“The press has been gutted. The bureaus have shrunk, and into that vacuum have come ideological voices,” he said. “Now Human Rights Watch gives you a report, in English, and you write a story based on that report. And you end up serving as the media arm of the hard left, the world of NGOs.”
It wasn’t that way when I started my career as a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, working for Reuters during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. (Yes, dear reader, you read correctly.) At the time, every major American and European newspaper had a correspondent based in Jerusalem. Most of us spent our time on the ground, in the then-occupied territories and Israel proper, covering the lives of Palestinians and Israelis and writing about their complicated and painful realities as well as the political dynamics that surrounded them. We all used both Israeli and Palestinian freelancers to support our work, but they did not replace going into the field to see for ourselves what was happening.
It is very different now. A combination of the decline in newspaper resources for foreign reporting, the rise of an activist strain of progressive journalism and the inability of journalists to report independently from Gaza itself has led to a skewed and often confusing narrative, with a tendency to lean into a simplistic portrait of Israel as an aggressor in this conflict — despite the fact that the country was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7 — and Palestinians as the victims.
This mattered less when the conflict had fallen out of the headlines. But now that the heated war between Israel and Hamas has come to dominate the global news cycle, this shift has dramatic consequences on regional tension amid a frightening spike in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment around the world.
As Friedman observed, “the coverage of Gaza is not coverage of a war,” and he wonders why there is so little interest in how Hamas operates in Gaza today to accompany the understandable focus on the suffering of the Palestinian population. “If you consume Western media coverage, it’s not a war,” he said. “It’s a campaign against Palestinian civilians.”
Independent journalists cannot enter the strip today, and Gaza’s side of the conflict is covered by locals — as it was with Gaza before the war. “Palestinian stringers are either intimidated by Hamas, or they are Hamas,” he said. “You can only operate in Gaza if you cooperate with the regime.”
This is not evident to many readers who see the coverage. (I got into an extended exchange on X with a pro-Palestinian reader who found this quite impossible to believe.)
A recent heart-rending piece on the front page of the Times about Palestinian civilians buried beneath the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli air raids in Gaza had four bylines and one contributor credit. None of them was in Gaza, nor did the story point that out.
“During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail — that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll — because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza.”
He noted that the policy then and now was not to inform readers that the story was censored unless the censorship was Israeli.
The AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation, he wrote, only to find the story back-burnered and never published.
