750+ Journalists Sign Letter Condemning ‘Israel’s Killing of Journalists in Gaza’

AP Photo/Abed Khaled

An open letter condemning “Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza” received more than 750 signatures from journalists on Thursday.

“We condemn Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza and urge integrity in Western media coverage of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians,” declared the letter, which noted that at least 35 journalists had been killed, with many other reporters losing members of their family, as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza over the past month.

The letter continued:

As reporters, editors, photographers, producers, and other workers in newsrooms around the world, we are appalled at the slaughter of our colleagues and their families by the Israeli military and government.

We are writing to urge an end to violence against journalists in Gaza and to call on Western newsroom leaders to be clear-eyed in coverage of Israel’s repeated atrocities against Palestinians.

…

We also hold Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Double-standards, inaccuracies and fallacies abound in American publications and have been well-documented. More than 500 journalists signed an open letter in 2021 outlining concerns that U.S. media outlets ignore Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Yet the call for fair coverage has gone unanswered.

Newsrooms have instead undermined Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives, dismissing them as unreliable and have invoked inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes. They have printed misinformation spread by Israeli officials and failed to scrutinize indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza — committed with the support of the U.S. government.

More than 750 journalists signed the open letter, including reporters and editors from the Washington Post, MSNBC, the Guardian, Jewish Currents, HuffPost, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, and Sky News.

On Thursday, more than a hundred journalists also occupied the New York Times‘ lobby in protest of the newspaper’s coverage of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.

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