The New Yorker Radio Hour - For Journalists, “Gaza Is Unprecedented,” and Deadly

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Journalism has often been a dangerous business, and many reporters have lost their lives reporting the news from conflict zones.  But the rules that have, at least to a degree, protected the safety and freedom of journalists are being violated around the world, nowhere more so than in Gaza.  “Gaza is unprecedented,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, says.  “It is unprecedented for the intensity of the killings, the number of journalists killed in such a short space of time. Part of that is to do with the size of Gaza, the density. The fact that there is nowhere to go that’s safe.”  Eighty-three journalists, most of them Palestinian, have been killed in the recent fighting, and the Israel Defense Forces has been accused of targeting journalists deliberately.  “Since October 7th, we’ve seen a number of cases in which journalists are killed when clearly wearing press insignia,” Ginsberg notes, “for example the Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah.”  Ginsberg also discusses with David Remnick the decline in press freedom and safety around the world, including Donald Trump’s insults and threats to journalists, whom he has labelled “enemies of the state.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Right now, the Gaza Strip is the deadliest place in the world for journalists. At least 76 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since Israel's air and ground campaign began. And there's a real question whether some have been targeted, deliberately, because of their work. That's very much up in the air. Israel has also jailed 19 journalists since the war began. The safety of the press is not just an issue in the Middle East, and it's not just an issue in wartime.

Around the world, the old rules that respected the freedom of journalists to operate, at least in theory, you're seeing more and more those rules being simply ignored, even here in the United States. I spoke the other day with the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Jody Ginsburg. She was formerly the Reuters Bureau Chief for the UK and Ireland. And I know Jody pretty well because in the interest of transparency, I serve on the board of CPJ, and I care very deeply about this work. As long as I've been involved with CPJ, every year seems to be worse, particularly the last several years.

What are the trends that are making it more and more dangerous to be a journalist? What we've seen over the past few years is, a decline in democracy and democratic norms and values worldwide, which means journalists are now at risk in places where traditionally they've been relatively safe. So, for example, we've seen here in the US leaders, including Donald Trump, smear journalists as enemies of the people, fake news, that unleashes online harassment, death threats, unfortunately physical violence that translates into physical.

violence in the real world. We've seen journalists harassed at protests worldwide, political rallies. And at the same time, we're also seeing authoritarian regimes become emboldened, so continuing to imprison journalists. And of course, we're seeing a world in which we have more and more complex, prolonged crises. So Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and now, of course, Israel, Gaza, and all of that is coming together to make it a much more riskier profession than it ever has been. Well, you know, wars have always been with us. Wars have always been perilous. But it does seem, it does seem worse. And when we look at Gaza, which is a very particular place, hemmed in, what is happening there that gives you special concern?

A recent number from CPJ gives us 83 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. Most of them are Palestinians, obviously, four of Israeli. That is more journalists killed in the past hundred days of war than have been killed in a single country over an entire year. What is going on in Gaza? Gaza is unprecedented. Part of that is to do with the, the same thing. size of Gaza, the density, the fact that there is nowhere to go that's safe. In wars that you talk about, of course covering war is perilous, but frequently people choose to go to cover war. In this case,

all of the journalists covering the war are Garzan journalists, those inside Gaza are Gazan journalists and they have nowhere to go. They have nowhere to escape. And the things that they are covering, there's no way to do so safely. You can't cover the aftermath of an attack and go to a hospital in the knowledge that the hospital will be safe because hospitals have attacked. You can't go to a refugee camp to cover the displacement of 85% of the population because refugee camps have been attacked. So there's nowhere to operate safely. And that's part of the reason why we've seen this high level of killings of journalists in this very short space of time. We should also say that in Gaza, with very rare exceptions, CNN, for example,

of course, the ward was one exception. People from outside of Gaza who want to cover the war, in other words, coming in from Israel or Egypt, but particularly Israel, can only go in through embedded forays with the Israel defense forces, with the army, with the Israeli army.

How does that affect things? As you say, only a very small number of journalists have been able to go in on entirely control, Israel's military visits. That has two effects. One is it increases the pressure on local journalists. Local journalists who remember are suffering the same things

that ordinary citizens and civilians are suffering. They're suffering from a lack of food. They're suffering from a lack of shelter. They're suffering from a lack of power. It also puts the burden on them to be the eyes and ears for the rest of the world as to what's happening. Right. Just to be clear, I took a couple of times. trips recently to the Middle East, and what you were seeing on television was highly circumscribed.

You saw Gaza mainly as a matter of military operations. You did not see, certainly not very often, suffering Gazans, dead babies, dead people, destroyed homes. That was something you went elsewhere to see. I guess the biggest question here is whether these Palestinian journalists are being targeted. In a recent article, CPJ, expressed concern, and this is very carefully worded, I think, expressed concerned about the, quote, apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families by the Israeli military. What do we know and what do we not know? If I may, I'd take a step back first before we talk about what's happened since October

the 7th. So in May last year, the Committee to Project journalists published a report called deadly pattern, which looked at the pattern of killings by the Israeli military of journalists over the preceding 22 years. And we found that 20 journalists have been killed, 18 of them Palestinians. Not one single case has anyone been held accountable. So that was a pattern that we were already seeing prior to this war. Since October the 7th, we've seen a number of cases in which journalists have been killed when clearly wearing press insignia. For example, the Reuters journalist Isam Abdullah, who was killed on the Lebanese border, operating from an area known to be somewhere where journalists frequently filmed from, clearly with a group of other journalists.

