When you are in Palestine, you see things exactly as they are. Every way in which Israel makes daily life for Palestinians a nightmare becomes impossible to ignore. The repression is so direct that the disconnect with coverage outside — where Israel’s actions are complicated, obfuscated or simply not written about at all — can be overwhelming.
Last fall, I visited my family in Beit Imrin, a small village in the hills outside the city of Nablus. As I was having breakfast with my uncle, aunt and cousins, we watched a lone settler walking around a distant hill in the village. What is often called a settler “outpost” was taking shape: a few tents, vehicles and stolen sheep to begin with. It won’t take long — maybe a few months, maybe a year — before it’s officially registered as the latest colony to swallow up Palestinian land, further fragmenting what remains of the West Bank.
As we sat there, watching a settler prepare to dig into one of the places where my father, born in 1947, spent his childhood, I realized I had taken those hills for granted. I should know by now that nothing is safe. Those hills — flecked with rows of olive trees, jagged rocks and clusters of ancient, stone houses — were characters in my parents’ childhood stories, as alive as the members of their family. My mother and father played in them every day, trekked over them to get to school in nearby villages — and in my father’s case, they are where he sat as he grew older, watching his country disappear.
It can be hard to fathom, let alone capture, what is happening in Palestine at any given moment. Across the West Bank, every day constitutes a rolling story of arrests, home demolitions, court orders, settler attacks, land grabs, one human rights violation after another. Israeli settlers close schools, assault farmers, burn olive trees that have supported families for centuries, carry out arson attacks on warehouses and pour concrete down wells that provide water to entire villages. A journalist from Nablus once showed me one of the group chats to make his point: Updates inundated the conversation, making it impossible to keep up. The only way to focus on any single act of repression was to put his phone on airplane mode.
Days earlier, a news cycle illuminated for me the vast dissonance between real life and social-media commentary. Once the U.S. woke up, the latest development in the Olivia Nuzzi scandal — a journalist fired from her job during the 2024 election for sexting then–presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — filled my feed with grandstanding about journalistic ethics and a very public breach of its principles. I felt a sense of rage and shame — not because I disagreed with my peers, but because of their sudden capacity to moralize when so many of them were either silent or mealymouthed about the hundreds of journalists Israel has killed in Gaza. Elsewhere on my phone, I was receiving calm, systematic updates from a friend who happened to be near a live Israeli Army raid at the Union of Agriculture Work Committees office in Ramallah. There were two different realities unfolding on my phone.
I paced the length of my living room in Ramallah, studying the speckle of the cold, beige stone floor to steady myself. It felt like that moment encapsulated the root failure of Western journalism. After all, literal military raids are just part of daily life for Palestinians, and this systemic repression could not exist without the shoddy journalism that has enabled and elevated it. I wondered how I ever believed I could change any of it.
I left my job as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times in January 2024, not long into the genocide. That decision wasn’t explicitly about Palestine — I did not want to make a career out of layoffs and managing decline. But during those last months at the paper and in the time that followed, that terrible gap between what we could see in real time on our phones and in the tortured inversions and baseline disinformation of Western media made me feel a specific kind of shame that made it impossible to imagine returning to that kind of environment.
The Times was my first real brush with legacy media — and there I understood how “it’s complicated” journalism functions. A long-standing institution can have a set way of doing things baked into its culture, which can make so much of its day-to-day operation run on autopilot. Since October 7, I have spoken to dozens of journalists across different organizations with similar constraints. Many have told me that, especially in coverage of Palestine, questioning the calcified “both sides” approach meant risking being branded a troublemaker or an “activist,” even when their reasoning was rooted in conventional journalistic standards.
One of the clearest examples arrived early on in the genocide: after Israel’s brutal attack on al-Ahli hospital in October, killing over 471 Palestinians, the phrase “Hamas-run Health Ministry” became commonplace as a part of a successful disinformation campaign to distract from the horror of the attack by questioning the death toll’s credibility. The next month, the Associated Press, whose Stylebook sets industry standards for how the vast majority of English-language newsrooms navigate sensitive-language issues, issued guidance using that phrase, and many newsrooms followed suit.
Among the journalists I’ve spoken to, there were some who told me they were stonewalled for attempting to question that style decision. Yet after more than two years of sowing doubt over the number of the dead, the Israeli military recently admitted the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers — the Hamas-run Health Ministry’s count of the dead — has always been accurate. And despite the Israeli military’s long history of repeatedly lying to the public, journalists who tried to scrutinize other claims by the army were also rebuffed by their editors.
That institutional resistance to regular journalistic norms around coverage of Israel extended, of course, to the word “genocide.” It’s not a word to be used lightly, but UN commissioners, experts on genocide, international human rights groups have all come to the conclusion that genocide is what is happening in Gaza. But in the world of legacy U.S. media, to describe it as such would be deemed a crime much more serious: It would “show bias.”
That same level of scrutiny is not applied to reporting the Israeli perspective. Take, for example, the U.S. journalists who embedded with the Israeli military to report from Gaza: What was the news value in those dispatches — which could only be made on the condition that the Israeli military conducts a review of all “material and footage” before publication? News organizations have used the lack of access to Gaza to justify embedding with a foreign military, even though local media workers and citizen journalists were already risking their lives to document all of the devastation. I have yet to see any of this reporting do much more than push the Israeli military line, even with a critical eye.
