CNN Admits Israeli Censorship & Control Of Their News Coverage
Keeping war crimes and genocide out of sight by targeting journalists and their families in Gaza
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
“War criminals don’t want their crimes documented.”
— Viewer comment
Breaking Points (11/7/23)
Krystal and Saagar discuss CNN admitting censorship by Israel live on air.
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Israel’s War On Gaza Is Also A Lethal War On Palestinian Journalists
“The media establishment, which a short time ago was rightly decrying the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, hasn’t said a thing.”
By Branka Marcetec
Jacobin (11/6/23)
In the post-2016 period, reporters and the job of a free press seem to have vaulted in importance in the eyes of the US establishment. Tributes to the power of journalism were suddenly everywhere. Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists press were regularly cast as posing a Hitler-like threat to press freedoms. It even had geopolitical reverberations: when the Saudi crown prince’s assassination of journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi triggered such outrage, it broke open probably the largest fissure in the decades-long US-Saudi relationship. Now, the Israeli government is killing not just journalists but their families, sometimes in deliberately targeted strikes, and all that sentiment seems to have melted away.
Seven of the three dozen journalists listed by CPJ have been the victims of Israeli strikes on their homes, while six were killed along with their family members.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of this past weekend, the Israeli government’s nearly four-week-long indiscriminate bombing campaign on Gaza has killed thirty-six journalists and other media workers, thirty-one of whom were Palestinian. A further eight are injured, and three are missing.
The twenty-day period following October 7 was the deadliest period the CPJ has on record for reporters covering a conflict, having started keeping track in 1992. For Reporters Without Borders (RSF), it’s the deadliest conflict for reporters since the start of the twenty-first century, outdoing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ukraine, with Israeli forces killing more journalists in a matter of weeks than they had slain over the entire period from 2000 to last year.
In either case, the fundamental point is the same: even in a long-running conflict notorious for endangering members of the press, Israel’s current assault on Gaza is an exceptionally violent and deadly one for media workers.
Targeted state murder
Some of these deaths have almost certainly been deliberate. An earlier RSF investigation concluded that the Reuters photojournalist killed and his two colleagues injured in an October 13 Israeli air strike “were not collateral victims of the shooting,” a polite way of saying they were intentionally targeted by the Israeli military. The investigation based this on several factors: that the two strikes they were hit with came within roughly thirty seconds of each other; that the reporters were standing on a hill in the open, wearing their clearly labeled press gear for more than an hour; and that several Israeli helicopters were spotted flying over the group before the strike, including just seconds before they were attacked.
The October 13 strike is hardly an isolated incident, with other reporters receiving warnings from the Israeli military to leave their homes or face certain death. …
https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israel-war-gaza-palestine-journalism-media-press-freedom-violence
