The first rule I learned in my very first journalism class is that there is no single definition of truth. In any story or event, beliefs held by individuals and organizations inform different versions of “truth,” and none are supposed to be seen as more valuable than another. Journalists are expected to report with “objectivity,” under the assumption that all perspectives, all individual truths, are based in fact. For most of history, though, objective journalism that prides itself on neutrality hasn’t been truly fact-based. In an effort to appear objective, journalists often omit facts and historical context, ultimately preventing us from being able to uplift the communities we are reporting on in a fair and equitable manner.
Journalists don’t exist in a vacuum. We are subjected to the influences of the world around us. In the West, we are surrounded by narratives rooted in white supremacy and have accepted these as truths. The “truths” that white people experienced or thought they experienced, are and historically have been seen as more credible than the truths Black people experienced. In
1956, white journalists were invited to report on segregation in Mississippi, and while some criticized the conditions, others argued that integration between Black and white people wouldn’t be possible. The trip to the South was funded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a pro-segregation, state-funded organization. Reporting from the time centered white perspectives and white fears (as it continues to do today). Journalists used “Mississippians” to refer exclusively to whites, ignoring the fact that Black people were also residents of the state. The norm was whiteness, and the journalists did their part to make sure that white people’s way of life was protected and legitimized through their articles. The truth of the Black Mississippian experience went unacknowledged in newspapers. According to journalists Brie Thompson-Bristol and Kathy Roberts Forde, standards of objectivity “led many not only to privilege powerful White official voices over those of Black leaders and Mississippians, but also to reproduce existing power and social caste hierarchies while claiming neutrality.” These standards had also been
utilized to justify slavery.
Reporters still center narratives created by oppressors. During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, journalists of Color began demanding that news organizations include “moral clarity” in their reporting. Philosopher Susan Neiman
said, “Moral clarity, however, is about looking at each particular case, looking at all the facts, looking at all the context, and working out your answers.” Arguments that are not rooted in fact do not add positive discourse to the public sphere and serve to obfuscate the truth rather than illuminate it.
The year 2020 prompted a moral reckoning in many newsrooms, as Black journalists demanded that their employers focus on telling the truth and giving historical context in a fair and equitable way. Wesley Lowery
wrote in The New York Times, “America’s newsrooms too often deprive their readers of plainly stated facts that could expose reporters to accusations of partiality or imbalance,” as they cater to the standards of “objective” neutrality lauded and accepted by white readers, without dismantling the pervasive language of white supremacy. The baseline, neutral perspective is defined by whiteness and white supremacy.
The problematic nature of neutrality-focused journalism is never more evident than it is during polarized times of conflict. In 2020, police narratives that justified violence against Black people — police narratives that had long been accepted as legitimate by journalists — were being challenged by moral clarity and commitments to fact. The facts were
clear: Black people are more likely to be killed by police than any other demographic, yet white journalists sought to counter this fact with a state-sponsored, pro-police narrative that victimized the very people performing this violence.
Now, in 2023, the inhumane reporting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine has made the need for another reckoning evident. On Oct. 7, following decades of Israeli control and violence, Hamas paramilitants
killed 764 civilians and 369 noncivilians (including soldiers and police) in Israel. They took more than 200 hostages into Gaza. The attack triggered the
fifth Israeli offensive in the enclave of Gaza since 2007. The war has been defined by a mostly one-sided assault on Gaza by a state that has killed more than
20,000 Palestinian people in less than three months. More than half of those killed were under 30 years old. Israel, which has
enforced a strict land, sea and air blockade of Gaza since 2005, cut off access to food, water and fuel for the enclave’s 2.3 million residents. Israeli forces have displaced more than 85% of Gazans.
These are the facts. The whole truth, though, can only be understood when historical facts contextualize the nature of occupation. The truth lies in the historical facts of the Nakba, the Palestinians’
right of return and Israel’s
prevention of their ability to do so. To understand the truth, one must also understand that in 2018, Palestinians in Gaza
peacefully protesting for their right to go back to their ancestral homelands were shot and killed by the Israeli military, resulting in thousands of casualties. The truth lies in the nature of occupation and the understanding that this is no mere “conflict” between two equal parties. Israeli journalist Haggai Mattar
wrote after the attacks, “There is a reason to everything that is happening today, and that — as in all previous rounds — there is no military solution to Israel’s problem with Gaza, nor to the resistance that naturally emerges as a response to violent apartheid.” The struggle of Palestinians before and after Oct. 7 is a struggle between an occupied people and an occupying force — a framework that Western journalists shy away from using. For decades, Palestinians have pleaded for Western media to print the truth.