We've seen that in the case of Hamza Dachdoch, the son of the Al Jazeera Gaza City Bureau, Chief Wail D'hth D'Hugh, who was targeted in a drone strike. Israel has admitted that they targeted that car, but have accused the two journalists who were killed of being terrorists. evidence they've produced again, as we saw in the, in previous years, extremely flimsy, very questionable. Many of the journalists who've been killed have been killed in air strikes, and it's difficult to know at this point in time when we're still in the middle of a war, whether that happens to be that dreadful phrase, collateral damage, people are reporting at places where it's extremely dangerous to report from. But there have been cases where journalists have

also been killed in their homes or their homes have been attacked after they've received warnings to stop reporting or to leave. And those are the cases where it's still unclear whether they were deliberately targeted for being journalists or they happen to be in a place that was under bombardment. And those are things that we are looking into to try to understand. What's your access to the evidence? It's limited and increasingly limited because the more the bombing goes on, the less you have evidence. No one can get into Gaza to do these investigations, so we're talking as much as we can to local journalists. We spoke recently to a journalist who was close by when Hamza Dato's car was attacked, but it's extremely difficult. And of course, the longer the war goes on, the harder it becomes.

Does CPJ confront Israeli officials with these cases? We ask for comment. We very rarely get any response. We appeal to the army, army authorities. And? We get very little back. And so the case that spurred us to do the deadly pattern report was the killing of Shereen Abu Ackle, who was the voice of Arab media, of Gaza, of Palestine for many people. So she was an Al-Jazeera correspondent.

She was shot and killed in May 22 by Israel. initially again Well shot by Israel shot by whom and where So she was shot by an Israeli soldier Initially Israel said well perhaps she was shot by Palestinian fire

There was no Palestinian fire It became clear that she was shot by Israeli soldier They claimed that it wasn't a targeting Yet she was shot When she was very clearly visible As a journalist again in her press insignia She was wearing a helmet

She had a press flack jacket on, a bulletproof vest, and she was shot between the helmet and the press vest, so in the neck. She was such a well-known, well-loved, well-respected figure in the region, and the death was incredibly shocking. And we've still seen no investigation into the killing and no one held accountable, despite the fact, by the way, that she's also an American citizen.

She was not just a Palestinian citizen. She was an American citizen, and we're still waiting for a more detailed outcome of the investigation into her. Was there any interest from the State Department? There was interest from the State Department. And I met Anthony Blinken last year to talk about the killings in Gaza, and the State Department continues to stress how important it views press freedom and how concerned it is by the killings of journalists.

And yet... Did you feel that you were being fopped off with cliches about how... important press freedom is? I feel Blinken is a former journalist, right? I feel he is sincere. I feel the State Department and USA, Samantha Power, also a former journalist. I feel they are sincere, but their actions do not meet their words. But we hear a lot about how important the president, the State Department, thinks press freedom is,

and yet we continue to see these high numbers of deaths. You will have seen that the deaths of journalists were specifically mentioned in South Africa's submission to the ICJ in its accusations of genocide against Israel. So we do expect some... Do you take a stand on that case? The South African accusation of genocide against Israel? We don't take a stand on those more, what you might call macro cases. Our focus is on journalists and justice for journalists and making sure journalists can be protected and are. protected. And one of the things that we have really focused on in the past three months is the

documentation, having the evidence. I'm a journalist. You're a journalist. I became a journalist because I think information is the most powerful tool we have for achieving justice. And so one of our key roles is to be the people documenting what's happening. And it might not change things immediately, but hopefully that can provide some of the information that will help to achieve justice in the long run. I'm speaking with Jody Ginsburg, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, more in a moment. Jody, you and I are creatures of what Sarah Palin so charitably called

the mainstream media, the mainstream media. You worked at Reuters for a long time. Things have changed. And in many ways, the influence of TikTok dwarfs some of the mainstream media outlets that we've, you know, growing up criticizing but respecting. I think it's easy to think of journalism as being, with no offense, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post. The vast majority of the journalists that we work with are local journalists, doing really important, impactful work that impacts their local communities. You think about places like Mexico, the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist outside of a war zone.

Those journalists are doing incredible work trying to expose the nexus between government corruption and organized crime and paying the ultimate price for it and with very little protection without the kind of name recognition that you would have if you are a well-known CNN reporter or a BBC reporter. If we as CPJ can keep reminding people, that's why it's valuable. That's why it's why it's important. That's why we defend it. I don't defend journalists because I think we're some sort of special species. Some sort of special species.

