The Rotten Partnership Between the US Media and the Israeli Military
Even as their colleagues in Gaza are deliberately massacred, Western journalists continue to play along with the IDF.
NBC News’ Raf Sanchez embeds with the Israeli military to travel into the Gaza Strip in November 2023.
(NBC News)On July 31, Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul was murdered. He had been reporting from the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, covering the reaction from residents to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran earlier that same morning. While he was with his cameraman Rami al-Rifi, their car was directly targeted in a strike by the Israel Defense Forces. Video soon emerged of the two journalists dead in the vehicle. The force of the blast had decapitated al-Ghoul. His press vest was still clearly visible.
Al-Ghoul and al-Rifi were just two of over 160 journalists who have been killed while covering the war in Gaza, by far the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history. But while Israel usually leaves their strikes on journalists unacknowledged, the IDF has instead openly gloated about killing al-Ghoul. In a statement, the IDF accused al-Ghoul of being a Hamas fighter–specifically, a member of the Nukhba special ops force. (No evidence was provided for this assertion.) Moreover, his filming of Hamas operations against IDF troops—otherwise known as doing his job as a correspondent for a major television network—was specifically detailed as the reasoning behind his murder.
Al-Ghoul was not even the first Palestinian journalist to have been smeared as a member of an armed organization without evidence. Hamza al-Dahdouh, the son of al-Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, was accused of being a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad after he was murdered by the IDF in January. But the explicit admission by Israel that al-Ghoul’s work as a journalist—his efforts to simply document the war around him—was enough to have him killed is what has caused much of the shock surrounding his death. It also raises a question that has been reverberating intensely around pro-Palestine circles in recent months, but has rarely broken through the hallowed halls of legacy media organizations: Where are the voices of Western journalists amid all this?
Throughout this war, those journalists have mostly ignored that Palestinian reporters are being killed, or even that they are reporters at all. With Western journalists largely prevented from entering from Gaza for these past 10 months, many of them have responded not by looking at the constant coverage by Palestinian journalists inside Gaza but by pretending that those reporters do not exist. Christine Amanpour, for example, lamented in April that “journalists are not on the ground in Gaza” who can show what’s happening there. (When she was corrected about this, she clarified that she meant “independent, Western journalists.”) A report from Rafah in December by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was sold to audiences as an “exclusive look at life in war-ravaged Gaza,” as if Palestinians had not been revealing what is going on in Rafah since October.
What’s almost worse than this erasure, though, is that the few Western journalists who have been able to enter Gaza have almost exclusively done so by embedding with the Israeli military on heavily supervised excursions into the Strip. The IDF decides where the reporters go, what they are allowed to see, and whom they are allowed to question.
Rather than challenge this obviously propagandistic situation, reporters from outlets like The New York Times and NBC News have instead dutifully played along. The benefit for Israel is clear. Witness a February dispatch in The Wall Street Journal, where the paper’s correspondent brought breathless reports from inside Hamas tunnels under the devastated city of Khan Younis that the Israeli army was more than happy to give access to.
Israel has done nothing to earn this level of trust. Throughout this war, its government has lied consistently, endlessly, in absurd ways without stopping for breath before announcing the next lie. Its credibility is beyond question in that it has none.
It would take the entirety of this piece to recite the ways in which accusations, parroted by Western journalists without investigation, have enabled the wholesale destruction of major sectors of Gazan society, where the destruction of hospitals and the bombing of schools no longer earn interrogation.
It would be one thing, on a purely cynical level, if American journalists pledging their fealty to Israeli narratives received loyalty, trust, and room to maneuver around Israeli politicians and military leaders in return. It is another, increasingly incomprehensible state of affairs when that fealty seems to continue to earn them barely veiled contempt.
Throughout the war against Gaza, Western media outlets have been attacked by Israeli politicians, with opposition leader Yair Lapid decrying the “objective media” as serving Hamas, and Israel’s communications minister accusing CNN and the Times, among other major organizations, of having been complicit in the October 7 attacks through the photojournalists they have previously worked with in Gaza. Israel’s antipathy toward respected Western news outlets has also extended far outside the confines of this war. During the 2021 Gaza war, Israel even leveled a building filled with offices for news outlets, including the Associated Press, on the alleged grounds that it was being used by Hamas. No evidence was ever supplied.
After such a blatant attack, such clear signs of disrespect, to say nothing of the murders and maimings of their colleagues, not just in Palestine but in Lebanon too, one would think that Western journalists and their organizations would be willing to change their tune about the state they so readily believed before. This has not happened.
Instead, correspondents the hemisphere over continue to play dumb, asking for further clarification, insisting that they’ll wait for evidence, remaining silent about the killings of people doing their job when they certainly do not when it happens to people in their direct orbit, in the hope that one day this cloud will pass, their careers intact, even elevated. Most insidiously, they keep traveling into Gaza as companions of the same Israeli military that is murdering so many of their fellow reporters. This is a dangerous, doomed game.
If nothing else has been proven by the eruption of the war against Gaza, it is that the ground has moved under all of our feet. The longer Western journalists continue to wed themselves to the words of Israeli spokespeople, the more they attach themselves to a ship heading into a maelstrom. Outlets like the Times have never fully recovered from their disastrous coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War, and their coverage of Gaza has proven to be no less damaging to their reputations.
This arrangement between Western journalists and Israel has always been something of a Faustian bargain, trading access for the inevitable loss of credibility to come. Now, the true, malignant disadvantages of this are becoming abundantly clear, as the genocide that Israel is already undertaking in Gaza threatens to explode into a conflict that may sear the Middle East. The burns left on those who have enabled such a terrible war may not easily heal.
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