The Washington Post is so influential that it defines journalism for people who neither live in Washington nor read the Post.
The most famous political scandal of all? Revealed by the Washington Post. So famous that, five decades later and on the other side of the Atlantic, even the most minor British row is given the nonsensical suffix “-gate”.
The two reporters who pursued the story have become global bywords for rigorous, insider-sourced investigative reporting. (Many a jaded news editor has chided an overly ambitious trainee, “Who do you think you are, Woodward and Bernstein?’) When social media users mock journalists for focusing on fluff, they often do so with a still from the movie All the President’s Men, featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the dogged duo.
Little wonder the Post’s decision to make one-third of its staff redundant has resonated on this side of the Atlantic. Amid trying times for print journalism and a spike in authoritarianism, some fear democracy is, per the Post’s motto, dying in darkness.
Journalism is one of the load-bearing walls of liberal democracy. We should be troubled when journalists are laid off; it is not only a personal and professional crisis for those affected, but a societal crisis that makes it easier for the rich and powerful to lie and cheat with impunity.
However, we must also face facts: while the Post produces some fine reporting, it also pumps out a torrent of activism posing as journalism. On no subject is this more evident than Israel.
In a May 2024 story headlined “They Criticised Israel. StopAntisemitism’s Twitter Upended Their Lives” the Post furrowed its brow over activists whose professional lives had been targeted for voicing their opinions on Israel. It was a rare expression of concern about cancel culture from the paper, and as other journalists quickly pointed out it was extremely misleading.
Among those whose lives were upended for “criticising” Israel was a woman who had declared “radical solidarity with Palestine means… not apologising for Hamas”; another who tore down hostage posters and claimed Israel had kidnapped its own citizens; and a third who had said: “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement” – plus, for good measure, "May they rot in hell.”
A feature headlined “They Voiced Their Hatred For Israel…” would have been perfectly legitimate, but the Post could never describe anti-Israeli rhetoric as hatred because hatred is something bad people do to good people and so pro-Palestinians couldn’t possibly be doing it to Israelis.
After Hezbollah killed 12 Druze children in the Israeli Golan Heights, the Post carried a photograph of women and children weeping over the coffin of one of the victims, with the headline: “Israel hits targets in Lebanon.”
When the parents of October 7 abductee Omer Neutra appealed for his release, the Post told its Twitter followers: “When his parents speak publicly, they don’t talk about Israel’s assault on Gaza that has killed over 38,000 Palestinians, according to local officials.”
But the Post is far from the only offender.
The BBC abandoned all pretence to impartiality following October 7. The Corporation rushed to blame Israel for the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital before any facts had been established. It refused to refer to Hamas as a terrorist organisation even though, as a matter of UK law, Hamas is a terrorist organisation. When Israel said an IDF operation at Al Shifa Hospital had “included medical teams and Arabic speakers”, the BBC reported that the Israeli army was “targeting medical teams as well as Arabic speakers” at the facility.
The issue is more than mere bias against Israel. The BBC’s output goes to lengths to downplay Palestinian extremism via omission, euphemism, and sometimes straightforward falsehood.
This includes airing a documentary on Gaza without disclosing that the narrator was the son of a deputy minister in the Hamas government; telling viewers that “analysts” considered terror mastermind Ismail Haniyeh “moderate and pragmatic”; and translating a Palestinian interviewee’s endorsement of “jihad against the Jews” as “fighting and resisting against Israeli forces”.
The Corporation’s journalists are frightfully keen to contextualise any words or actions that might reflect poorly on one side – and only one side – of the conflict. When it comes to the Palestinians, the BBC isn’t in the business of news reporting but image management.
A similar mindset is becoming evident on Sky News. One correspondent blithely declared that Israel had a "lust for revenge”. A regular military analyst pronounced that “Hamas offered hope” and posited the following as its rationale for October 7: “[B]y initiating a major conflict Hamas would shine a spotlight on the region and perhaps kick-start progress towards an enduring two-state solution.” No doubt it would be a comfort to Israeli parents to know their daughters were raped and murdered in the name of peace.
This is not journalism. It is what is sometimes called “journactivism”. On both sides of the Atlantic once-respected news organisations have allowed journactivists to run amok, often though not exclusively earnest young progressives, fresh out of the leftist echo chamber of higher education, brimming with ideological zeal and moral certainty.
Those institutions which acceded to the young radicals and affirmed their proud rejection of impartiality, rather than enforce long-established journalistic standards, are beginning to reap the consequences of their cowardice. Like toddlers pacified with a sugary drink, they keep coming back wailing for a bigger swig. Their ever-escalating demands on editorial decision-making, recruitment, pay, unionisation, and workplace culture are making newsrooms harder to govern.
There is a grim irony in all this: democracy does indeed die in darkness and in this era of media-bashing populism, presidential journo-baiting, and restrictions on access to information, it is the self-styled champions of a free press who have done the most to wreck news brands, destroy credibility, and liquidate public trust in the news media.
Israel is the ultimate boogeyman of progressive and leftist politics, and its mere existence, let alone its actions to defend itself, can drive some journalists to paroxysms of polemic and propaganda. It is the job of editors to tether these tendencies in their staff and the job of proprietors to back them up when they do so.
The alternative is the sort of staffing cull that has been inflicted on the Washington Post and could be inflicted on other news organisations who follow it down the path of journactivism.
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