Dear colleagues covering the war on Gaza nowadays:
🔵 Putting claims that are “impossible to be verified” in your headline is not an individual mistake, it’s an editorial decision to fuel misinformation, spread hate and justify war crimes.
🔵 Asking guests who are not members of a certain group to condemn its actions and interrupting them when trying to highlight their stories is hostile, keep your challenging questions for the Israeli officials who are proudly declaring committing war crimes while only being given open questions and mics.
🔵 Prioritizing some victims’ lives over others can’t be but a result of racism, classism, islamophobia, white supremacy or a combination of this all.
🔵 Don’t lecture us about impartiality when your news described the killed Israeli as killed while the Palestinian just die! And if you want to be accurate and describe Hamas an an Islamic militia, you should too say the Jewish Israeli army occupying the Palestinian lands, because this is accurate and detailed too.
🔵 Giving an equal platform (number of words/minutes) to the oppressed Palestinians and their occupier apartheid state is bias toward those in power instead of holding them accountable for their crimes.
🔵 Balancing your story is achieved by giving a bigger space to the sources who are being silenced, e.g the Palestinians.
🔵 If you ignore the western hypocrisy and support for war crimes committed now in Gaza, what is the difference between you and the propagandists of Russia Today you have been criticizing for long?
🔵 Conflict sensitive journalism is not just a course you train journalists from the global south on, you should apply it specially when there is a conflict.
🔵 You are not the story.
🔵 Remember the role the Western media played in the invasion of Iraq, and the consequences of all that to our and your words, do you want to be part of such crimes again?
🔵 If you don’t believe we are White enough to be humans, don’t cover our region, there are many issues happening in your countries you can report, go domestic!
This message is also recorded as a video here