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A few weeks ago, I hosted a webinar with Professor Assal Rad and Sana Saeed on the ethical failures of Western coverage of the genocide in Gaza. The discussion eventually turned to the question of complicity. Not the complicity of “the media”, which is usually discussed endlessly and at little cost to anyone, but that of the particular journalist who keeps filing for an institution they have watched misrepresent – and at times justify – mass atrocity.
My question: At some point, if they stay and don’t resign, doesn’t being part of a system that constantly dehumanises and misrepresents become complicity, even for the journalist who privately disagrees?
My two guests did not entirely agree, and I have not stopped thinking about the gap between them. Sana, who has spent years in and around American newsrooms, was unsparing: yes, it is complicity, especially at the outlets that have most actively carried water for the genocide. Her advice to those who stay was blunt – leave, or build something else. And she cited, as many do, the legal precedents: Nuremberg and Rwanda.
Assal, a historian, was more reluctant. She said she was uneasy judging the individual reporter at all. The reporter on the ground is not the editor; she does not write the headline or decide whether the word “genocide” survives the copy desk, and much of her work may be honest and good. The fault, in this account, lies with the institution and the system it serves, not the footsoldier handed an assignment. And some journalists, she reminded us, did resign, did sign the letters, did push back – because people enter journalism wanting to tell the truth, not to launder a war.
I cannot fully take either side, and I have come to think that the discomfort is the point. This is not a question with a clean answer. It is one each journalist has to sit with. But sitting with it honestly means separating two things we tend to run together: what is criminal, and what is wrong.
Sana was right that the law has reached this terrain before. At Nuremberg, the one man hanged essentially for what he published was Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer. He was convicted not of planning the war or of any conventional war crime, but of crimes against humanity, for his words. Half a century later, the tribunal for Rwanda followed the same principle, convicting the men who ran Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines and the editor of the newspaper Kangura of incitement to genocide. A journalist’s work, the precedent says, is not shielded from culpability by the fact that it is journalism.
But the precedent does not stretch as far as we might wish. Sana sees the BBC, The New York Times, and others as today’s equivalent of Mille Collines, and there is a case to be made that their reporting – and especially their uncritical repetition of Israeli atrocity propaganda and justification – laid the groundwork for the dehumanisation of Palestinians that preceded and accompanied the genocide. However, it is not a one-to-one comparison. Where Der Stürmer and Mille Collines were much more explicit in their incitement – actively, explicitly urging extermination – the BBC and The New York Times have been more restrained though not necessarily any less condemnable. They do not openly call for slaughter. They justify and sanitise it. They withhold the word, weigh the testimony of the starved against the denials of those starving them, and file the result under “war”. That is a different thing, and, sadly, almost certainly not a crime.
No tribunal will prosecute a sub-editor for choosing “died” over “was killed”. And because the law will never reach it, the whole weight of the question falls onto the one place left to carry it: the conscience of the person doing the work.
Which is where the difficulty begins, rather than ends. The law reaches only the most flagrant cases. It has nothing to say about the quieter complicity of the respectable press, the complicity of tone, of omission, of false balance, of the agentless verb. No tribunal will prosecute a sub-editor for choosing “died” over “was killed”. And because the law will never reach it, the whole weight of the question falls onto the one place left to carry it: the conscience of the person doing the work.
Professor Rad’s reluctance also deserves to be taken seriously. She is right that in many cases the reporter does not choose the framing, and that responsibility and culpability accrue to the institutions and to the people running them. The freelancer filing to make rent should perhaps not be judged in the same way as the bureau chief with power, tenure, and a pension.
However, acknowledging that distinction does not address the question. “The institution” is not a thing standing apart from the people who staff it. It has no hands. It does not choose the verb that hides the killer, or decide that an expert consensus is an “accusation”, or return to the desk on the thousandth morning. People do those things. The system Assal rightly indicts is, in the end, not just the work of a few senior editors, but the sum of countless individual framings and individual decisions to stay. To say the fault is structural is true, but it can also, quietly, become a way of ensuring no one in particular is ever to blame.
What makes the dilemma genuinely hard, rather than merely uncomfortable, is that the people inside these institutions cannot claim ignorance.
In the first weeks, the dissent was loud and public. More than 1,500 journalists across dozens of American newsrooms signed an open letter against their own industry’s coverage. BBC staff accused their broadcaster of serving as a mouthpiece for Israel. At The New York Times, the newsroom revolted over a discredited atrocity story and a leaked memo rationing the words “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. A few people resigned. Others were pushed out.
But there was no wholesale exodus. The protestations faded. The memos were never rescinded; the coverage did not change even as the death toll climbed past anything the language had been adjusted to obscure. Some of the dissent did not subside so much as get removed. As Sana noted, Arab and Muslim journalists were quietly taken off Palestine, much as Black reporters had once been kept from covering police violence.
Still, most stayed. And that is not easy to ignore. Silence at the outset might have been mistaken for ignorance. But this is no longer a tenable excuse. Many who named the wrong, often at real professional risk, then went quiet and kept their bylines. The comforting theory that one does more good inside than out has now been tested for more than two years. The dissent was raised and absorbed. The institution did not reform; it waited the dissenters out.
We have been here before. In Germany, the Nazi press was not built from scratch. Hitler inherited, consolidated, and hollowed out one of the most diverse media institutions in Europe. Of the 4,700 newspapers existing when the Nazis took power in 1933, less than 1,100 survived, half of them still in private or institutional hands, but operating in strict compliance with government press laws and publishing only approved material.
The October 1933 Editors Law made journalism a “public task” of the state, and the Propaganda Ministry issued daily instructions on what to print and which words to avoid. Jewish and dissenting journalists were purged or fled; their desks were filled not only by amateurs but by skilled, established professionals who stayed to protect and even advance their careers.
We like to imagine we would have been among those who left. It is a flattering story, and for most of us almost certainly false – as Gaza attests. The veterans who stayed did not think of themselves as propagandists either, but as professionals with families and mortgages and a craft to practise. They probably told themselves it was better to hold the post than surrender it.
In her book, Time’s Monster, Priya Satia speaks of how history can become a way of ethical thinking, that “a certain kind of historical sensibility” could allow many people to avoid perceiving their ethically inconsistent actions. The idea of waiting for history’s judgment is one of these sensibilities that conveniently postpones ethical evaluation to a future time. But this is cold comfort for the Palestinian journalists inside Gaza who have been killed in unprecedented numbers for revealing the truth as newsrooms abroad debated terminology. The contrast is not subtle. Some journalists died to show the world what was happening. Others, in safety, declined to call it by its name.
As I said earlier, it is not my place to judge the choices of any individual journalist to stay or go. But the scary thought is that the judgment of history will surely come. But perhaps the more urgent ethical task is for each journalist to examine their own conscience before then.
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