How many journalists need to be assassinated before others notice a trend.
I put this in another thread, but it bears repeating:
https://cpj.org/2023/12/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
"As of December 17:
64 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead: 57 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese.
13 journalists were reported injured.
3 journalists were reported missing.
19 journalists were reported arrested.
Multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members."
More on the CPJ:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/committee-to-protect-journalists/
Interesting point. Several Palestinian reporters were killed when “Israeli warplanes struck an area housing several media outlets in Gaza City’s Rimal district”.
It’s also notable that the Israeli reporters were not killed as a result of covering the war. 2 were covering the music festival and 2 were just at home and work when they got killed. They were not killed because they were reporters, rather they were civilian casualties of the October 7th attack who happened to be reporters.
Why do you think we have mostly terrible “journalism” these days?
I am convinced that Israel is deliberately targeting journalists and their families. It keeps fucking happening, where a journalist says something that undermines Israel’s narrative, and then either they or their families are killed.
Israel knows where everyone is at all times unless they’re underground. It’s always intentional, every journalist and every doctor and every UN aid worker. Israel isn’t accidentally killing anyone. It’s always done with intent.
It makes sense; they hate journalists and NGOs and view them as anti-Israel. There’s decades of evidence showing they are targeted by soldiers, same way a lot of US soldiers accused the “liberal media” of opposing the wars and Bush tried to target Al Jazeera’s offices with a car bomb until Tony Blair vetoed the idea.
How long will the rest of the international community wait before end-running around the US and holding the Israeli government accountable?
Forever, probably. This is just another in a long line of Israel’s atrocities since they were created from Britain’s discarded colony in 1948 with the most ridiculous borders decided by the UN
Israel immediately annexed more than half of the Arab territories in that map. The UN, Western Europe and the US just shrugged in response. These days the politicians have to at least mime disapproval because news travels fast, but that’s all they will do. People are just GDP to them.
I can’t find a good source for how many journalists work in Palestine, but in other countries, it is about 0.1% of the population (I couldn’t imagine it would be higher in Gaza given the oppressive conditions).
That means there are probably about 5,428 journalists working in Palestine (based of 0.1% of 5,428,542, the best figure for Palestine’s population). 64 have been killed since October 7th, or ~1.2% of all Palestine’s journalists (under the estimate based off worldwide journalism figures). Of Palestine’s population, 19,968 have been killed since October 7th, or ~0.37% of the population.
Doing a two-sample Z-test for proportions on those proportions gives a Z-score of 25.43, which has a P-value of << 0.001 - in other words, if the probability of journalists being killed was the same as for the general Palestinian population, it is vanishingly unlikely we would see a difference in probabilities of being killed this extreme. This is very strong statistically significant evidence that journalists are more likely to have been killed in Palestine than members of the general Palestinian population.
The question then is why are journalists more likely to be killed? There could be an argument made that journalism is inherently a more risky occupation. However, the vast majority of journalists seem to have been killed at their home, not while filming military action or anything like that. There is a theoretical possibility journalists have stayed closer to the action and are less likely to have evacuated to another corner of Gaza since their job requires them to stay closer to the action. However, the other, probably more likely and much more disturbing possibility is that the Likud (Netanyahu) controlled IDF is intentionally targeting journalists (which is a serious war crime).
Good point but looks like those population numbers are for Gaza and the West Bank, which together comprise Palestine. Gaza’s population is 2.2 M, so the picture you painted is actually much worse in reality.
I think all the numbers are for all of Palestine - the population, the number of journalist fatalities, and the number of total deaths (most would be in Gaza, but the IDF is apparently also continuing activities in the West Bank which are killing Palestinians and included in the total - see for example https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2023/11/alarming-urgent-situation-occupied-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem).
If I had separated out numbers, focusing on the Gaza subset would probably tell a similar story; it might remove some noise that could have masked a significant difference in proportions if the difference was more marginal. However, including the whole of Palestine the proportion difference was still extremely highly significant - there can be no doubt from the numbers that journalists in Palestine are more likely to be killed than any random citizen.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Television journalist Mohammed Balousha filmed a report about the communications blackout in Gaza on Saturday afternoon, working near his home in Jabalya in the north.
The risks are gravest for Palestinian reporters based in Gaza, who must keep themselves safe while also dealing with the loss of their homes, families and colleagues.
It accused Israeli forces of preventing rescue workers from reaching Abu Daqqa, who was “left to bleed to death for over 5 hours.”
In late November, Balousha broke the story that four premature babies left behind at al-Nasr Children’s Hospital after Israel forced the staff to evacuate without ambulances had died and their bodies had decomposed.
Shani Sasson, a spokeswoman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), had earlier told The Post that Israeli forces neither directed al-Nasr’s staff to evacuate nor operated inside the facility, but declined to answer whether COGAT or the Israeli military had been told about the babies or taken any action to care for them.
Al Mashhad TV said in a statement that it “holds the Israeli government responsible” for Balousha’s safety and that the agency was trying to evacuate him from Gaza.
The original article contains 782 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Israel’s government needs roughly 500mg of chill.
They need 500mg of cyanide.
Journalists used to treat attacking one of their own as something the entire field could rally behind, and now they’re literally dodging rockets and bullets while reporting, being shoved around like ragdolls and not a word from any of them because it’s the US empire doing it this time.
