you want to prevent others from even picking up a phone or picking up a camera putting on a press jacket the point is to send a message.
00:26:19 Speaker_00
Now, this lack of solidarity from journalists to journalists, of course, has long predated Israel's current genocidal assault on Gaza.
00:26:27 Speaker_00
According to Reporters Without Borders, again, RSF, between March 2018 and April 2022, the four years following the Great March of Return protests in 2018, the Israeli military and police injured at least 144 Palestinian journalists.
00:26:45 Speaker_00
using live rounds, rubber bullets, stun grenades, tear gas, and baton blows.
00:26:50 Speaker_00
And in May 2021, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Al Jala building in Gaza City, where the offices for such media organizations as Al Jazeera, The AP, and Middle East Eye were located. Israel has been targeting Palestinian media for decades.
00:27:07 Speaker_00
In 2002, Israel destroyed the broadcasting center of the Voice of Palestine, the official broadcaster of the Palestinian Authority.
00:27:15 Speaker_00
That same year, 2002, in a piece for Slate Magazine, current Atlantic writer and middle-brow anti-autocracy expertitian Ann Applebaum called Palestinian radio and TV fair targets.
00:27:28 Speaker_00
and blamed the Palestinian Authority's official media for, quote, why the Oslo peace process failed, end quote, and producing, quote, suicide martyrs, end quote.
00:27:39 Speaker_00
Appelbaum added at the time, quote, from the Israeli point of view, the PA's official media also expressed tacit approval for terrorism in general and for terrorist martyrs in particular, end quote.
00:27:53 Speaker_00
One of the most high-profile cases of a journalist killed in Palestine recently was that of Shirin Abu Akhle, the senior correspondent with Al Jazeera Arabic. Abu Akhle was shot by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank in May of 2022.
00:28:08 Speaker_00
And as many have pointed out since, a lot of news outlets obscured the fact that Abu Akhle was killed by Israel. The AP, for example, noted that she was, quote, killed by gunfire, end quote.
00:28:22 Speaker_00
This kind of dismissal of humanity for Palestinian journalists stretches much farther back than just the past few years, though. As I wrote over 10 years ago, back in 2013, the Washington, D.C.-based Newseum dropped two Palestinian cameramen
00:28:39 Speaker_00
who were killed by Israeli airstrikes from a dedication ceremony held at the museum to honor, quote, reporters, photographers, and broadcasters who have died reporting the news, end quote, over that previous year.
00:28:53 Speaker_00
The camera operators, Husam Salama and Mahmoud Al-Koumi, worked for Al-Aqsa TV at the time. they were killed, a channel overseen by Hamas in Gaza.
00:29:04 Speaker_00
Their removal from the memorial wall at the museum dedicated to journalists killed doing their jobs was the result directly of pressure from anti-Palestinian organizations on the museum, including the Anti-Defamation League,
00:29:20 Speaker_00
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the American Jewish Committee, which characterized the cameramen as Hamas propagandists. Meanwhile, the Newseum did not remove a dedication to James P. Hunter, a reporter and photographer killed in 2010
00:29:36 Speaker_00
by an IED while covering the massive U.S. offensive taking place in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
00:29:42 Speaker_00
Hunter, an active-duty staff sergeant with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, was reporting for the Fort Campbell Courier, an Army newspaper in Kentucky.
00:29:53 Speaker_00
But despite his active status in an occupying military while covering that very occupation for a U.S. Army publication, the Newseum obviously included Hunter in its honorary memorial wall of journalists killed during warfare.
00:30:08 Speaker_00
And in his keynote address that year,
00:30:11 Speaker_00
At the Newseum ceremony, the much-lauded NBC correspondent Richard Engel vocally supported the Newseum's last-minute decision to exclude the Palestinian journalists from their memorial, claiming that Salama and al-Khumi were not, quote, strictly journalists, but political activists who worked in the media, end quote, adding, quote, just because you carry a camera and a notebook doesn't make you a journalist, end quote.
00:30:36 Speaker_00
Engel also said, quote, journalists shouldn't have causes. They should have principles and beliefs, end quote.
00:30:43 Speaker_00
Yet without any hyperbole, Engel then proceeded to praise Syrian reporters, quote, who worked for media outlets that were actively trying to topple Bashar al-Assad's regime, end quote, and who were included without controversy in the museum's tribute.
00:31:01 Speaker_00
According to Engel, the Syrian journalists, quote, certainly died trying to do something noble. They were speaking out against oppression. They died trying to quench a thirst for freedom, end quote.
00:31:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, so this is kind of one-on-one different standards for different people, different causes. If your causes align with the U.S. State Department, then you can actually be active military or be in a military fighting capacity.
00:31:27 Speaker_01
But if your causes are antithetical to that or opposed to that or separate from that, You're therefore a propagandist. There's of course no consistent criteria here. That's not really the point.
00:31:36 Speaker_01
And again, this is true because in several cases, reporting from Gaza by ABC News and CNN, and of course the invasion of Iraq, all had embedded reporters in the US military.
00:31:46 Speaker_01
They weren't in the US military, but they were rolling with them, operating with them. filming them, oftentimes quartering with them.
00:31:53 Speaker_01
And then, of course, any time a cameraman is within 100 city blocks of some supposed Hamas fighter, they therefore become Hamas propagandists. A double standard we will talk about with our guests.
00:32:04 Speaker_00
To discuss this more, we're now going to be joined by Kavitha Chakuru, an Emmy-nominated and Polk Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
00:32:13 Speaker_00
She is the director of the new film, The Night Won't End, Biden's War on Gaza, an investigative documentary about war crimes against civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military and the Biden administration's ongoing support for the war, which was released this past June.
00:32:29 Speaker_00
Kavitha will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by Kavitha Chakuru. Kavitha, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
00:32:47 Speaker_02
Thanks for having me.
00:32:48 Speaker_01
So first off, your documentary is very important. I think everyone should see it. It's both incredibly moving and also incredibly detailed and thorough and sober. So I urge everyone to go see it.
00:32:59 Speaker_01
And I think almost more importantly, get others to see it. Not to be too evangelical about it, but I think this is something that all 332 million people in this country should be forced to watch.
00:33:06 Speaker_00
I'll be evangelical about it. Everyone should watch this film. It is absolutely devastating and important.
00:33:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, I was phrasing it like a multi-level marketing thing, but no, yeah, get people to see it. Absolutely watch it.
00:33:18 Speaker_01
But as a media criticism podcast, our focus is maybe a little different than some of the other interviews you all have done about this. which is that I want to sort of talk about the general state of journalism surrounding Gaza.
00:33:29 Speaker_01
And obviously what y'all were trying to do, at least in part, as I see it, is really give a human face to these somewhat abstract numbers, which is why you sort of profile these three families.
00:33:40 Speaker_01
I want to sort of begin by asking you, there is this humanization gap that we talked about at the top of this show, where it really does become abstract. There's a ton of reasons why that is in terms of how the media covers it.
00:33:52 Speaker_01
We don't have the numbers quite yet, but the proportion of humanizing profiles in the New York Times for, say, Israeli hostage families.
00:33:59 Speaker_01
versus the profiles of Palestinians where you get the sort of full blown photo shoot is more or less, you know, 30, 40 to one, but obviously y'all attempted to correct that.
