When news media outlets engage in open advocacy, can they reasonably still be called and referred to as objective news outlets, or have they simply become activist groups?
The Globe and Mail recently stretched that definition.
For more than 20 months, Canada’s newspaper of record has produced a seemingly endless parade of aggressively hostile anti-Israel opinion columns and deeply flawed reports on the Hamas-Israel war.
While those could be interpreted in isolation as instances of an anti-Israel bias on an editorial level, there may be a more substantive answer.
On June 5, an open letter authored by Reporters Without Borders/Reporters Sans Frontieres and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) demanded that Israel allow for “unrestricted international media access to Gaza and for full protection of journalists who continue to report under siege.”
The letter said that Israel’s refusal to permit foreign journalists into Gaza is “a situation that is without precedent in modern warfare,” that local journalists face “starvation,” and that “nearly 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military,” and the letter concluded by imploring world leaders and governments to pressure Israel to that end.
The open letter was signed by 136 representatives of news media outlets around the world, the vast majority of which would be unknown to Canadian audiences, including from Lebanon, Yemen, Turkey and Qatar, hardly bastions of free expression.
In fact, there was only one Canadian outlet on the list, The Globe and Mail, signed by David Walmsley, its editor-in-chief.
By signing the letter, The Globe and Mail piggy-backed on the hardline anti-Israel advocacy of CPJ, whose claims of some 200 dead journalists killed by Israel have been accepted hook, line and sinker by many news outlets, even as there remains powerful evidence showing many, if not most, of these so-called “journalists” appear to be Hamas propagandists (or actual fighters) simply dressed up as journalists.
Despite the histrionics expressed in the letter, Israel’s ban on foreign journalists in Gaza has not stopped the war from being reported incessantly across virtually every platform in Canada and beyond the world from the enormous number of Palestinians inside the territory who, on a daily basis, produce content (much of it cannot be reasonably called ‘news’) for international consumption.
While there may be a ban on foreign journalists into Gaza, there is no ban on local journalists, and CBC News, for instance, has widely employed the services of one such individual, Mohamed El Saife, an anti-Israel propagandist whose videos have helped (mis)shape the perceptions of millions of Canadians. Another so-called “freelance journalist” that Canada’s public broadcaster gave a platform to repeatedly is Aboubaker Abed, though CBC didn’t disclose when they gave him airtime that he was a correspondent for the Canadian-sanctioned Iranian propaganda outlet Press TV.
This is fundamentally a distinction without a difference, because the international press operates widely inside Gaza, and its messages, videos and photographs are disseminated around the world, countless times per day.
The letter signed by The Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief makes no mention of this, nor did it make mention of Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group that widely oppresses journalists, a point previously documented by Reporters Without Borders but ignored in this letter.
By signing this open letter, The Globe and Mail has engaged in advocacy, not for the furthering of free expression, but for the unfounded demonization of Israel. It doesn’t simply call into question the newspaper’s anti-Israel bias over the last 20 months; it crystallizes it, a sentiment we relayed directly to Canada’s paper of record.
