Reactions to letter about coverage revealing
Calling for fair reporting has had repercussions for some journalists
My family name is not Yousif.
I was born in mid-1990s Baghdad, a time when Iraq was under a heavy economic embargo. My parents’ generation had already survived seven wars or uprisings and one bombing operation in the region since 1970, and further conflict was brewing.
We managed to leave under difficult circumstances two years before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
What followed was six years of exile across the Middle East until our immigration application to Canada was approved in 2007.
When immigration officers reviewed our papers, they commented on the lengths of our full names. These names are too complicated, my mother recalled them saying. They gave us the option to simplify them. After some deliberation, my parents landed on “Yousif,” the first name of my great-grandfather, as a last name. It’s easy to say, they rationalized. But more importantly, it is ambiguous enough.
This is when I learned the heavy burden names carry. At the age of 10, my parents explained to me that a name can come with labels. A name can suggest someone’s ethnicity or nationality, and even religious and political beliefs, without them saying as much as a “hello.”
My parents were tired. Canada offered them — and more importantly their children — a fresh start, free of labels, and they gladly took it.
Fourteen years later, I am now a journalist in Canada, an extremely public job where my name is attached to almost everything I do. This includes a letter I signed on May 14 alongside 2,000 other journalists, academics, lawyers and news subscribers from Canada and elsewhere asking for professional standards of journalism to be upheld in Canadian media when covering Israel-Palestine.
The letter has since drawn some ire on social media. Some commentary on the letter has been particularly disturbing, with a few pointing out the Arab or Muslim-sounding names of many signatories as a way to discredit its message.
“I thought it was a Terrorist Wanted List when I first glanced at it,” one Twitter user wrote.
I am a signatory with an Arab-sounding name and had no hand in writing the letter. Like most journalist signatories, the letter first came to my attention on Twitter. I read it carefully. Among several points, it criticized the CBC’s failure to report on a recent Human Rights Watch report that found Israel guilty of apartheid, a term that has long been debated by academics when discussing the plight of Palestinians in the region. This, despite the outlet’s willingness to publish stories quoting the international organization on other humanitarian issues, such as the genocide of the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar.
The letter further criticized stylistic policies in some newsrooms that avoid the publishing of the word “Palestine.” Policies like these systematically contribute to coverage of the issue that skews towards pro-Israel partisans. As a journalist, I believe these policies are inequitable. They’ve resulted in reporting that tiptoes around historical context worthy of nuanced, public discourse, and have even led to retractions and apologies that were not warranted.
For signatories like me, the letter’s ask seems simple: “That all the tenets of journalism should apply to Canadian coverage of Occupied Palestinian Territories moving forward.”
It’s extremely troubling, then, to hear from some journalist signatories that they’ve been called out by their employers, and in some cases are being told they cannot write about Israel-Palestine again because, as a CBC spokesperson told Vice, the letter “appears as a conflict of interest for some audiences.”
After a year of overdue racial reckoning in North America, followed by commitments from news organizations to do better on equity issues, is this really the appropriate response?
This reaction shows that deeply held notions of journalistic objectivity — notions that have been increasingly criticized as a set of rules defined exclusively by newsrooms through the lens of white experience, alienating other communities’ experiences in the process — have shaped perceptions of the letter. Many read it and its signatories as biased, but to me, the letter was calling for unbiased coverage.
Sadly, this misreading confirms what many racialized journalists in Canada already knew: that white voices are still seen as an objective authority, while voices of people of colour, especially from affected communities, are sidelined. Reaction to the letter only brought these issues once again to the surface.
Palestinian-Canadian journalist Haneen Al-Hassoun said it best on Twitter: “This is the behaviour that has kept me from saying I am Palestinian-Canadian, my identity, in ( journalism) school and in the industry.”
This erasure in the field, fuelled in part by a fear of accusations of “bias,” is not only discriminatory, but deeply hurts the integrity of reporting on the region. Middle Eastern, Muslim and Palestinian journalists should not be sidelined. Many bring an important grasp of language and historical context on an issue society consistently deems “complex.”
Wouldn’t it be good, then, to include journalists from the region in the public discourse that can help break down this complexity?
As a journalist, I have not expressed opinions on the political nature of the Israel-Palestinian issue. Journalists are careful not to participate in protests or voice explicit support for any political entity. Despite this, political beliefs have been ascribed to many of us not based on our behaviour, but on our identities — and our names.
I’ve never supported the decision my parents made in simplifying my name. It brought me some grief in my younger years, and contributed to the confusion I’ve endured as I tried to define for myself what it means to be a child of two cultures.
But in light of the reaction to the letter, I’ve come to understand why they did it. I’ve come to understand that even in Canada, names can carry an undue burden.
My name once was Nadine Ihsan Ghadban Yousif Al-Sudani.