"What will we do when the Times is the only major news outlet left standing covering matters of war?"
On December 28, the Times published ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella.
Three months after October 7, [Thrasher] found little of news substance in the story, and I read it as an attempt to use charges of racialized sexual violence to justify the genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians. . . But it was deep reporting by Daniel Boguslaw and Ryan Grim at the Intercept which revealed that the credibility of the Times’ reporting on mass rape on October 7 was not just questioned by outsiders, but within the Times itself.
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Meanwhile, Gettleman, Schwarz, and Sella were assigned to write a follow up story, which relied on some of the same discredited sources, offered little new information and was also quickly condemned. Gettelman also undercut his own credibility onstage, when he said what he relies on in his reporting should not be considered “evidence.”
But were the reporters or the Times reprimanded for any of this?
No. On February 19, the Polk Awards announced their 2024 Foreign Reporting honor would go to the staff of the New York Times for its “unsurpassed coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas.”
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Unsurpassed in violating its own rules? In November, National Magazine Award-winning writer Jazmine Hughes spoke to Democracy Now! about leaving the New York Times magazine. A Black lesbian who often wrote openly about her identity, she was forced to resign because she had signed a letter protesting the genocide in Gaza. (Disclosure: I signed the same letter, which was featured here at Lit Hub). Hughes told Amy Goodman that “the biggest note that I want to make” was “that I signed that letter as a magazine journalist, right? I wasn’t working in the newsroom.”
So, compare Hughes being pushed out as a voicey, first-person magazine writer whose work “didn’t try to purport” to be held to “the standards of the newsroom” for signing a letter against genocide to Schwartz being an Israeli military veteran who publicly liked calls for violence against Palestinians while getting to report news for A1.
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