Journalists of the world, unite!

You have nothing to lose but the cowardice/apathy of your corporate overlords. Something has to change.

A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

Two weeks ago, I attended and spoke at the International Journalism Festival, an annual event held in the beautiful Italian hilltop town of Perugia. How nice for you, I suspect you’re thinking, and it was, but this is not the point of this post, although this story does begin with me drinking wine on a spring evening on a beautiful Italian square with a bunch of international friends from journalism and its allied fields.

So far, so unbearably smug you’d be quite right to think, but then, the friend I was with, suddenly took a sharp intake of breath.

“Is that…Wael Al-Dahdouh?” she said in shock and pointed to a man a few feet away who was walking through the crowd.

It was Wael Al-Dahdouh and even if his name isn’t familiar, you’ll have likely seen the viral news clips of him in his blue PRESS flak jacket on social media. He was Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, where he reported on atrocity after atrocity, including the one where, live on air, he discovered a missile had killed his wife, his seven-year-old daughter and his 15-year-old son. Five nephews and nieces and his 18-month-old grandson were also killed in the same strike.

Two months later, he was seen bending over the body of another son, Hamza, who followed him into journalism and also worked for Al Jazeera. All the time, he kept on reporting.

It was a moment of sharp cognitive dissonance. Wael has seen and experienced things that are beyond imagination but were also livestreamed to us on our phones in real time, while the world did nothing. And now, here he was, mingling with the international press corps. He had the air of someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

We were standing outside Perugia’s grandest hotel, the Brufani, which played a small role in Mussolini’s rise to power: back in 1922, it became home to the fascist supreme command and was used to plan his “March on Rome”, the insurrection that propelled Mussolini to power. It was late and Perugia, boiling by day, still had a chilly springtime edge to it in the evening. Suddenly, it felt hard to ignore.

Everything looks normal, but it isn’t. And Wael is a symbol of that. He lost his family to a series of war crimes that have gone unpunished even as he continued, in spite of everything, to document them as they happened.

No-one has been held to account. There is no coordinated international outcry. And yet, here he was, walking among us.

Two days later, in another stunning setting, the beautiful 13^th century Church of San Francesco al Prato, Wael told his story.

What shocked him most, he said, more even than what Israel did, was what the international community didn’t do. And most especially what we didn’t do: the international journalism community.

“We just felt so alone,” he said. It was the lack of solidarity that was most difficult to bear, he said. Even as journalist after journalist was murdered, where was the response from news organisations around the world?

It was a deeply shaming moment.

I wrote a little about this in a newsletter that the Nerve put out last week. We included a video and transcript of Wael’s talk on the site but I wanted to re-visit it for several intertwined reasons.

Sunday, May 3, was World Press Freedom Day. And yesterday was the end of a bank holiday weekend in Britain, a public holiday that celebrates the ancient spring rituals that developed around May Day but also, as in many other countries, International Workers’ Day.

And what I want to do in this newsletter is to connect those two things not least because I’ve read a lot of self-regarding articles about World Press Freedom Day from news organisations that have not shown any particular solidarity to Palestinian journalists, or realised that this lack of solidarity will one day come to bite them on the arse.

There are also two anniversaries I’m marking in this newsletter. It’s a year since the Guardian gave away the Observer newspaper in the face of days of protests from 93% of its journalists. And a year since I went back to TED and gave a talk that used my journalistic experience of being targeted and silenced as both a warning and a call to action.

If this feels like a jumble of disparate topics, well, they are, in fact, connected. Silence, normalisation, cowardice, fear, and the shortcomings of the institutions are what connects them. And I’m returning again, to the assault on press freedom, because it’s the canary in the coalmine. And the canary is croaking.

I’ve been posting here less than I’d like to because I have been trying to build a new news organisation, with my ex-Guardian/Observer colleagues, because it’s felt like the most important thing that I could be doing in this moment. Without independent media, we are doomed. And without press freedom, there is no freedom.

Gaza was the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. Israel has killed 232 Palestinian journalists since October 2023, more than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the United States war in Afghanistan combined.

But what’s happened to journalists in Gaza didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s just the tip of the spear. A report, just published by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), reveals that press freedom is at a 25-year low. It’s diminishing almost everywhere at an astonishing rate. The report includes a press freedom index that shows America is now a shocking 64^th on its list behind Namibia, Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Tonga, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Samoa, Panama, Botswana, Gabon and Ghana.

In the last year, vast swathes of the US press have been captured or defanged: CBS has been gutted from within, its editorial integrity destroyed after being bought by the Ellison family, a key Trump ally, that has already gained control of TikTok and is in the throes of an $81bn takeover of Warner Bros that will give it control of, among many other media properties, CNN’s newsroom.

