Samuel Geddes exposes Western journalists’ fear of accountability for their complicity in "Israel’s" Gaza genocide, highlighted by the silencing of veteran reporter Christopher Hedges for confronting their moral and professional collapse.
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and former Middle East Bureau chief for The New York Times, Christopher Hedges, this week delivered the Edward Said memorial lecture in Australia. He had also been invited to address the country’s national “Press Club” in which he was to highlight the overwhelming moral failures of Western establishment media outlets, chiefly by amplifying Israeli propaganda and undermining the credibility of journalists in Gaza, most of whom "Israel" has subsequently killed in its decimation of the territory’s population.
It shouldn’t really have come as a surprise then, when the Press Club rescinded its invitation to Hedges on the grounds of “balancing out” its programming. Whether or not the withdrawal was directly influenced by Israeli pressure, the collective media aristocracy of the country would hardly have looked forward to the prospect of an actual, decorated reporter scathingly indicting them to their faces on their systematic malpractice and dereliction of duty that has contributed to perhaps the definitive atrocity of the 21st century.
Stalwart ABC journalist David Marr came out to defend “The Club” in a radio interview with a furious Chris Hedges. Rather than seek to engage with the content of what his speech would have been, Marr set about using his training as a barrister to ambush the real journalist in the room, smearing the sponsorship of his tour by a Palestine advocacy group as a “fundamental breaking of the rules,” according to his definition of journalism.
Beneath the sniveling pettiness and affected outrage of his attacks on Hedges, lurked a palpable sense of indignation that anyone, least of all a decorated journalist, would attack his “club” of establishment approved media personalities for having not done their job, to the point of betraying those Gazans practicing journalism in its purest form.
Marr, whose career is not particularly distinguished by international reporting, much less from a warzone, attempted to impugn Hedges’ authority on Gaza (where he lived for seven years) by pointing out that he hadn’t been in the territory since 2005 and hence his lack of recent experience there might not have measured up to the Club’s exacting standards. (more...)
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