As journalists risk their lives in Gaza, West looks the other way
In wartime, truth is precious and is often only guarded by journalists. The Israeli military has made the task of reporting on the war in Gaza a particularly arduous one, with many journalists having died in the conflict. In such a hostile environment, journalists are becoming targets for their reporting.
On April 11, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated that 95 journalists and media staff were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war started on October 7. According to CPJ, 90 of them were Palestinians, three were Lebanese and two were Israelis.
As it receives support from the United States, Israel is restricting journalist access to combat areas. On March 31, Israeli forces bombed tents housing journalists at a hospital in Gaza. A day later, the Israeli parliament approved a law allowing the government to temporarily shut down the Qatari Al Jazeera channel
After the bombing, an Egyptian journalist asked me how I see the media’s coverage of the war. The journalist, like many of his colleagues, was deeply angered by constant Israeli military attacks on reporters in Gaza.
The journalist’s mother, sitting by his side, said the horrific images of dead Palestinians reminded her of the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in May 2022 while covering an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp.
From my vantage point in a suburb of Cairo, I see many Arabs toughening their stance towards the West. Many are denouncing the Western media for their failure to report on the true humanitarian toll of the war, with some fearing that it could escalate into a regional conflict.
With their pro-Israel slant, prominent Western media outlets have presented a sanitised view of the war. Some propagate the narrative that Israeli bombardment is all about saving people from the rule of Hamas. They demonise Gazans as “unpeople”– as if Israel has a moral obligation to exterminate them. The media has thus fallen to the same faults as when reporting on the Iraq War.
In going after journalists, Israel is following the same path the US took during the war in Iraq – suppressing casualty figures. Israel has endeavoured to impose severe restrictions on non-Western transnational TV channels, such as the pan-Arab Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen, whose around-the-clock coverage has focused on the death toll and carnage.
Even though I don’t necessarily fully agree with all of Al Jazeera’s coverage, the channel has been a powerful force in offering a diverse outlook on the Gaza war. While much of the Western media seems to be converging around a pro-war stance, Al Jazeera and the media in other countries have depicted the war as illegal while presenting a human-focused coverage.
Mobilisation of support for the war is based on propaganda that overlooks Palestinians’ rights to statehood based on pre-1967 borders. Media outlets in the West have served as propagandists within the political and ideological context of Western imperialism, with much of their coverage tamped down on issues such as Israel’s use of food as a weapon.
Within the parameters of what’s true and what’s false, many in the Western media have interpreted the Gaza war through the eyes of Israeli soldiers. Their lopsided, pro-Israel coverage of the war has proved that we live in the time of a clash of civilisations.
The Western media’s biased coverage of the Gaza war raises questions about notions of objectivity, balance and accuracy as well as journalistic ethics and standards. I hear of no talk today among Arabs of a “CNN effect”, as when CNN played a key role in informing people about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but of an “Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen effect”.
From what I can see, the institutional foundation of journalism in the Global South differs from the Western model by focusing more on the human aspect of the story.
By consistently documenting fatalities and offering a voice to Palestinians, media outlets in the Global South have gained Arabs’ support in spite of the criticism in the West that such coverage is unprofessional and gullible. If Arabs mainly depended on the Western media, they might have been largely uninformed about the war – about the slaughter of Palestinians.