Dima Khatib, photograph by Nelson Pereira.
Journalistic coverage of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza after October 7, 2023, continues to draw sharp criticism. Syrian-Palestinian journalist Dima Khatib minces no words: “The media actively relayed Israeli propaganda.”
“Silence is already complicity. But it was worse. It was active engagement with Israeli propaganda,” said the Managing Director of Digital Projects at Al Jazeera, whose journalistic career spans more than three decades.
“And it was an active engagement against journalists themselves,” Dima added. “Not once, not twice, it was repeated. The justification Israel gave for the killings of journalists—obviously false and unacceptable, that is, every time they were terrorists, they were guilty, they deserved it, etc.—it was celebrated, it was lauded.”
Dima, who has reported from over 30 countries across 5 continents, interviewing presidents and people from all walks of life, points to a clear bias in the media in favor of Israel’s official narrative. “The media weren’t even doing their basic job of verifying this information, simply relaying lies against Gazan journalists. And this was proof of racism against journalists who don’t have the skin color required for journalists, at least in the mainstream media, to do their job. We’re not asking for more; we’re asking them to verify the information and publish it.”
Noting that when a journalist is killed elsewhere, it causes an uproar, she denounces the media’s indifference to the murder of Palestinian journalists. “It’s an unspeakable scandal. 262 journalists (*) have been killed in Gaza—a record, a real massacre. Just look at the major media outlets here in Europe, in the United States, and even in the Global South, and see how many times this information has been relayed, published, and reported correctly and ethically.”
Journalism That is No Longer Journalism
According to Dima Khatib, the “poor” media coverage of the killings of journalists in Gaza demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Palestinians are not considered equal human beings. She admits that this experience was a huge disappointment and a source of great sadness for her.
The same pattern of disinformation has been applied to media coverage of the genocide in general, she adds. “The media continue to repeat Israel’s lies as if nothing had happened, after they have been debunked time and time again. They parrot the lies spewed by Israeli officials, repeating them like stock phrases in their articles.”
A method that transforms journalism into propaganda, Dima emphasizes. “Every time we say a certain word, we add a little phrase to define our position regarding that word, that person, that organization, that place. It’s unethical, it’s not journalism. It’s propaganda.”
“Just look at how media outlets like the New York Times headline and handle the news,” she explains. “They write that 400 Palestinians have died, but they don’t say how or who murdered them. We wonder if they died of heatstroke or indigestion. But as soon as it involves Israelis, the moment an Israeli dies, we’re immediately told that he was killed by a Palestinian. They publish a photo of him playing guitar. Even though he’s a soldier. A humanization that no Palestinian is entitled to, not even a child. This language has become standardized in newsrooms, and many journalists simply repeat it, thus avoiding upsetting their editors.”
Expressing her disappointment with the attitude of many colleagues in the profession, she adds that there are also those who have opposed and denounced editorial policies that lead to the dehumanization of Palestinians. “It’s a deliberate dehumanization of Palestinians, and it’s why I no longer have respect for the media, I no longer have respect for these fellow journalists. At the same time, I’ve seen courageous ones who said no. There are many newsrooms that have experienced this kind of pressure regarding coverage of Palestine, journalists who have lost their jobs, their livelihood, for themselves and their families, just for saying a word. I have great admiration for the journalists who haven’t given in to propaganda and the easy way out.”
Refusing to betray journalism, some journalists decided to embark on independent projects and launched their own media outlets. According to Dima Khatib, this independent journalism movement has everything it takes to replace “what journalism claims to be but no longer is, because selective journalism isn’t real journalism.” She adds that if we can’t do it for Palestine, we won’t be able to do it against fascism. “It’s a universal struggle for all of us.”
Regarding state media, the coverage of the 2003 war against Iraq revealed an alarming complicity with propaganda, notes Dima, who worked in Doha for Al Jazeera during the invasion of Iraq. “The lies were repeated, repeated, repeated, without any verification, from weapons of mass destruction to an association of Iraq with 9/11 that had no basis in reality. This is very problematic because it’s a public service. A journalist’s work is always a public service, with an ethical duty that is essential for democracy. But this is even more true when it’s funded with our taxes.”
Decolonizing Journalism
Dima Khatib joined Al Jazeera in 1997 as a young journalist in Qatar and later became the channel’s first female executive. She subsequently established Al Jazeera bureaus in China and Venezuela. Appointed director of AJ+ in August 2015, she held this position for ten years, overseeing AJ+’s English, Arabic, Spanish, and French channels.