00:34:08 Speaker_01
So I want to talk about if dehumanization fuels violence, wanton violence, genocide, humanization, I think is the strongest at the risk of sounding corny is this, I think the strongest antidote to that.
00:34:18 Speaker_01
So I want to talk about why you decided to sort of frame it this way, why y'all decided to frame it. with this profile approach.
00:34:25 Speaker_01
And where do you view this documentary as fitting into that broader regime of dehumanization, which I think is pretty empirically true?
00:34:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think for us, what was important was within Jazeera, obviously, Jazeera is covering this war 24 hours a day, every day.
00:34:42 Speaker_02
And for us, our kind of what we wanted to do was and what we needed to do was focus on the U.S. rule. This war could not continue, could not be happening without the Biden administration support.
00:34:53 Speaker_02
And what we wanted to do was essentially trace that response since October 7th and look at, really to me, one of the questions was all the different chances they've had to stop this war and what it's meant for families on the ground.
00:35:08 Speaker_02
And I think that dehumanization in the media that you're talking about, it's rampant in Western media, right? I mean,
00:35:16 Speaker_02
Not even just for this film, but for this film and all the documentaries that our team has done, we often have to go film at the White House, the White House press briefing, or State Department, or on the Hill, Shutter.
00:35:28 Speaker_02
And something that always really sticks out to me, or I think about, especially with this, is how many of those journalists have ever met somebody who was on the other side of a U.S. war or a U.S.-supported war?
00:35:41 Speaker_02
Or in this case, how many of them have ever talked to a Palestinian? How many of them are looking at the images coming out of Gaza? And more than that, how many of them have ever even talked to or given support to Palestinian journalists?
00:35:55 Speaker_02
The answer for most of those questions is that they haven't talked to any of those people or heard what it's been like for them, not just even during this war, throughout the many wars in Gaza or what's been happening in the West Bank well before October 7th.
00:36:10 Speaker_02
I've never seen anything like Israel and Palestine get treated, there's nothing within the Western media that gets treated like Israel and Palestine does.
00:36:17 Speaker_01
Well, the liberal, especially, I think, mind, both liberal Zionists and just kind of liberal more generically mind, what they've done is they, because I think they could watch this documentary and to some extent, they've kind of reverse engineered this moral logic where all these deaths are horrific and regrettable and hand ring, hand ring, hand ring, but it's all ultimately, quote unquote, Hamas's fault because of this human shields narrative, which we did a whole episode on.
00:36:40 Speaker_01
Have you all gotten any of that kind of feedback? I'm sure you've heard this line a million times, because this is kind of the last line of defense. Say what you will about the extreme genocidal right wing, but at least they're honest.
00:36:51 Speaker_01
I think liberals operate in this elaborate kind of inception, M.C. Escher world of delusion.
00:36:57 Speaker_01
And if you could talk about how these kind of reverse engineered moral frameworks about how all these horrible things we've seen in this documentary that, again, you document with such care and nuance and detail and analytical thoroughness.
00:37:10 Speaker_01
Have you heard this from people either on social media or real life where they say, but, but, but, but Hamas, Hamas, Hamas?
00:37:15 Speaker_02
Oh yeah. I mean, there's been various points where I'll open up Twitter and there's just all these notifications and it's a lot of kind of really poorly done graphics and things like that, which I don't, maybe it's from bots.
00:37:27 Speaker_02
I don't know, but it is very much like, but Hamas, but Hamas, but Hamas. And, you know, it's not just in, you know, less not in relation to our documentary, but back with the Western media.
00:37:37 Speaker_02
One of the things I had to do through this film was monitor the White House briefings basically every day, go back through a lot of them and essentially watch John Kirby talk for months on end. That's torture. It was definitely the worst.
00:37:51 Speaker_02
And he constantly would have has said and Matt Miller, the State Department spokesperson, does this as well and continues to do it where they say, you know, this war could stop today if Hamas wanted it to. And we know that's not true.
00:38:04 Speaker_02
But the problem is, is that for the most part, mostly, primarily, I would say, in the White House press room, there's not really any pushback.
00:38:13 Speaker_02
So I don't think that the political press in Washington has done as good a job as they could have at holding the administration accountable. Like, that's what they're supposed to do. That is their job. And they have failed with devastation.
00:38:27 Speaker_00
Now, you know, I want to kind of stay on the topic of journalism more broadly, but actually journalists specifically, as we've discussed, the film follows families. However, it is dedicated to the journalists of Gaza.
00:38:43 Speaker_00
As we well know, the state of U.S. coverage of Gaza is. as you were just saying, horrific and harmful.
00:38:50 Speaker_00
And at the top of this episode, we also laid out how that connects to a total lack of professional solidarity among American journalists, much to your point, Kavitha, about the White House press corps.
00:39:02 Speaker_00
The lack of solidarity from American journalists with the reporters killed in Gaza already, many deliberately targeted by Israel.
00:39:11 Speaker_00
We've also talked about the kind of total asymmetry in coverage of journalists that say have been killed in Ukraine with the extreme silence about those killed by Israel in Gaza. So there's this kind of widespread indifference
00:39:26 Speaker_00
to journalists, namely Arab, Muslim, Palestinian journalists.
00:39:31 Speaker_00
Can you talk a bit about how this institutional bias impacts not only the work of reporters and filmmakers inside Gaza, but also the broader reception to your documentary and other work by non-Western but still English language news outlets?
00:39:48 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the main ways that that institutional bias impacts the journalists in Gaza is that they are more vulnerable.
00:39:57 Speaker_02
I think if more of the industry and the parts of the industry that have power, unfortunately, like the New York Times or CNN, if they had, from the very beginning, actually given solid support to journalists in Gaza, but not just in hiring them, which they should be doing and they're not, at least not on a very regular basis, but actually being outspoken about it,
00:40:20 Speaker_02
I think it's fair to question if as many journalists in Gaza would have been killed since October 7th. And that to me is, I think, one of the biggest parts of it is that it has made those journalists more vulnerable.
00:40:33 Speaker_02
And also the other, then, you know, second to that, which, you know, it feeds into it is that because of, you know, something we've seen a lot is when Western journalists talk about the fact that they're not being let into Gaza, which they should be talking about.
00:40:46 Speaker_02
That's a big deal. And more journalists need to be let in.
00:40:50 Speaker_02
When they do that, though, they make it seem like there aren't any journalists in Gaza who haven't been risking their lives, who haven't been killed, who aren't suffering from starvation right now to show the world.
00:41:02 Speaker_02
And I think this has happened a number of times. I think it was Christiane Amanpour, she was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and I think she said it at one point, and a lot of journalists in Gaza
00:41:14 Speaker_02
went on Twitter and basically like, are you kidding?
00:41:17 Speaker_01
And Jon Stewart, if I'm not mistaken, actually corrected her.
00:41:19 Speaker_02
Yeah. And then she kind of backtracked, but that was really, I was deeply shocked by that.
00:41:25 Speaker_01
Because the chauvinist implication obviously is that you can have kind of quote, quote journalist or kind of semi-journalist, but ultimately they're all compromised. They're all kind of Hamas adjacent and therefore suspect.
00:41:37 Speaker_01
They're not credible is the implication, right?
00:41:40 Speaker_00
They don't have that, you know, quote unquote, Western objectivity, of course.
00:41:44 Speaker_02
Yeah.
