We spend a lot of time arguing about bias and picking apart headlines and framing.
Then a week like this arrives, and the argument gets simpler. A late-night strike near Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital killed a group of journalists.. Among them was Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, a reporter many have watched narrate bombardment, funerals, and hunger in real time. Israeli officials say al-Sharif was a Hamas operative. So far, they have offered no independently verifiable evidence to prove it.
Whatever you think about the outlet, the baseline is the same. When you kill the people documenting events, you narrow the public’s opportunity to know what happened.
The Committee to Protect Journalists’ rolling count puts the toll in the Israel-Hamas war at 192 journalists and media workers. They are the ones who stayed because they live there, and they are the people we now rely on for nearly everything we know from inside the strip.
Access has tightened at the same time. Foreign reporters have largely been barred from entering Gaza unless they go in on tightly controlled military embeds. Petitions from press associations have had little success. In embeds, movement is choreographed, and interviews are limited. At times, contact with civilians is restricted or reviewed before use. When that becomes the main access point, what we see is influenced by what escorts are willing to show, and often away from what people on the ground need us to hear.
Now, let’s take a step back from this particular conflict. Recent events give us a good access point and impetus to interrogate this issue, but this is not only about one conflict or one government’s choices. When a journalist is killed in a war, during a crackdown, or amid a campaign of ethnic cleansing, two losses happen at once. The first is human. Families are broken apart, and colleagues grieve. The second is one of civic importance. A witness is gone, and with them, sources, notes, and hard-won access disappear. We do not simply lose a hardworking journalist and a byline, but we erase a pathway through which the voiceless are heard and power is checked.
That erasure always benefits someone. The death of a reporter makes it easier for an armed group to terrorize a neighborhood without documentation. Removing independent witnesses clears the field for a government to make its account the only account.
Violence is a disturbingly efficient editorial tool. Fewer witnesses mean fewer facts, and fewer facts mean fewer consequences.
And the impact doesn’t stop at the death of the journalist. The fear and trauma that follows edits the news in its own way. Sources go quiet, and editors reassess sending their reporters into the field. Over time, whole regions can become places where truly independent reporting is rare, and official narratives fill the space that verified reporting should occupy. We begin to see self-censorship by attrition. The decay of journalistic investigation often precedes that of the people in the most vulnerable conflict-laden parts of the world.
At home, the effects show up in how we converse with each other. The press turns events into knowledge by gathering, checking, correcting, and publishing. Kill the people who do that work often enough, and the method breaks. Polarization solidifies when there is less that can be tested across lines of loyalty.
At its very least, journalism scaffolds our understanding of history. Years from now, we will try to reconstruct this moment, professionally or personally. If the people who would have documented it are gone, we will never have the perspectives they could offer. Those gaps are not neutral. The removal of journalists from these spaces benefits the interests of those who need less to be known.
None of this asks you to suspend criticism of the press. The hero narrative of journalists is fraught. But criticism and protection are not opposites. If you want coverage to be better, we need more reporting and safer reporting, not less. We need to ensure journalists can stay alive to do the work to the standards we need them to.
We also need to uphold that standard in all cases. If a government or an armed group says a dead reporter was a combatant in disguise, we should demand evidence. If officials promise an investigation, ask whether it will be independent and when the findings will be released. If access is blocked, we need to be ready and willing to call that out. Our politics may tug us toward different sympathies in different conflicts, but our standard for proof should not.
In a week like this, resist the temptation to pick a side and stop there. Instead, choose a standard. Go back and look at the work that these journalists produced and think about what is lost with their absence. Ask who benefits from the quiet that follows a killing, and who is robbed of a voice when a witness is gone.
If we want facts to rise to the surface, we have to advocate for the protection of the people who gather them.
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