The past two years have seen a catastrophic failure by Western journalists to report properly what amounts to an undoubted genocide in Gaza. This has been a low point even by the dismal standards set by our profession, and further reason why audiences continue to distrust us in ever greater numbers.
There is a comforting argument — comforting especially for those journalists who have failed so scandalously during this period — that seeks to explain, and excuse, this failure. Israel’s exclusion of Western reporters, so the claim goes, has made it impossible to determine exactly what is occurring on the ground in Gaza.
There are several obvious rejoinders to this.
First, why would any journalist give Israel the benefit of the doubt in Gaza — as we have been doing — when it is the party keeping out reporters? The media’s working assumption must be that Israel has excluded us because it has plenty to hide. The obligation must be on Israel to demonstrate that it is acting out of military necessity and proportionately. That cannot be the starting point, as it has been, of Western media coverage.
When one party, Israel, denies journalists the chance to report, our default responsibility is to adopt a posture of extreme scepticism towards its claims. It is to subject those claims to intense scrutiny — all the more so when the world’s highest court has ruled that that Israel’s very presence in Gaza is as an illegal occupier, one that should have left the Palestinian territories long ago.
Second, and just as self-evidently, this explanation arrogantly discounts the work of hundreds of Palestinian journalists who have risked their lives to show us precisely what is happening in Gaza. It is to view their contribution, even as they are being slaughtered by Israel in unprecedented numbers, as, at best, worthless and as, at worst, Hamas propaganda. It is to breathe life into Israel’s self-serving rationalisations for murdering our colleagues – and thereby sets a precedent that normalises the targeting of journalists in the future.
It is also to treat these Palestinian journalists with the same colonial contempt demonstrated by British aristocrats a century ago, when they promised away the Palestinians’ homeland to European Jews, as if Palestine was a possession Britain was entitled to dispose of as it saw fit.
And third – and this is the issue I want to grapple with tonight – the presence of Western journalists in Gaza would not have made any dramatic difference to the way the slaughter of Palestinians was presented. Audiences would still have received a sanitised version of the genocide. Failure is baked into Western media coverage of Israel and Palestine. I know this firsthand from 20 years of reporting from the region. (more...)
Breaking Out of Media Group-Think
Why BBC editors must one day stand trial for colluding in Israel’s genocide.
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 20, 2025
Read my latest: https://t.co/GjHh9CbTPw pic.twitter.com/2Vu1NQkHwV
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