Journalists, As Such

Five weeks ago, I wrote in this newsletter about the growing hunger crisis in Gaza and the toll that it was taking on members of the media: staffers at Agence France-Presse had warned that their colleagues were starving to death; Anas al-Sharif, a reporter at Al Jazeera who had won a Pulitzer Prize for prior work with Reuters, had written on social media that he was “resisting the fainting that follows me every moment.” Three weeks ago, I wrote about an Israeli strike that killed al-Sharif and five other journalists. Israel claimed that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant, but the evidence that it offered was practically impossible to corroborate, and even if taken at face value—which was not advisable given Israeli officials’ habit of making flimsy claims of militancy against other journalists they have targeted—they appeared to be out of date. Various critics accused major Western news organizations, including Reuters, of nonetheless taking Israel’s claims at face value, or, at least, organizing coverage of the strike around them. As I wrote at the time, the coverage was certainly organized around the character of al-Sharif and not the other five journalists who were killed alongside him, against whom Israel made no claims of militancy. The Committee to Protect Journalists called their deaths “murder. Plain and simple.”