How Do We Tell the Story of Gaza’s Murdered Journalists?

[Steven W. Thrasher in LitHub]

A fiery piece from Steven W. Thrasher, who holds the Daniel Renberg chair at the Medill School of Journalism.

“In the last two weeks, two high profile journalists have been martyred: one was Awdah Hathaleen, a consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, who was lynched by settlers on live video in the West Bank. The other was Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al-Sharif. Though only 28 years old, Al-Sharif was kind of the captain of journalists in the north, especially after Hossam Sabbat was killed in March.

There have been other Palestinian journalists killed in the last two weeks whose lives were no less important and whose deaths no less tragic, but the lynching and targeted assassination of these two men signal something particularly sinister: Israel’s concerted effort to eliminate every journalist in Palestine who has borne witness to this genocide. The message the entity is sending is brutally obvious.”

At its best, journalism allows democracy to function: it provides the information we need to know in order to make informed democratic decisions. The kind of journalism Thrasher is talking about genuinely speaks truth to power and reveals what’s happening on the ground. That these journalists should not be protected, let alone be murdered — over 270 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza so far — says a great deal about which stories are allowed to be told.

Yet every day, I still see sentiments that supporting journalism on the ground in Gaza is supporting terrorism. That is not the case. Supporting freedom and democracy must mean supporting journalism’s ability to record the truth, and it must mean publishing stories that challenge us. There’s a name for societies that only have one approved narrative, and it’s not “democracy”.

Everyone has the right to be free. Journalists are a core part of that equation.

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