00:41:44 Speaker_02
And I mean, with The New York Times, with the piece that they did, The Screams Without Words, looking at the allegations of sexual assault on October 7th by Hamas, they hired a very young reporter and then a filmmaker who had, I believe, worked with the IDF for this very, very important investigation.
00:42:03 Speaker_02
And yet the industry, aside from, you know, they were criticized by the independent media, but not really by mainstream media. whereas journalists in Palestine have in Gaza, these Palestinian journalists.
00:42:14 Speaker_02
the rest of the industry treats them like they aren't real journalists.
00:42:17 Speaker_01
Right. And they'll use them as stringers and for video, but they won't give them any credit. And Clarissa Ward went into Gaza on December 13th, 2023. And I'm not saying this is her fault necessarily.
00:42:27 Speaker_01
And she did a very sympathetic report, but to the way CNN framed it, at least the editors and producers kept describing it as an exclusive. Right. The only white journalist in Gaza. Yeah. And I'm like, that's not what an exclusive is.
00:42:41 Speaker_02
that was you know and actually about i think it was in january the new yorker they put out a piece about the perils of war coverage in gaza and it was actually all about clarissa ward the writer from the new yorker did not interview one journalist in gaza at all
00:42:59 Speaker_02
And it's not like there aren't journalists in Gaza who don't speak English. Al Jazeera English has an entire English network with a number of people she could have interviewed and didn't.
00:43:09 Speaker_00
So Kavitha, making this film, you worked very closely, of course, as you've said, with journalists in Gaza.
00:43:16 Speaker_00
Can you actually talk about that process and who your just, I mean, absolutely incredible partners were on the ground in Gaza and kind of how you worked with them to create this incredible film?
00:43:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, they're amazing. So we did it in a number of ways, but the main team was through a Palestinian production company called Mediatown.
00:43:37 Speaker_02
And so they've worked with Al Jazeera, with the news department, but also with the documentary department as well. But they had a team in the north who are still there, and a team in the south, both are in documentary filmmakers.
00:43:49 Speaker_02
And so what we would do is essentially me and my executive producer, Leila, we would write up questions in English and then she would translate them into Arabic.
00:43:59 Speaker_02
And then we'd send those to the team along with kind of, you know, instructions of what we would want them to film. And then they would go to the interviewees and they would film the interviews. And when they could, they would send it.
00:44:09 Speaker_02
But sending the footage was actually really difficult because they had to make sure that it was safe. because they would need to go up to a roof to get a signal because the internet access is so unsteady.
00:44:21 Speaker_02
And the other part of this is that when we set out to do this, we knew that we needed to cover an airstrike. And the first thing was trying to figure out how to narrow that down, right? Because there's been so many.
00:44:32 Speaker_02
But because we worked with these journalists, they said to us, hey, you should look at this airstrike that happened in December. And it turned out that more than 100 people from the same extended family had been killed.
00:44:45 Speaker_02
And it hadn't really been covered because at that point, there really was only kind of a core group of journalists left in the north.
00:44:51 Speaker_02
Most of the other journalists had gone south because of the orders from the Israeli military, you know, pretty early in the war. But it was because of them that we were able to report on that airstrike and then actually get it.
00:45:03 Speaker_02
We asked Air Wars, the civilian harm investigation organization in the UK, to see if they could research it as well. And so all of it was thanks to these amazing journalists in Gaza.
00:45:13 Speaker_02
And I think if the rest of the industry was doing that, I question if the war would even be where it is if the rest of the industry had been working more closely with journalists since the beginning.
00:45:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, that was the coverage of the Salem family, I believe. And just the idea that just even to get the footage.
00:45:30 Speaker_00
to you as you're making the film basically as an act of putting their lives on the line by just being on a rooftop just so that they could upload files, you know, just really goes to show that, like, what conditions these journalists are operating under, whereas, you know, obviously, like, most CNN journalists are wearing flak jackets and reporting from Tel Aviv.
00:45:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, because there's been a targeting of journalists. I think when people see 103, 120, 140 plus journalists have been killed by Israel and Gaza, the vast majority in Palestinian, some Israeli, some Lebanese.
00:46:03 Speaker_01
They think, oh, well, that's sort of incidental or that's kind of just because they're indiscriminately bombing, which is, of course, in and of itself horrible. But there has been numerous reports.
00:46:11 Speaker_01
972, an Israeli based publication, has detailed how Israel drone strikes journalists who are labeled as journalists because they're journalists, because for obvious reasons, the same reason people historically have always targeted journalists, which is you don't want people to report the bad shit you're doing.
00:46:27 Speaker_01
And so I think people don't quite internalize how egregious that is and how if there was all this documented evidence, again, of an enemy state, China, Russia, Iran doing this, there would be, of course, far more outrage in Western press.
00:46:41 Speaker_01
And there is that hypocrisy, which we documented. And I'm curious, again, as someone who does work for an English language news outlet that has been doing this relentless, courageous reporting in Gaza,
00:46:52 Speaker_01
And of course has been banned by Israel within Israel for that reason.
00:46:55 Speaker_00
And Israel routinely bombs Al Jazeera offices in Gaza.
00:46:59 Speaker_01
Yeah. So how is that interpreted? I mean, how is that interpreted to be on the, in the face of that kind of naked cynicism and hypocrisy? The professional solidarity stops at the water's edge.
00:47:09 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, the, I feel like while al-Qaeda, the bureau chief for Al Jazeera in Gaza, he had to leave because he had to get surgery after he was attacked in an airstrike. His cameraman, Summer Apodaca, was killed.
00:47:22 Speaker_02
But he's been pretty outspoken about the fact that how disheartening and disappointing the lack of support and solidarity from the rest of the industry has been. And, you know, it comes in the ways that I think we've already talked about.
00:47:33 Speaker_02
But even when the Pulitzers came out, I think it was last year or the year before, they gave an award to the journalists of Ukraine. It was very specific. It was the journalists of Ukraine, right?
00:47:42 Speaker_03
Yeah.
00:47:44 Speaker_02
It was for the journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza. Because apparently, that means I get it too.
00:47:49 Speaker_02
Because it could be somebody with an egg for a photo on Twitter slash X. Yeah, that's the 2006 Time Person of the Year version of journalists.
00:47:58 Speaker_01
It's everything and nothing.
00:47:59 Speaker_02
They didn't even say Palestinian. It's, you know.
00:48:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it's now been over three years since Israel bombed the Associated Press office in Gaza.
00:48:10 Speaker_00
And again, we just see no cross industry solidarity, because I guess the implication is, of course, if you are in Gaza, you are therefore inherently a viable target, right?
00:48:26 Speaker_00
Like you kind of you are then part of a quote unquote enemy, and therefore your life is not worth the same as anyone else's.
00:48:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I think this has been happening since before October 7th, right? Like when Shireen Abu Akhle, the Al Jazeera correspondent in the West Bank, was killed, there was some outrage, a bit, but not that much.
00:48:46 Speaker_02
It was like a kind of a blip for one day, it felt like, or maybe a week, for the funeral, where mourners were attacked at her funeral. The rest of the industry barely said anything, and it's I, it's, again, I said it before, I'll say it again.
00:49:00 Speaker_02
I have never, there's nothing like Israel and Palestine, nothing gets treated like Israel and Palestine within Western media.
00:49:06 Speaker_00
Because you're not going to, you're not going to give a Palestinian journalist the like Khashoggi treatment.