Having encountered such diverse realities, she says she has come to understand that, within newsrooms, a constant process of decolonization is a priority. “I talk a lot about decolonizing journalism, newsrooms, and the journalists themselves. Even journalists from the Global South, who have been colonized, need to undertake this process. For example, in the minds of many Arab journalists, Latin America was discovered by Europeans. Yet, that’s exactly what the Israelis say about Palestine, which was supposedly a land without a people for a people without a land, as if it were empty. They arrive and there are no natives.”
At the root of these ingrained narratives are school curricula that have omitted historical facts. To such an extent that adults who were victims of colonialism are unable to recognize the harm they suffered when confronted with its remnants. “When you erase the existence of a civilization, several civilizations, ancient ones, and great, important ones, and the massacres that took place, so that this discovery—which is colonization—could happen, you are erasing history, you are erasing entire peoples. It’s the same thing that’s being done to us in Palestine, with this same propaganda,” Dima points out.
“By repeating colonial narratives, we perpetuate the dehumanization of the other,” she adds. “Because these narratives were created with the aim of dehumanizing.”
Besides efforts to decolonize and rehumanize history, it’s equally important to know which language to use, Dima emphasizes. And above all, to get rid of labels. “Who is a terrorist? Who isn’t? Who is good? Who is bad? It’s already predetermined by international agencies that have already defined who is bad, who is good.”
She insists that, faced with this imposition of a single truth, we must, first and foremost, listen to the people who come from there. “If you’re going to cover Bosnia and you don’t have a single Bosnian in your newsroom, well, you’re not going to know how to tell the Bosnian story. So, diversity in newsrooms is very important. In our AJ+ newsroom, we had Palestinians—not just any Palestinians, a Palestinian man or woman from Jerusalem, someone from the West Bank, someone from Gaza, someone from the refugee camps in Syria, Palestine, Jordan, a Palestinian Spaniard, a Palestinian American, a Palestinian Colombian—because without that diversity, we’re not going to be able to tell the stories.”
She adds that the much-vaunted objectivity of the media simply means seeing things from the perspective of someone sitting in Paris, London, or Washington. “That’s what objectivity is. It’s about making everything look the same and eliminating any distinction between one story and another. They’re all told under the same umbrella. Objectivity, in fact, is journalism that doesn’t disrupt the status quo of established norms. Always from a Western perspective. And the West has every right to its perspective, but not to erase other perspectives.”
Gaza Journalists
Since Israel did not allow foreign journalists into Gaza during the genocide—and even before, because there had been a blockade for 19 years—Gaza journalists took it upon themselves to tell the story directly. “There wasn’t the parachuted-in journalist, as is always the case, a journalist who arrives with a whole team, who also has access to a bathroom, a comfortable bed, food, etc., and who arrives with their vision of how the story should be told,” Dima emphasizes. “The task was left to the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. While they lacked food, warm beds, shelter, and protection—they had nothing—they were bombed like everyone else, they were hungry like everyone else, they were cold like everyone else, and they didn’t have access to a bathroom like everyone else.” And we saw that live on social media, and it rehumanized the Palestinian story.”
Young people around the world who followed the reports of these young Palestinian journalists on social media saw them in their tears, in their suffering. And that, Dima points out, contributed to the solidarity movement for Palestinians worldwide, but especially among young people, the university generation, Generation Z, who spearheaded the entire solidarity movement in American universities. “I happened to be in the United States when they set up the first camp. I was in Michigan, I arrived, and they asked me, ‘What media outlets are you from?’ Because here, the New York Times, Reuters, and all that, it’s forbidden. They don’t get through. I told them, ‘I’m from Al Jazeera,’ and they replied, ‘Oh, wow, of course, come on over.’ And I took a look around, and they had Al Jazeera English live on an iPad in the camp. And that really touched me. They weren’t Palestinians; they were people from all over the United States—immigrants, white, Black, and maybe a third were Jewish.”
* The number is higher at the time of publication. On June 21st, cameraman Ahmed Wishah was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp, less than three months after his brother Mohammed Samir, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in a separate strike. Ahmed is the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza.
The post How the Media Aligned Themselves with Israeli Propaganda appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nelson Pereira.