I defend it because I genuinely believe that by getting to the truth and the facts, we can make the world a better place and we can do things and make changes. that have direct positive impact on our lives as individuals. Now, many of our listeners will have heard about, and we've talked about this on the program before, the reporter Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal. Putin has kept Evan in jail on bogus espionage charges for the better part of a year now.

Speaking as an editor who assigns reporters around the world, it's a very dicey thing sending somebody to Russia right now, even if they have all the proper accreditation, You take a lot into your hands doing that. But that's intentional. That's intentional because what editor wants to have the responsibility of sending someone abroad, someone to Russia, in the knowledge that they may well be jailed. The thing about Evans' detention is because it felt unexpected, because foreign journalists had been able to operate somewhat freely, as you say, it's... It felt almost like, you know, Russia was trying something out to see whether it would work.

And actually, the Committee to Protect Journalists does a census every year of journalists who've been arrested who are in jail on December 1st every year. And Russia has the majority of foreign journalists who are detained. The challenge that the U.S. and others have is what – what – what levers do you have? Yeah. In the case of Evan Gerskovich, there was much talk about prisoner swap. We can't be reliant entirely on having someone that Russia or somewhere else wants to swap with in order to be able to assert the importance of press freedom worldwide. No, that's not a good economy.

Well, you know, it sort of encourages international hot state-sponsored hostage-taking. What are your – we've been through this experience. once, and everybody has noted about not just the name calling, but the bullying and the rhetoric and all the rest. What do you fear in a second Trump presidency? I see all the color rushing out of your face. I fear that the gloves come off. Trump supporters have already said we heard, I think, Steve Bannon on one radio show talking about the fact that they're they would come for the media in a second term. And in a country that has the highest gun ownership in the world, that worries me.

I know of journalists who now take off the phone part of their microphones, which indicate the news outlet that they might be from because they don't want to be targeted. Death threats have become the daily experience of pretty much political reporters everywhere. And I don't just mean those people who report on the white. House. That includes people working for local newspapers in Texas and elsewhere, enabled by this narrative from the top, but also frankly, from individuals like Elon Musk. As we saw in Las Vegas last year, a young female journalist was reporting on the hit and run of a police chief, social media kind of misrepresented and misunderstood the coverage. There

was a pile on and Musk came in and escalated it to the point where she felt so threatened she had to move. And this, by the way, was a reporter who worked for a newspaper where the year before, a journalist who'd received threats online, was killed at the Las Vegas Review Journal. So I think there's a lasting legacy of that. And certainly there's a lasting legacy in which those in positions of authority feel empowered to clamp down on journalist. We've seen that in some of the legislation proposed in Florida for weakening defamation laws. We've seen that in the

behavior of some police some police authorities in various parts of the United States. So I think it has, if you like, created a new low bar. What would you like to see

happen from either the mouth of the president of the United States or anyone else with political or moral influence in this country. There's a limited amount that CPJ can do from day to day, alas. What would you want Joe Biden or pick your influencer in the broadest sense to get up and say, and would it matter? The one thing that I always found impressive about American media was that you would come out in support of one another. Everyone's fiercely competitive, and yet at the same time,

news outlets tended to be supportive of one another's right to report, and whenever that seemed to be restricted, would come out very publicly in support of one another. That's not always the case elsewhere. That's not the case in UK. It's not in the case, certainly in places like Turkey and Poland. And I would not want the divisiveness that we have seen in the political landscape and somewhat in the media

to result in a situation in which news outlets fail to defend one another's right to report because that would be really dangerous. We were slow to, as journalists, to recognise the threats against us and to talk about them. And yet, internationally, we know that when democracies decline, the first people to be attacked are journalists and the media. Among the, you know, it's a leading indicator of democratic decline. And unfortunately, we're on a trajectory in which democracies are imploding, which means that we're going to see more journalists under threat, more journalists needing support, more journalists needing our help than ever before,

and we can play a powerful role in helping those journalists and highlighting their importance. Sometimes it's because governments are shamed, and if you have the capacity for shame, it means you have at least in some corner of your soul or political being a conscience. That seems to be in rarer supply. Shame is less of a stick than it used to be. It used to be the case that governments and nonprofits like CPJ could publish a story about the poor behavior of a government, and particularly if that government wanted to be seen publicly as respectable or was trying to gain,

respect, it might put its hands up and say, we made a mistake and release the journalist in question or prosecute someone. That's not the case anymore. So we have to find new avenues. There is a link, of course, between information and the economy. If China kicks out every single journalist and every single reporter, how do those people investing in China know what's happening? Hong Kong is a very good case in point. So Hong Kong, which is currently holding the media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, has always prided itself on its ability to attract investment and holds itself up in opposition almost to Singapore

and now has rapidly fallen down in press freedom indices and democracy indices. And that inevitably at some point will have a... knock-on effect of people's winning list to invest and trade there. So I think we have to find new tools other than the name and shame. Money walks is what you're saying. Exactly. Jody Ginsburg, thanks so much. Thank you.

Jody Ginsburg is the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and I'm on the board of CPJ. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining me this hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.