Just a quick post from the hip, because to be quite honest, I don’t know what to do with this information or how to process it. Let me just say that HonestReporting has always been credible and that the story is well-sourced and the evidence they provide is extremely compelling. There is no easy way to put this, so it has to be said straight:
Journalists knew the 7 October attacks were going to happen and appear to have been embedded with Hamas to cover it.
Earlier today – and last week – I complained about the failure of journalism ethics in the modern media landscape, but I could not have imagined this.
HonestReprorting says:
On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.
They say it raises “ethical questions”. That is to put it mildly. The News of The World collapsed after a celebrity “phone hacking” scandal. What the fuck is this!? How do you even describe embedding journalists with rampaging killers? And even if the editors weren’t aware beforehand, they still accepted the photographs without querying the provenance, or rejecting them outright based on the obvious and unavoidable conclusion.
Now, it is possible that the local stringers for these agencies didn’t know the scope and scale of what was about to go down on 7 October. And that is understandable. But what should have happened next is this: For not being candid, the stringers should have been fired and the photos pulled. Instead they continued being used, got photo-credits and the opportunity to submit more photos and/or copy. Then, there should have been a fulsome apology and an explanation of what went wrong the moment the photo-desks, editors and producers realised what must have happened.
That the freelancers may have gotten carried away by the events before they knew what the full extent was is the best case scenario. That they knew what was going to go down and went anyway is the worst. But even in the best case scenario, did they come clean with the editorial desk, or did they hide it? And if they came clean, why did the editorial staff continue to cover it up?
In short, it is harder to give Reuters, AP, and the other newsrooms, the benefit of the doubt when they transparently have acted in incredibly bad faith.
It’s not enough that the New York Times hired a Nazi?
There has to be a reckoning. There has to be a reckoning.
