Traditionally, journalism has been pretty straightforward: Seek out the facts and report them. That has changed in recent years, with media companies urging reporters to be mindful of the consequences of presenting both sides when one side is promoting hate and distorting facts. Sometimes those facts are not distortions, but information that might lead some people to conclude that the official line is the fake news. Those concerns have resulted in much of the news being reported today to be advocacy journalism that labels the “other side’s” views as “disinformation” and not worthy of consideration. When the “bad” people point out that those considered “good” commit similar errors, they are accused of “what-aboutism” and are dismissed.
Many sides are advocating for some form of censorship, whether it involve books and social theories or inconvenient facts about things like masking and vaccines. Those approaches do not promote rationale discussion of what is factual and what is not, nor does it lead to understanding. Questioning everything, rather than blocking access to it, is what good journalism is all about.
Sometimes, making those decisions about what makes up the news will pose moral quandaries. Parker Malloy, a writer and blogger who publishes The Present Age, a column about “communication in a hyperconnected world” on Substack, commented on a blog post by a group called Honest Reporting, a nonprofit whose mission is “to ensure truth, integrity and fairness, and to combat ideological prejudice in journalism and the media, as it impacts Israel.” She takes issue with the post “Photographers Without Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions.” Malloy says the story “strongly insinuated that there was something shady happening with photojournalists who published some of the earliest photos from Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack on Israel … It honestly sounds like HonestReporting doesn’t understand conflict reporting or the limits of what journalists can do when covering a militant group like Hamas, the Taliban, or ISIS.”
Honest Reporting’s article said, “Reuters has published pictures from two photojournalists who also happened to be at the border just in time for Hamas’ infiltration: Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih. They both took pictures of a burning Israeli tank on the Israeli side of the border, but Abu Mustafa went further: He took photos of a lynch mob brutalizing the body of an Israeli soldier who was dragged out of the tank.”
The article continued, “News agencies may claim that these people were just doing their job. Documenting war crimes, unfortunately, may be part of it. But it’s not that simple. It is now obvious that Hamas had planned its October 7 attack on Israel for a very long time: its scale, its brutal aims and its massive documentation have been prepared for months, if not years. Everything was taken into account — the deployments, the timing, as well as the use of bodycams and mobile phone videos for sharing the atrocities. Is it conceivable to assume that ‘journalists’ just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?”
Malloy said such speculation endangers the lives of the journalists covering the horror, and in her post, she embeds a panel discussion from Ethics in America, produced by Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society in 1989. The segment records reporters Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace being asked to speculate on a hypothetical conflict between fictional North and South Kosanese forces. According to the scenario, they are reporting from within an enemy military faction.
Jennings said that, as part of a news organization, he would be very interested in getting all perspectives on the war. When asked what he would do if he then learned that the North Kosanese were about to ambush a South Kosanese unit, Jennings hesitated. “I really think you make a commitment going in … You understand that the possibility exists that you may come upon a South Kosanese unit. You also make the decision going in that the possibility is you’ll come upon an American unit. … [I]f you’ve made that decision you would film North Kosanese shooting the American soldier … well, I guess I wouldn’t. … I think I would personally warn the Americans, even if it means my life.”
Wallace expressed astonishment at Jennings’ answer, saying, “Granted, you’re an American but you’re a reporter covering combat … and I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered that story.” Jennings said after hearing from Wallace, “I think he’s right.”
General William Westmoreland, who also was on the panel, commented, “It’s rather repugnant to me, and I think it would be repugnant to the American listening public to see on film in the United States an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy. The conclusion that would be drawn is the network is in cahoots with the enemy.”
Wallace, seeking to compare the situation with covering a murder in the United States, posed a hypothetical: “Would you cover that story? Or would you let the object of that murder know? Or would you let the police know? … I think that I would surely not let the man or woman be murdered.” That led him to concede, “Now moving over into war, and it’s like, going back and forth as I sit here, I understand all the stresses and strains that are going on. It’s a hell of a dilemma to be in, I think.”
The discussion noted that a reporter issuing a warning to the other side would be killed, but no one brought up the longer-term consequences: An enemy would never again allow an American journalist to report from inside their territory, or at least would not be willing to trust that reporter.
Is there a value in having an embedded reporter? It would lead to a better understanding of the situation on the other side, but placing a reporter in such a situation does not make sense to me. More logical would be to have someone with clear journalistic integrity who resides in the enemy country do the reporting from that side. Integrity is the key word: The reporter must not be sending propaganda for the other side, merely reporting on what is happening. That avoids the moral conflict of the hypothetical situation posed to Jennings and Wallace.
As for the controversial Hamas photos, the reporters apparently were freelancers, and their allegiance is uncertain. Reuters face a moral dilemma when considering their publication, and decided it was worth doing.
There are no easy answers in cases like this. Mike Wallace dodged it at one point, saying, “I’m an old man. I don’t know that I would [be there].”
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