The U.S. Media Is Ignoring Israel’s Slaughter of Palestinian Journalists

Reporters in Gaza are being killed at an unprecedented rate. The elite media has barely batted an eye.

AFP via Getty Images

You can also read this piece at The Nation.

It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line, deep into a gauzy New York Times puff piece published on Friday about women fighting for the Israeli military in Gaza. In between lauding female soldiers striking a blow for gender equality while helping carry out a war that has overwhelmingly killed women and children, the paper’s longtime Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner made this brief aside (emphasis mine): “The Times accepted a military transport to secure rare access to wartime Gaza, which is typically off-limits to journalists. The Times did not allow the Israeli military to screen its coverage before publication.”

The implication here is that Gaza is a journalistic black hole, an opaque and mysterious land that reporters are cut off from. And it is true that journalists from outside Gaza have been allowed inside only on the back of Israeli tanks. But Kershner’s sweeping statement erases the many Palestinian journalists inside Gaza who have been working under brutal circumstances for the past three months. More offensively, it erases the Palestinian journalists inside Gaza who have been killed at a rate unlike anything the world has seen in living memory. And the Times isn’t alone in doing this. The entire U.S. media establishment has paid scant attention to what appears to be a deliberate attempt to kill all Palestinian journalists in Gaza.