Protestors have been shot in the street and journalists who reported on these protests have been arrested. The Washington Post, owned by another billionaire tech ally, has laid off hundreds of reporters and neutered its editorial pages but Bezos’s sponsorship of the Met Gala last night saw him wash his hands of their blood. Meanwhile, the chair of the powerful FCC, Brendan Carr, has been threatening news outlets with losing their broadcast licences for so-called “distortions” over their coverage of the Iran war.

I’ve been reflecting on this moment now versus this moment a year ago because, it’s impossible to believe that my TED talk caused such a stir at both the conference and then online. It was a warning of what Silicon Valley’s merger with Trump’s authoritarianism means and where it will lead and a year on, so much of what I warned might happen, has now happened.

The attacks on journalists, the silencing, the corporate capture and surrender have now come. It’s real, not foretold. The totalising all-encompassing power of Silicon Valley coupled with Trump’s America has given us the ultimate dystopic endgame, a hallucinated war, fed by hallucinating algorithms that has blown up school children and blocked shipping channels for reasons that defy logic, common sense, rational belief, historical memory.

Trump’s attack on Iran is a cognitive weapon he’s turned on his own people. Us. We are numbed to it all. That’s what’s changed in a year. It has all come to pass but our shock and outrage has run out. The abnormal is the new normal. We’ve had to accept that.

Except it’s not normal. None of it it is. And that’s what Wael’s haunted face in Perugia brought home to me.

He was the ghost of Christmas past at Perugia, but he’s also the ghost of Christmas future. His family were killed by a country that my country arms and supports, a country whose prime minister who’s a close ally of the tech leaders whose products are integrated into our daily lives, who hold government contracts, who are knitted into the very fabric of our state.

How is that normal? It isn’t. It’s an affront. And Wael was right to call out the catastrophic moral failure of journalism on the biggest stage in front of the world’s journalists at what is the world’s biggest journalism conference. And he’s also right to understand how what’s happened to journalists in Gaza, the impunity with which they’ve been targeted and murdered, won’t end there.

But he was wrong about one thing. Afterwards, I found him outside, with a brilliant investigative journalist I know, Hoda Osman, the executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. I’d bonded with Hoda at another conference where she’d presented a detailed report on another Gazan journalist murdered by Israeli soldiers and had been blindsided from the audience by an American producer who accused her of covering for Hamas.

“You’re not alone,” I told Wael while Hoda translated. There are so many journalists who support you. And I gestured at the journalist next to me, Sangita Myska, an ex-BBC journalist, who was sacked without warning from her job presenting a show on Britain’s commercial radio station, LBC, after a combative interview with an Israeli government official.

“It’s the leaders of western news organisations who are the problem not the journalists,” I said.

Because they haven’t led, they’ve cowered or simply dodged the issue. There’s been an abject lack of leadership; a hollow vacuum where it ought to be. It’s not that news organisations can’t co-operate. In Britain, just over a year ago, every front cover of every newspaper - with radically different political views - carried a “Make it Fair” campaign ad over the government’s plans to tear up copyright laws. They acted in unison out of joint self-interest. And it worked! The government actually backed down.

It is possible. Just not on this subject. Last summer, RSF or Reporters Without Borders, one of the most prominent press freedom organisations in the world organised a news blackout in partnership with Avaaz and asked news titles to black out their front pages in solidarity with Palestinian journalists. This was L’Orient Le Jour, a Lebanese newspaper, published:

Lebanese journalists, of course, understood that they would be next. As it’s inevitably turned out to be: the recent terrible murder of Amal Khalil joins a list of 21 Lebanese journalists killed since October 7. Around the world, 250 outlets joined the blackout (including this newsletter) but they were mostly smaller independent outlets though Britain’s Independent was an honourable exception. The big boys refused to play. My former employer, the Guardian, was among the prominent western news organisations who declined, despite multiple efforts from journalists advocating internally and even as their own correspondents and stringers operated at huge risk.

And this is why I’m writing this today. Because May 1 - International Workers’ Day - and May 3 - World Press Freedom Day - need to be understood as two sides of the same coin.

The solidarity that gave us basic rights and protections that spawned the labour movement was a solidarity between individuals not organisations, not management, or boards. And, we can’t leave the defence of press freedom to editors and CEOs who have, increasingly, corporatised World Press Freedom Day. In one particularly tense meeting during the Guardian dispute, one executive let slip that that it was one of the best opportunities in the year to “monetize” the brand.