00:49:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:49:12 Speaker_02
And it's because it, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that at least from the US media, the mainstream media, it's like a second layer of propaganda where they only know how to cover the rest of the world in the lens of US foreign policy.
00:49:27 Speaker_02
and as some kind of, you know, in support of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. government interests. You see that with everything from Afghanistan to Iraq to Ukraine to this, and most notably this.
00:49:39 Speaker_00
One of the most powerful parts of this film, The Night Won't End, is the section that really covers the life and then murder of Hind Rajab, killed by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. And I'd love to talk about that part a bit.
00:49:58 Speaker_00
CNN's Casey Hunt, when the news about Hind's murder broke in the media, and I say that broke meaning, you know, not that many people were covering it.
00:50:06 Speaker_00
But still, when this became news, Casey Hunt somewhat infamously referred to Hind, who was six years old when she was murdered, as a quote-unquote woman, you know, when she did like a throwaway line about her killing. And in what ought to have been
00:50:21 Speaker_00
one would hope in like a more just world, a galvanizing story of tragedy, right? Of the abject cruelty and dehumanization of the ongoing genocide backed by the United States government willingly.
00:50:33 Speaker_00
All that went away, all that kind of dissolved, and it just became another kind of like, oh yeah, we heard about that, it's kind of a bummer.
00:50:39 Speaker_00
But then moving on, topped off by, as you covered in the film, this vague appeal to a quote-unquote Israeli investigation into the incident.
00:50:49 Speaker_00
Can you talk about Hind and this section of the film, kind of how you approached covering these moments in the incredible and, I mean, truly brutal audio and video that accompanies this section, and just how this glaring lack of meaningful coverage in any sense in the US press really does indicate exactly what American media priorities are?
00:51:12 Speaker_02
Sure. I mean, I guess I'll start from how we approached it, I guess. You know, the first part was getting to her mother, Wassam.
00:51:20 Speaker_02
And the only reason we were able to do that was because our team in the north went, there's no, the cell communications are really bad. She doesn't have steady cell communication.
00:51:28 Speaker_02
So they actually had to walk a couple of hours to get to her when it was safe and ask her if she would do the interview. And that's how all of that happened. So it wasn't like a picking up the phone and saying, Hey, can we come by? So
00:51:40 Speaker_02
feel the need to point it out just because they do so much extra work that I don't think people realize.
00:51:46 Speaker_02
So they did the interview with her, and then we worked with one of our colleagues in Ramallah to interview a number of the Red Crescent workers who took the call. The way we approached it was, it was forensic, right?
00:52:00 Speaker_02
You kind of have to, especially when it's a more high profile case, and just kind of starting with the facts with all of those key people and going through the phone calls.
00:52:10 Speaker_02
first with Leon, him's 15-year-old cousin, who had the first phone call with Omar, the dispatcher from the Red Crescent, in which you hear at the very end, six seconds of gunfire, and it's 64 shots. And then she screams and the line goes dead.
00:52:27 Speaker_02
And after that, when Omar finally, when he calls back, even though I've, you know, I've had to listen to all of this many times and watch through our different cuts, but it never, I always feel like I have like a chill goes through me when
00:52:39 Speaker_02
I listened to the first time Omar gets a hold of Hind, and you just hear that young voice, and it just, yeah, it takes, it kind of just takes everything out of me.
00:52:50 Speaker_02
And I think about that first call with him, and then he brings in his colleague Rana, and she starts talking to Hind, and this audio was put out on the same day by the Red Crescent. And you hear Rana saying, can you see the tank? And Hind says, yes.
00:53:05 Speaker_02
And she asks her, where it is, is it moving, where is it, is it in front? And she says, it's in front. And she asked, how close is it? Is it very close? And he says, it's very, very close. And the Red Crescent put this out that same day.
00:53:18 Speaker_02
And thinking about the media coverage of this, I think that if this had been a Ukrainian girl who was being attacked by the Russian military, or if it was an Israeli girl being attacked by Hamas or other Palestinian fighters, I think that this would have been breaking news, rolling coverage,
00:53:37 Speaker_02
on CNN with live updates and constant news alerts from the New York Times and the Washington Post and the AP. None of that happened. None of that happened.
00:53:47 Speaker_02
One thing I will say about the Washington Post, they did do in-depth coverage and a really good investigation of this, you know, in essentially the kind of months that followed, but the Times didn't. They barely reported on it.
00:53:59 Speaker_02
And, you know, something I've seen online from kind of pros really supporters, they actually questioned if this even happened. And it's, you know, they say it's, they quote unquote, Pollywood, which is what they refer to like Palestinian Hollywood.
00:54:11 Speaker_02
They think that these things are made up and like filmed and created as though all these people could do this, had the time and to do this, it's insane. It's completely insane, but it's really shocking to me how little media covers there's been.
00:54:25 Speaker_02
And even, you know, at the state department, because everything kind of has to start with them when it comes to Israeli investigations, the only person who's really been asking has been Prem Thakkar from the Intercept.
00:54:36 Speaker_02
He has repeatedly asked since this happened on January 29th, but nobody else really has. I don't think anyone's really pressed the White House in the White House press room about it. We think it's come up a couple of times, but not really.
00:54:48 Speaker_01
I want to talk about this idea of, because I think it's not just about the lack of quantity, it's a lack of quality, which is what we call and what we've talked about is kind of what Adam Curtis calls odierism, which is a kind of mode of journalism where, or what I refer to as the natural disasterizing of Gaza, where
00:55:06 Speaker_01
there's not really any particular moral agent or primal or primary cause of any of the suffering. Israel obviously does airstrikes, but obviously it's kind of passive and it's presented as kind of two warring sides and people caught in the middle.
00:55:17 Speaker_01
Now, what y'all did, I thought very effectively, was you avoided that kind of agency free framing, in fact, in the title Biden's War. because that's the primary patron of the war, right? Israel is actually a fairly poor country.
00:55:28 Speaker_01
It can't really operate. It's obviously relatively much more powerful, but it's a fairly small country that can't get out of bed in the morning without asking permission from the U.S.
00:55:35 Speaker_01
And framing it as a U.S.-authored and U.S.-funded and U.S.-backed war I think is something you just never see, or rather you see it as done kind of passively.
00:55:42 Speaker_01
I want to ask you about this kind of odierism framing that's popular within liberal kind of highbrow media. The New York Times has kind of mastered this. Their headlines never ascribe agency. And again, as we talked about on the top of the show,
00:55:53 Speaker_01
this asymmetry is not at all how they report on Russian war crimes in Ukraine. It's Russia attacks this, Russia goes after hospitals, you know, using hunger as a weapon, all this kind of stuff.
00:56:02 Speaker_01
If you could, could you comment on this kind of professional norms surrounding this odierism, why you deliberately avoided it and what purpose you think this kind of natural disastrification of Gaza serves?
00:56:14 Speaker_02
I mean, I feel like this odierism, as you put it, it stems from the fact that so much of the Western media is primarily white people and white people who have never interacted or really experienced war or violent conflict.
00:56:30 Speaker_02
And so it's almost like that like Palestinians or Arab countries that war is inevitable and that they'll just take it and that's just how it has to be.
00:56:41 Speaker_02
And there's a moment, this is pretty early on, it's in the film, John Kirby says, this is war, it's bloody, people are gonna die. Why did nobody in that press room say, It doesn't have to be like this.