Late in 2023, when hundreds of journalists tried to call attention to the targeted killings of their colleagues in Gaza and the dehumanization of Palestinians they saw in their own newsrooms’ coverage and beyond, they were ignored or, in some cases, denigrated, fired and punished. When I saw that letter, I saw a generation of journalists who knew their history and did not want blood on their hands. Why did simply recognizing the power of what we publish become activism? That unwillingness to engage, to me, feels fatal.
This was all a part of a legacy media culture that made my job — ushering the paper into the next era by growing its readership, especially among young people — feel impossible. I was part of a young, diverse class of internet-literate journalists who understood, better than anyone else, how audience consumption and trust were shifting in a changing news environment. We were brought into traditional newsrooms to ensure their survival through diversity. We were tasked with translating what we saw work in digital-native newsrooms. But how could we pull that off if we couldn’t interrogate the very practices that had shattered readers’ trust? When most teens in the U.S. mistrust the veracity of mainstream news coverage and 43% of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok, the answer simply cannot still be “put your heads down and let your work speak for itself.”
When a news consumer can plainly see the devastation in Gaza on social media while at the same time hearing a journalist uncritically repeat and spread the lies told by Israeli officials, it pushes them to look elsewhere. Many news organizations treat this as a question of distribution, taking the same, problematic reporting and simply putting it into a different format for social-media platforms. But meeting the audience “where they are,” means a willingness to redefine the standards according to how they actually receive and consume information.
This time period also crystallized the normalization of anti-Arab and -Palestinian sentiment in newsrooms. During the big racial reckoning in newsrooms in 2020, before I worked at the Times, I remembered telling a fellow Palestinian journalist that it was a moment that did not extend to us. I thought about that exchange a great deal during the early months of the genocide, where I felt my Palestinian heritage being used to flatten me. The quality of my work or the actual day-to-day of my job was irrelevant; I was a threat for simply existing in my position. That was why I was subjected, without actually saying anything, to bad-faith attacks externally. The Times and my colleagues vociferously defended me, but that this even had to happen took me back to that time after 9/11 when people began to regard their Muslim neighbors and friends with a heightened suspicion.
I remember one colleague who told me that people would perceive the Los Angeles Times’ coverage as biased since my Twitter bio says that I am Palestinian-American. I replied that it would be easy enough to find out that I’m Palestinian. Their reply? That if I didn’t say that I was Palestinian, “no one would ever know.”
It was demeaning to realize that, even for a well-meaning colleague, my credibility as a journalist ostensibly rested on the erasure of my culture and heritage. Imagine asking a journalist who’s Black, Jewish or any other ethnic minority to do the same. But anti-Arab and -Palestinian racism is so ingrained that it flies under the radar. It’s why, during a job interview with another mainstream news organization, a recruiter felt comfortable asking me if I had been reconsidering my relationship to being Palestinian since, even though “everything going on” was terrible, I would still have to be “neutral.”
But what is neutrality if mere existence is made political?
I’m not alone in those feelings and experiences: If you are an Arab, Muslim and especially if you are a Palestinian, you have to engage in conversations with your editors and peers ready to prove that you are, in fact, good at your job. A full 85% of Arab and Middle Eastern journalists responding to a recent survey about newsroom climate since October 2023 said that their work was held to a “higher standard of neutrality” compared to that of their colleagues.
Of course, some of this can be attributed to the biases and political agendas of longtime staffers and leaders. But it’s also driven by powerful people who are explicitly, intimidatingly, supportive of Israel and can cause trouble for outlets whose reporting they feel strays from their narrow view of what constitutes “objective coverage.” There are also well-oiled pro-Israel organizations that harass journalists and editors for stories that offer Palestinians even a marginal degree of humanity. It has a chilling effect: reporters and editors might turn away from important stories in order to avoid days of aggressive, threatening phone calls and emails. That reluctance is also bound to these newsrooms’ fight to survive, which cultivates a culture of paralysis and fear. As staffs, audiences and budgets shrink, it can feel safer to double down on the path of least resistance.
This is even more difficult to watch when the news industry is in free fall, with brutal mass layoffs, the disappearance of newspapers and billionaires’ growing control over outlets. In that sense, journalism is unique, but in many ways, it mirrors the other institutions that have failed to meet this moment, whether it is academia or the arts — all too willing to torpedo their credibility and professed principles in order to silence any speech or perspective perceived as pro-Palestinian. It’s telling that even when the tide of public opinion shifts, the institutional approach does not shift with it. Take, for example, the Democrats: Gaza cost them the election in 2024, according to their own secret report. And yet the refusal to engage on the issue is so strong that institutions seem willing to risk collapse rather than confront a core reality.
To remain in these places is to be constrained by a fight to sustain the status quo. After being outside of a newsroom, I came to realize that working in legacy media — even when fighting tooth and nail for accuracy and transparency — was to be complicit on some level, exactly because of what you have to sacrifice in order to stay on the inside. This, of course, doesn’t undermine the good work of journalists within these organizations. It just takes far too much effort to make these stories happen. Without reflection on journalism’s actual impact and a real scrutiny of our standards, the job of a journalist slides further into irrelevance.
What stories would the journalists and writers who have contributed to these outlets produce if they weren’t having to work through arguments about whether Palestinians are worthy of humanization? How might we better understand our own lives, our own agency, our own complicity if our media were allowed to actually reflect reality back at us? In an era of mass disinformation, confusion and despondency, the need for urgent, fearless journalism has never been greater.
So I am proud to introduce The Key, a new publication built for a bolder online media landscape. We’ll look squarely at the contradictions at the heart of our world, commission brave and innovative work and cultivate new talent and new writing. Join us on the journey.