These are execs (paid hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds) who are using the day not to campaign for justice for the likes of Wael al-Dahdouh but to push fundraising campaigns while failing to defend the most basic of all journalistic rights: to stay alive.

And while I’m thrilled with the news from yesterday that Saher Algorrha, a Palestinian photojournalist has won a Pulitzer Prize for his incredible photographs from Gaza for the NYT at the height of the famine (gift link to his portfolio here), it was while he was photographing those harrowing scenes, short of food and in grave danger himself, the NYT’s management declined to join the global news blackout to highlight the targeted killing of his colleagues. Why? The NYT will dine out on that Pulitzer. But what did they do to protect, defend, fight for justice for Algorrha’s colleagues? Nothing! And there are so many things the Times could do. It’s a choice.

And it’s these same corporate management teams who discourage journalists from posting on social media on “controversial” or contentious topics. There’s a sound editorial logic behind this, to maintain objectivity on politically sensitive subjects, but the murder of journalists is a war crime and there’s nothing “political” about it. The overwhelming ongoing silence from all but a handful of journalists is, in part, I suspect because of a fear of breaking these social media codes, an obedience reinforced by the silence from the top. If their editors had spoken, they would be free to do so too.

There’s more sensible journalists than me who would not write these things, who would be far more judicious about criticising their former news organisations or any news organisation, but I’m doing so because press freedom is a proxy for everything else that is happening right now. It’s at the centre of a Gordian knot of democratic decline and authoritarian takeover and, what Wael told us is that every single gesture of support is meaningful. It gave him hope, he said.

It was his use of the word “solidarity”, or lack of it, that spoke to me. I know how that feels, how it sticks in the craw, how pathetically grateful one can be for any scrap of support. It’s why I remain indebted to the press freedom organisations that stepped in and spoke up for me. Why I now have to do so for others.

But what’s mystifying to me is how news organisations don’t understand that it’s also basic self interest. How they don’t understand what’s coming for them next. Even the NYT. It might be the last bastion to fall, bulwarked by power and money and prestige but, you don’t have to be Cassandra to think that one day, even it may need some outside help to campaign on its behalf. The ongoing castration of the US media is a warning that even now we’re failing to heed and it’s a folly to think that what happened to journalists in Palestine and now Lebanon is an exception to the rule. The rules have changed. There are new rules. And impunity is chief among them.

Press freedom is the canary that’s gasping for air. Gaza is the roadmap to understand what’s coming next. And murdering journalists is the least of it. Its revolting “Board of Peace” is a privatized UN run by some of the worst people on the planet. Its plans for redevelopment are a tech bros’ fever dream, the promised “network state”, a land without citizens, only subjects and consumers, kept in line by an all-powerful CEO.

And it’s why May 1 should set the example for what May 3 should be. Our colleagues are being killed and if it’s not us who stand for them, then who will? The dam can and must break. Journalists’ solidarity has to be with each other not their corporate overlords. A lone, prominent NYT journalist, Nick Kristof, finally spoke up this week. In the Nerve, we’ve published the BBC’s veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson a couple of weeks ago (a task and a half as he had to have it signed off by the head of BBC News) and now the Sunday Times’s foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, has also stepped up calling for an international body to investigate crimes against journalists. The dam is breaking.

What these individual voices are doing is leading from below. It can be done. Even Google DeepMind employees in London are learning that lesson. They’ve been speaking out about the company’s partnership with the US Department of War and it was reported today, they are voting to unionize.

That’s what unions are for. And that’s what we need now. A union of unions. That’s what May 1 can teach us, that leadership will not come from editors-in-chiefs and publishers of mainstream western news orgs; they do not have this. But there are, I believe, thousands of journalists across the world who do. Wael is not alone. We are with him. But how do we make our voices heard?

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In one of my panels in Perguia, I described how it was going on strike that inspired the team behind the Nerve: action is agency and fighting for your journalistic values was the spark that lit the flame. Six months on, I’m delighted and honestly gobsmacked to report that it’s working. We have announced four fantastic new hires today: investigative journalists Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Alice McCool and columnists Sangita Myska and Cory Doctorow.

Thank you for reading and for bearing with the patchy publication schedule of this newsletter. Please let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree or have ideas for what needs to happen next. Consider this newsletter a call to action. What is the action that is needed? And if you want to support Palestinian journalists, I recommend donating to International Media Support. The Committee to Protect Journalists and RSF also do excellent work supporting journalists across the world and I’m so glad they’re there.

Additional Perugia content: interview + vibes