00:56:53 Speaker_02
There's this idea that war is inevitable, and it's not. And I cannot believe how long this has been going on. It's really staggering.
00:57:02 Speaker_02
And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Western media, which has power to push to hold the Biden administration accountable, they have just treated this as inevitable.
00:57:16 Speaker_02
And I think that they bear a lot of responsibility for the state of the war.
00:57:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean I think this film should be required viewing for not only everyone certainly in this country, but like for
00:57:28 Speaker_00
But for John Kirby, like the John Kirbys and the Joe Bidens and the Antony Blinkens, you know, they should be forced like Clockwork Orange style to watch this film again and again.
00:57:38 Speaker_00
I just really can't thank you enough for making it as well as all the other filmmakers that you worked on this film with. What are you working on next?
00:57:46 Speaker_00
Where can people not only, of course, they can find this film at Al Jazeera, Fault Lines, but what else are you working on these days? How can people follow your work?
00:57:55 Speaker_02
That is a great question. I just became an independent journalist. So I guess the first place they'd have to go is Twitter.
00:58:00 Speaker_02
But right now I'm kind of focused on making sure we can get this film out and then also just trying to kind of find ways to continue reporting on Gaza with journalists on the ground. So yeah.
00:58:10 Speaker_00
Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. Again, can't thank you enough for joining us. We've been speaking with Kavitha Chakuru, an Emmy-nominated and Polk Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
00:58:20 Speaker_00
She is the director of the new, incredible investigative film for Al Jazeera, Fault Lines, The Night Won't End, Biden's War on Gaza, which was released in June of 2024.
00:58:30 Speaker_00
Kavitha, thank you again so much, not only for making this film, but for joining us on Citations Mavis.
00:58:36 Speaker_02
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
00:58:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, I can't recommend the film enough. It is gut-wrenching. It's exactly what reportage should be in its platonic form. The thing we're told it should be, that it never is, or that it rarely is. There's been stuff here and there.
00:58:59 Speaker_01
But it is an exquisite combination of humanization backed by cold, hard analysis and data. It has the pathos, the ethos, and the logos. It has the golden triangle.
00:59:10 Speaker_00
Another recent investigation follows a similar trajectory, Adam.
00:59:14 Speaker_00
The recently launched investigative series, The Gaza Project, documents how the Israeli military deliberately targets journalists, even when, or rather especially because, they are clearly identified as reporters and wearing press vests.
00:59:30 Speaker_00
A consortium of 50 journalists from 13 news organizations around the world, including outlets like 972 Magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and Just Vision, reviewed nearly 100 cases of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, incorporating testimonies from over 120 witnesses in Palestine and analysis by over two dozen ballistics, weapons, and audio experts.
00:59:54 Speaker_00
Among the Gaza Project's findings are that, quote, at least 14 journalists had been wearing press vests at the time of their death or injury in Gaza since October 7th.
01:00:05 Speaker_00
Similarly, at least 40 journalists had been killed by Israeli arms while they were in their own homes, which contradicts the Israeli claims that journalists are just simply caught in the crossfire.
01:00:18 Speaker_00
It also found that 18 journalists had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones.
01:00:25 Speaker_00
To discuss this more, we're going to be joined by Hoda Osman, an investigative journalist and editor who serves now as the executive editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, or ARIJ, one of the partners of the Gaza Project.
01:00:40 Speaker_00
She is also president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. Hoda will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by Hoda Osman. Hoda, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
01:01:08 Speaker_04
Thank you for inviting me to talk about this.
01:01:10 Speaker_01
I want to sort of begin by talking about some of your findings. You write that, quote, one in 10 reporters in Gaza have been killed by Israel's military campaign, which is obviously extremely high. This was as of June of 2024.
01:01:24 Speaker_01
So I want to begin by talking about your organization, the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. They've been documenting the killing of journalists. And I want to sort of ask you generally what you've uncovered in your reporting.
01:01:34 Speaker_01
Now, obviously, a non-trivial percentage of those 120, 140 plus deaths of reporters in Gaza have been intentional.
01:01:42 Speaker_01
They've been targeted, such that you write, quote, dozens of journalists said they believe that they were being targeted by the Israeli military. Many were afraid to wear press vests and helmets, unquote.
01:01:53 Speaker_01
I want to start by talking about how your organization and others make this distinction between intentionally killed versus incidentally killed, but of course, incidentally still does not morally absolve Israel because that, again, if they're killing journalists at such a high rate, it means they're kind of just indiscriminately killing everybody.
01:02:07 Speaker_01
Or the more likely scenario is, from the IDF's perspective, which has been reported on, which you can talk about, they simply view any reporter who's Palestinian as a military target.
01:02:16 Speaker_04
Just to give this some context, the investigations that we worked on were part of a larger collaborative investigative project called the Gaza Project.
01:02:26 Speaker_04
It involved 50 journalists from 13 different organizations, and it was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, which is a nonprofit based in Paris.
01:02:35 Speaker_04
And what they do is make sure that the stories of journalists who've been either threatened or jailed or killed are told and reach a global audience.
01:02:45 Speaker_04
Having said that, let me start by speaking about our work in investigating the killings of the journalists in Gaza. So at ERIJ, at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, my organization, we started working on this since the early days.
01:02:59 Speaker_04
I think it was November, and the number of journalists that had been killed there was already staggering. I think it was over 30, and it was record-breaking even then.
01:03:09 Speaker_04
And today we're talking, as you mentioned, about over 100 journalists who've been killed. It's the highest number ever of journalists killed in any war. And you can, you know, you can mention any conflict.
01:03:19 Speaker_04
World War II, we can talk about Vietnam or even the Iraq War. And these wars lasted years. And still, the number of journalists who were killed during these wars was less than that. So back in November, we were in shock.
01:03:32 Speaker_04
Areej works with Arab journalists on a regular basis because actually what we do is teach or train journalists on how to do investigative journalism by working with them on actual investigation.
01:03:43 Speaker_04
So we have all these contacts and relationships with journalists in many, many Arab countries, including in Palestine and in Gaza.
01:03:51 Speaker_04
Early on, when I started speaking to some of them, some of my colleagues in Gaza, they already had lost family members or had been displaced even, you know, a couple of weeks into the war.
01:04:02 Speaker_04
So we started thinking about investigating these killings, and we collated the names of the killed journalists from various organizations. We didn't do the work of collecting the information ourselves.
01:04:14 Speaker_04
We were getting them from the Committee to Protect Journals, the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate and other organizations, and basically just putting all the names in a spreadsheet and looking into each case.
01:04:25 Speaker_04
Who can we speak to that can tell us more about it? What's been written about this? Has the Israeli military responded? What have they said? and to try and identify some of the cases that we could start working on.
01:04:37 Speaker_04
And then we started conversations with Forbidden Stories. Initially, we were speaking about just one investigation, but then I have to give Forbidden Stories full credit for taking this project to this level that we've seen.
01:04:50 Speaker_04
They invited the other news organizations and together we worked, all of us collectively, for four months
01:04:57 Speaker_04
day and night, we interviewed over 120 sources, including many weapons experts, and we used visual and audio like investigative forensic techniques to come to some of the conclusions. One of the challenging things was
01:05:12 Speaker_04
doing the interviews inside Gaza, but in spite of the difficulties that the many of our sources, of course, were journalists themselves, because we're investigating the killings of journalists.
