"I left my job as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times in January 2024, not long into the genocide.

[remixtures@tldr.nettime.org]

"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."

It’s Not Complicated

The mainstream media failed the public during the genocide in Gaza. The Key's editor-in-chief shares her vision for what comes next.

The Key (www.thekeymagazine.com)

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