In a 2023 speech that was later published in The Nation, Palestinian writer Muhammed El-Kurd
explains the Western dispassion toward Palestinian suffering. He writes, “The ruins of countless depopulated villages provide the material evidence of calculated ethnic cleansing. When we as Palestinians speak about this ongoing and ignored ethnic cleansing — which is inherent to Zionist ideology, by the way — we are at best passionate and at worst angry and hateful. But in reality, we are just reliable narrators. I say we are reliable narrators not because we're Palestinians. It's not on an identitarian basis that we must be given, or must take, the authority to narrate. But history tells us that those who have oppressed, who have monopolized and institutionalized violence, will not tell the truth, let alone hold themselves accountable.”
Acknowledging
occupation,
apartheid and
ethnic cleansing, as they have been defined and applied to Palestine by human rights experts, isn’t biased journalism — it is fact. It provides moral clarity that we need to report the truth in a factual manner.
As a ground invasion continues into the southern part of the Gaza strip, more Palestinians continue to lose their homes, and many have nowhere to go. Overwhelmed hospitals have been
raided by the Israeli military, which claimed that these hospitals were hubs for Hamas, a claim that the group denied and remains unconfirmed by any verifiable third-party organization. The Israeli Defense Forces have also
claimed that one-third of those killed in Gaza have been Hamas combatants. The claim hasn’t been corroborated by third parties and has faced backlash from UN spokespeople for justifying civilian deaths. Still, claims like this are legitimized by journalists, who calculate ratios of civilian to noncivilian dead, thereby rationalizing the murder of thousands and the horrors of what many human rights experts have deemed a
genocide.
Journalists have not been safe in Gaza, either. According to the
Committee to Protect Journalists, 69 journalists and media workers have been killed since Oct. 7, 20 have been arrested and three have been reported missing at the time I’m writing this, on Dec. 27, 2023. The violence has prompted Reporters Without Borders to
file a complaint with the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for its war crimes against the press. According to a Jewish Currents
report, Israel’s X account circulated a claim that major media organizations “had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists.” This language not only delegitimizes information coming out of Gaza, but it also seeks to obscure realities and create one version of truth — one that is created by the occupying force of Israel — while putting journalists’ lives at risk.
Still, media
bias persists. According to media analyst Tamara Kharroub, there are
three types of bias: terminology and framing, dehumanizing language and source bias. Mainstream journalists often use
passive language to describe the murders of Palestinians or compare Hamas to ISIS, which is ahistorical, Islamophobic and serves to justify occupation. The Israeli occupation has also made it difficult for journalists to enter Gaza and report the Palestinian narrative, and media that does enter often
embeds with the IDF, thereby spreading a one-sided narrative.
To be journalists, to report truthfully and accurately, we must be firm in our language. In 2020, Lowery wrote, “Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled as such with clear language and unburied evidence.” This framework must also be applied to covering the atrocities currently occurring in Palestine — both in Gaza and the West Bank. State-sponsored claims of Hamas using Palestinians in hospitals as “human shields” should not be given credibility by journalists, especially when there is little supporting evidence for those claims. Journalists should not hesitate to label Israel as an apartheid state when scholarship and human rights organizations from both inside and outside of the region point to tangible facts that support that characterization. There should be moral clarity in understanding and criticizing state-sponsored violence and misinformation, both in the U.S. and in Palestine.
Since its inception, MiC has been committed to battling misinformation and colonialist narratives. MiC’s commitment to progressive journalism informs “Palestine in Focus,” an expanding page that spotlights our news coverage, commentary and art centering Palestinian liberation. As future journalists, we have a moral obligation to bring attention to imbalances in power — to report on conflicts with historical context that centers truth, equity and moral clarity. We hope that this page can be part of a new reckoning — one that seeks to dismantle oppression and the language that justifies it while uplifting the people of Palestine.
Sincerely,
Safura Syed
MiC Managing Editor, 2023