01:05:22 Speaker_04
So we're talking to their colleagues, we are talking to their family members. And doing these interviews, we did about 50 interviews in Gaza alone. And it was quite difficult with the daily horrors that they go through.
01:05:37 Speaker_04
but also with the communication problems, the phones, the eSIMs, if they're using any, and the sensitivity of having to be mindful of what they're going through and when to talk to them about what.
01:05:48 Speaker_04
Together, this consortium, we published 20 investigations about journalists in Gaza and the West Bank. It was published in five languages, I think it was 16 countries, many news outlets.
01:06:00 Speaker_04
And it truly was an example and it demonstrates the power of this collaborative journalism, because at ARIJ we would have been able to do some investigations, but not at this scale.
01:06:11 Speaker_04
So the partners and the management and coordination by Forbidden Stories was critical. So this is just to give you some context about this project and about these investigations. Now, if we talk about the targeting,
01:06:21 Speaker_04
I think that it's important to start responding to this question about whether or not the journalists are targeted by speaking about what the journalists themselves are telling us.
01:06:32 Speaker_04
As you mentioned, so many journalists in Gaza believe that they are being targeted to the extent that they stay away from their own families so they don't put their families in danger.
01:06:43 Speaker_04
I've spoken personally to many journalists who say they have problems, you know, either renting a place is difficult because people don't want to rent to them, knowing that they are journalists and feeling that they would be targeted. Transportation.
01:06:56 Speaker_04
One journalist told us that the taxis wouldn't allow them to get in because they're wearing their vest. People fear being near them. So that's what the journalists themselves believe, that they are being targeted.
01:07:06 Speaker_04
And then there are certain cases where there is clear and strong evidence of targeting, and I'll mention quickly a few. Sam Abdullah, a Lebanese photojournalist who worked for Reuters, in October on the border between Israel and Lebanon, was killed.
01:07:20 Speaker_04
And there are multiple investigations showing that he was directly targeted. Hamza al-Dahdouh, the son of Wael al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thraya, These two journalists were killed in January.
01:07:33 Speaker_04
And we know that the Israeli military targeted them because they have admitted to doing so. And they claimed that they were members of a militant group without really providing enough proof.
01:07:46 Speaker_04
There was an important visual investigation by The Washington Post, which debunked some of these claims made by Israel with regards to this particular case.
01:07:54 Speaker_04
In addition to that, Reporters Without Borders, RSF, filed three cases with the International Criminal Court, and they mentioned, I think it was 20 Palestinian journalists. In these cases, it's about war crimes against Palestinian journalists.
01:08:10 Speaker_04
And in the filings, they mentioned that this is, quote, an eradication of Palestinian media, they say. They said they have reasonable grounds for thinking that some of these journalists were deliberately killed. Then we come to the numbers.
01:08:22 Speaker_04
If we just look at the numbers and if we take the number by the Committee to Protect Journalists, it's at 103, 103 Palestinian journalists killed since October.
01:08:33 Speaker_04
This idea, this notion that this is simply a natural and expected result of the war really doesn't stand. Working on these investigations and looking through these cases, This was one of our main findings. But let us also look at this 103 journalists.
01:08:50 Speaker_04
Over half of them were killed at home. So the idea that journalists during wars are in areas where there's fighting and these areas are more dangerous than the areas where the civilians are, it's not true.
01:09:04 Speaker_04
Most of the journalists are actually by the hospitals. So this claim that it's a natural result of the war, with over half of the journalists being killed at home, many of them with family members, just does not hold.
01:09:17 Speaker_04
Another element to address this question is drones. One of the excellent pieces that was done, that was part of this investigation, was done by Forbidden Stories, is about targeting by drones.
01:09:28 Speaker_04
Drones are supposed to be highly precise in their targeting. 18 journalists and media workers were reportedly killed or injured by precision strikes, likely by drones.
01:09:39 Speaker_04
If you speak to anyone in Gaza or you see some of the videos, you're going to hear this buzz constantly in the background. I hear it all the time. The Gazan journalists refer to it as the Zanina because of the buzzing sound.
01:09:50 Speaker_04
It's an Arabic word and it refers to the buzzing sound that they make. So they're constantly, they're collecting information. they see, they hear, and yet 18 journalists were killed or injured by a drone. How do you justify or explain that?
01:10:07 Speaker_04
And finally, I'm going to say one last thing, the press infrastructure, we have definitive evidence as part of our investigations about the targeting of media offices.
01:10:17 Speaker_04
So altogether, it provides a clearer picture, you know, that the question of targeting journalists, there's a consistent and alarming pattern of attacks on journalists in Gaza that cannot be dismissed simply as collateral damage of the war.
01:10:29 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the scale of this is so stark and the Gaza Project and Forbidden Stories has done such a remarkable job here.
01:10:38 Speaker_00
I want to kind of look into kind of how we got here or where this idea of journalists as quote unquote legitimate targets and certainly being targeted deliberately really evolved in our own media here in the United States.
01:10:55 Speaker_00
So back in early 2002, Atlantic magazine contributor and high status centrist pundit, also a board member of the Pulitzer Prize Awards, and Applebaum actually wrote an article in Slate with this headline, quote, kill the messenger, why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine-Israeli war, end quote.
01:11:18 Speaker_00
And in this piece, Applebaum advocates that Israel should kill Palestinian journalists for the crime of making Israel look bad, essentially. She doesn't even really try and link any specific people to any specific groups.
01:11:33 Speaker_00
She doesn't kind of mention that this has to do, I mean, obviously this is just a few months after 9-11, doesn't kind of link this to this idea of, you know, a war on terror.
01:11:42 Speaker_00
She really just openly writes that publications promoting anti-Israel and anti-American views are
01:11:49 Speaker_00
inherently fair targets in Israel's bombing campaigns across Palestine, and she of course has suffered no professional or social consequence for this from openly advocating the killing of reporters.
01:12:03 Speaker_00
She is herself a reporter, she is herself a writer, has no solidarity across there, only this kind of murderous intent. What do you think, Hoda, this tells
01:12:13 Speaker_00
us about the state of even just being a Palestinian or Arab journalist working here in the United States, let alone in Palestine or elsewhere. And do you think anything has changed for the better or potentially for the worse in these past 22 years?
01:12:30 Speaker_04
I am an Arab journalist working in the U.S. and I tell you it is painful, deeply painful and troubling and dangerous to see a journalist advocating for the targeting of journalists, no matter what nationality they are, where they come from.
01:12:48 Speaker_04
And it shows and it underscores the biases that exist and the dangers that the Palestinian journalists face. Imagine if the roles were reversed and someone advocated for targeting journalists. working for official media in any other country.
01:13:05 Speaker_04
It would be understandably, it would provoke condemnations and outrage. So it's really sad. And let's go back to the numbers again, the over 100 journalists on CPJ's list.
01:13:20 Speaker_04
30% of those journalists listed by CPJ were working for media outlets that were affiliated or grossly tied to Hamas.
01:13:26 Speaker_04
And there's one story that was part of our investigation written by Harry Davies of The Guardian that I can speak more about if you'd like. but it raises this issue about whether or not they are legitimate targets.
01:13:41 Speaker_04
And we had an excellent interview with Carlos Martinez de la Serna from CPJE, and we asked him about this. And he said, here's what he said, you know, he said that if they are not engaged in violence or inciting violence, they are journalists.
01:13:57 Speaker_04
So he said, like, we draw the line. If they are not engaged in violence or inciting violence, they cannot be targets. And he said they thoroughly examined the cases. They have these names of these journalists on their lists.
01:14:12 Speaker_04
And he, you know, he called out Israel. He said that they systematically use propaganda to discredit journalists without providing proof.
01:14:20 Speaker_04
and that in all the years of CPJ doing this work of collecting records of journalists who have been killed, they've never had to change or remove a name because of information provided by the Israeli military. So it's, you know, it's harmful to
01:14:35 Speaker_04
Of course, first to the journalists who are there, who are working there, whether in Gaza or the West Bank or in Israel, but of course, also to journalists here who are Palestinian or Arab and are more maybe, you know, exposed more closely to these sorts because it's coming from an American, a fellow American journalist.
01:14:52 Speaker_01
Yeah. And of course, the whole thing is absurd because CNN, ABC News, New York Times routinely in bed with the IDF. Obviously, the New York Times employs several reporters who are formerly IDF or whose kids are current IDF. Yeah.
01:15:03 Speaker_01
But I mean, just assuming we focus solely on the journalist itself, I mean,
01:15:07 Speaker_01
The idea that if a reporter has quote-unquote ties with a military, they therefore become conscripted in that military by proxy is a standard that does not apply to any other country, really, that we've seen.
01:15:19 Speaker_01
I mean, especially given the revolving door between the U.S. military and reporters. I mean, Jim Sciutto at CNN worked for the U.S. State Department between a stint at ABC News. and CNN.
01:15:30 Speaker_01
So the whole criteria, of course, is a double standard that is not applied evenly.
01:15:34 Speaker_01
And I want to sort of talk about this kind of militarization of the press, because I think this is the key kind of racist sleight of hand that's done, where it's, and you see this all the time, there was this idea that people say there's no media really in Palestine, or they're not letting reporters into Palestine.
01:15:49 Speaker_01
The assumption being is that Palestinian reporters, especially Gazan, for want of a better term, that are in Gaza are somehow inherently untrustworthy.
01:15:57 Speaker_01
One sees this with reflective skepticism of reporting coming out of Gaza, that Palestinians are sort of seen as too close, too biased.
01:16:04 Speaker_01
By definition, they don't have the kind of Western detached worldview that supposedly makes reporting or reportage trustworthy. Now, obviously, this is kind of just racism and chauvinism.
01:16:16 Speaker_01
And the corollary to this, of course, is that when they get killed, they're sort of militants. So their deaths really don't really count as reporters because they don't really count as reporters. They don't really count as journalists.
01:16:25 Speaker_01
I want you to talk about this casual racist assumption that they're inherently biased or inherently Hamas partisans or whatever, and how this dehumanization effort both makes information coming from these reporters seen as unreliable and kind of discredited, but also, of course, opens them up for summary execution by Israel.
01:16:43 Speaker_04
You know, I want to start answering this by speaking about my experience working on the Gaza project, because I have to say that not all Western media perceive Palestinian journalists this way.
01:16:54 Speaker_04
And it's important for me to make this point now, especially as we've just finished this project. It involved 50 journalists, as I mentioned. Most of them were Western. And we had four Arab journalists, me included, and three of us were Palestinian.
01:17:07 Speaker_04
They showed a lot of respect and appreciation for the journalists in Gaza, but also for our editorial judgments and for our participation and contribution. But having said that, it doesn't mean that what you just described doesn't exist.
01:17:22 Speaker_04
And I want to give my testimony on how accurate how professional the Palestinian journalists are, especially the journalists who are in Gaza right now.
01:17:31 Speaker_04
I've been in touch with them since the beginning, but recently because of this project, I had to interview them for our stories. And they've been incredibly accurate in their information. They've been thorough in verifying anything.
01:17:46 Speaker_04
If they didn't know something, they would tell me, Hoda, I don't know, let me check. I've asked for time codes for like pictures, the timestamps, they would take them and show me exactly when a picture was taken.
01:17:58 Speaker_04
So in addition to dealing with everything that is going on, with all the horrors, with like not finding food for their families, they're still working and they're doing so very, very professional.
01:18:11 Speaker_04
Definitely one of the key issues here that's been raised over and over again is allowing, of course, Israel is banning any foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
01:18:21 Speaker_04
And if they do enter, it has to be with the military and they are restricted in where they can go and what they see. There have been calls, including recently, just last week, for Israel to allow foreign journalists in.
01:18:34 Speaker_04
And sometimes Palestinian journalists take offense in the way that these calls and statements are made, because it makes it seem as if Palestinians are unable to tell their own stories or to cover and report accurately, and that the foreign journalists are needed to do that.
01:18:50 Speaker_04
But the calls for foreign journalists to enter Gaza and to report, I would like to see them coming from a place to lift the burden off of these Palestinian journalists who have been exhausted by what is going on.
01:19:02 Speaker_00
To Adam's point and then to your response, I think this idea that the perception, not even by fellow journalists, right, but by people consuming the media, so the news readers, people watching cable news, people seeing these reports come through on their phones,
01:19:20 Speaker_00
this idea of kind of inherent bias in one way and then sort of moral objective journalism on the other.
01:19:28 Speaker_00
And this how if you're reading someone who works at CNN and their name is John Smith, then, oh, well, that's going to be straight down the line, unbiased reporting. But if you read a report by someone who is in Gaza, who lives in Gaza,
01:19:46 Speaker_00
then that is inherently going to be biased.
01:19:48 Speaker_00
And this false idea even of objective journalism to begin with, as a teacher and a trainer and a coach of journalists, Hoda, how do you kind of view the idea of what even being objective means and what the role of the journalist is in telling people's stories and being that kind of holder of both current events and then history?
01:20:15 Speaker_04
Thank you for asking, because I was going to point to that. What is objective journalism? I think what's happening right now has changed a lot. I think we should all reconsider how we do journalism.
01:20:28 Speaker_04
The rules that we're supposed to follow is someone who is experiencing what we see in these videos and pictures and the stories. supposed to be objective.
01:20:41 Speaker_04
I mean, even if they pretend to be objective, don't we really know that they're not objective, that they must have an opinion about what they're suffering from or struggling with themselves? I'd rather journalists be honest.
01:20:55 Speaker_04
and tell me what they think and report while also expressing what they think. And I think it's just made us all just reconsider what does objectivity mean, especially when you are reporting on a war and you're part of this war yourself.
01:21:12 Speaker_04
I feel it's irrelevant to talk about objectivity and objective journalism.
01:21:17 Speaker_00
Yeah. And what are you even hearing from the reporters that you talk to who are in Gaza in terms of, I don't know, maybe the sense of fatalism or I mean, there's only so many vivid images and horrifying stories.
01:21:33 Speaker_00
personal testimonies, eyewitness accounts that can come out, whether it's obviously over the past century or 75 years or 50 years or the last nine months, this idea that this immense human suffering nonstop on display
01:21:51 Speaker_00
is still not changing the minds of those who are able to continue this genocide or even those who continue to justify and support it.
01:22:00 Speaker_00
So what are you hearing from people in Gaza and how that may affect the way that they are still diligently telling these stories and recording the truth?
01:22:13 Speaker_04
I remember one journalist in an interview we did, his name is Hany, and he talked about feeling kahr. Kahr is an Arabic word.
01:22:23 Speaker_04
And I had to translate this interview to English, and I couldn't find a direct translation, and it made me realize the genius of some of these deeply nuanced words in Arabic.
01:22:34 Speaker_04
So I asked a friend who's a translator, and I said, how do you describe kahr? So here's what she said. It's a mix of anguish, helplessness, being frustrated, resentful, plus a sense of injustice. It's impossible to put it in one word.
01:22:51 Speaker_04
So Hani in this interview says, I makhour, he feels kahr. And she said, it means I feel crushed by the injustice of it all. I think this encapsulates how they feel, crushed under the weight of this unjust,
01:23:07 Speaker_04
war, the circumstances and the unjust treatment. But while, you know, many of the journalists are understandably feeling this and frustrated by the lack of action, and more recently, even the lack of attention and coverage in the West,
01:23:24 Speaker_04
They continue reporting and primarily because they are committed to journalism. They report not just to see or to affect change, but because they want to document and to inform. And I think they feel a duty to report and even if there's no change.
01:23:43 Speaker_04
So we see them day in and day out continuing to do it. And as part of our reporting, we did a survey of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a poll And we got over 200 responses. And let me share some of what we found.
01:24:00 Speaker_04
Out of the over 200 who responded, many had lost family members. 49 had lost an immediate family member. 11 tragically lost one or more of their children. I spoke to one journalist who lost all four of his children. Can you even imagine?
01:24:19 Speaker_04
and they continue to work. There were five journalists who lost 40 members of the families or more, and 98% have been displaced.
01:24:29 Speaker_04
As you can see, everyone has been displaced, but what's shocking is that there were several who had been displaced 20 times or more. Imagine in 10 months, moving over 20 times. The homes of 183 were partially or totally destroyed,
01:24:46 Speaker_04
and 195 had lost their equipment, the equipment that they use for reporting because everything, of course, is also getting like their cameras, their laptops, they're losing this and many of the journalists I speak with, they write full reports on their phones, they type them up on a phone.
01:25:04 Speaker_04
So just like, you know, horrific conditions and they're still going, quite heroic if you ask me.
01:25:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, no, it's incredible, incredible resilience and strength to continue to do this amid all these horrors and for so long with such inaction on their behalf, if not even worse. But Hoda, thank you so much for joining us today.
01:25:25 Speaker_00
And thank you also for the Gaza Project. It's really important. Can you just tell our listeners what else Areej is up to and where folks can find your work?
01:25:35 Speaker_04
Thank you very much for having me and for giving this the time and attention that it deserves. You can find all the stories we've worked on on Arij's website, Arij, A-R-I-J dot net.
01:25:47 Speaker_04
Also, our stories have been published in The Intercept and The Guardian. And Forbidden Stories, if you go to their site, you'll find all the over 20 investigations that have been published.
01:25:57 Speaker_04
You can find them there in the many languages that they were published in.
01:26:01 Speaker_00
Well, thank you again. We've been speaking with Hoda Osman, investigative journalist and editor. She is the executive editor at Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and the president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association.
01:26:15 Speaker_00
Hoda, thank you again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
01:26:18 Speaker_04
Thank you.
01:26:32 Speaker_01
I think one thing that the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza has done, I think pretty unequivocally, has pretty much pissed away any credibility these kind of fart-sniffing, lofty, Western liberal platitudes have.
01:26:45 Speaker_01
I mean, again, I think to some extent they can be credible here and there, but for the most part it's clear that they
01:26:50 Speaker_01
Are only really important in the abstract but when the rubber hits the road and actually challenge one's own national security state or one's own career then suddenly they just go out the window i mean i can't tell you how many freaking articles and pieces and we did tell you were about jim acosta getting his press credentials taken away.
01:27:09 Speaker_01
versus the fact that CNN has done basically no segments on the systemic killing of journalists. They've mentioned them briefly. One of the CNN stringers was one of the people killed, so Jake Tapper brought it up once.
01:27:20 Speaker_01
But it's just not an issue they ever talk about. It's not something that gets sustained coverage. It's not framed as intentional, even though, of course, we know it is. And of course, the reason is that it's about who's in the club.
01:27:31 Speaker_01
There are liberal rights for those who are in the club, who are in the right class status, who have the right credentials, who went to the right school. And that includes who's doing the killing, not just who's killed. Yeah, exactly.
01:27:41 Speaker_01
And so it is very much a press freedom with a big asterisk. And if it's in, you're in my class status, if you're aligned with the U.S. national security interest, if you're the right racial makeup, sort of Ivy League schools.
01:27:53 Speaker_01
And if you're sort of not that, if you're seen as grimy, if you're one of the J-20 journalists, because, you know, you write for independent news outlets, Or you're, God forbid, on the business end of a U.S.
01:28:03 Speaker_01
military campaign, then you simply don't count. You're not human, much less a journalist.
01:28:08 Speaker_00
Right. Your motives are questioned, if not automatically deemed dubious or suspect, and you are not owed the honor. If you're even thought about at all. Right. I mean, totally. And if you are thought about, you are immediately dismissed.
01:28:22 Speaker_00
It's almost like what happens when cops kill like a young black person and it's like immediately going to well, you know, they were no angel. Right. Like if they live in Gaza, it's like, well, you know, I mean, a guy who knew a guy.
01:28:33 Speaker_00
They knew a guy who knew a guy who maybe whose name was Mohammed. And so therefore, you know, chances are he's a mosque. That's that same kind of tangential reasoning, which really is purely just racist, right?
01:28:45 Speaker_00
Like, it's just racist and imperial, and it has everything to do with who is in, who is out. This is one of the starkest double standards that we see.
01:28:55 Speaker_00
and of course is a show dedicated to media and one that has, as much as we have been able to, has, you know, been talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza ever since last fall.
01:29:07 Speaker_00
Thought this was a fitting way to end our seventh season of Citations Needed. Thanks so much to our guests Kavitha Chakuru and Hoda Osman for coming on. And thanks to all the guests that have been on the show.
01:29:21 Speaker_00
I guess over these past seven seasons, we've had about 300 guests, Adam, over the course of what is now, if you kind of add up episodes and news briefs and live shows and megathons and stuff like that, over 375 releases.
01:29:37 Speaker_00
And so just can't thank you, the listeners, enough for staying with us, for sharing and supporting the show. for writing reviews when you're able to for helping us out through Patreon or by going to bonfire and getting some citation swag.
01:29:53 Speaker_00
It all helps the show keep going. And of course, on behalf of the citations needed team. Thank you so much for continuing to support the show.
01:30:02 Speaker_01
Yes, thank you so much. We very much look forward to coming back in September. We have some bangers lined up. So definitely stay tuned for that.
01:30:09 Speaker_00
That's right. We are going to take a end of summer break, and we will be back in September with new episodes of Citations Needed.
01:30:18 Speaker_00
So until then, you can follow the show on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast.
01:30:30 Speaker_00
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100%
01:30:36 Speaker_00
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01:31:03 Speaker_00
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01:31:50 Speaker_00
Senior producer is Florence Burrow Adams. Producer is Julianne Tweetin. Our production assistant is Trenda Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cardellano. Transcriptions are by Mahnor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone.
01:32:04 Speaker_00
We'll catch you in September.