David Remnick: Right now, the Gaza Strip is the deadliest place in the world for journalists. At least 76 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since Israel's air and ground campaign began. There's a real question whether some have been targeted deliberately because of their work. That's very much up in the air.

Israel has also jailed 19 journalists since the war began. The safety of the press is not just an issue in the Middle East, and it's not just an issue in wartime. Around the world, the old rules that respected the freedom of journalists to operate, at least in theory, you're seeing more and more those rules being simply ignored, even here in the United States. I spoke the other day with the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Jodie Ginsberg.

She was formerly the Reuters Bureau Chief for the UK and Ireland. I know Jodie pretty well because, in the interest of transparency, I serve on the board of CPJ, and I care very deeply about this work. As long as I've been involved with CPJ, every year seems to be worse, particularly the last several years. What are the trends that are making it more and more dangerous to be a journalist?

Jodie Ginsberg: What we've seen over the past few years is a decline in democracy and democratic norms and values worldwide, which means journalists are now at risk in places where traditionally they've been relatively safe. For example, we've seen here in the US, leaders, including Donald Trump, smear journalists as enemies of the people, fake news. That unleashes online harassment, death threats, unfortunately, physical violence that translates into physical violence in the real world.

We've seen journalists harassed at protests worldwide, political rallies, and at the same time, we are also seeing authoritarian regimes become emboldened, so continuing to imprison journalists. Of course, we are seeing a world in which we have more and more complex prolonged crises. Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and now of course Israel, Gaza, and all of that is coming together to make it a much more riskier profession than it ever has been.

David Remnick: Well, wars have always been with us. Wars have always been perilous, but it does seem worse. When we look at Gaza, which is a very particular place, hemmed in, what is happening there that gives you special concern? A recent number from CPJ gives us 83 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th.

Most of them are Palestinians, obviously, four Israeli. That is more journalists killed in the past 100 days of war than have been killed in a single country over an entire year. What is going on in Gaza?

Jodie Ginsberg: Gaza is unprecedented. Part of that is to do with the size of Gaza, the density. The fact that there is nowhere to go that's safe. In wars that you talk about, of course, covering war is perilous, but frequently people choose to go to cover war. In this case, all of the journalists covering the war are Gazan journalists. Those inside Gaza are Gazan journalists, and they have nowhere to go. They have nowhere to escape. The things that they're covering, there's no way to do so safely.

You can't cover the aftermath of an attack and go to a hospital in the knowledge that the hospital will be safe because hospitals are attacked. You can't go to a refugee camp to cover the displacement of 85% of the population because refugee camps have been attacked. There's nowhere to operate safely, and that's part of the reason why we've seen this high level of killings of journalists in this very short space of time.

David Remnick: We should also say that in Gaza, with very rare exceptions, CNN for example, Clarissa Ward was one exception. People from outside of Gaza who want to cover the war, in other words, coming in from Israel or Egypt, but particularly Israel, can only go in through embedded forays with the Israel Defense Forces, with the army, with the Israeli army. How does that affect things?

Jodie Ginsberg: As you say, only a very small number of journalists have been able to go in on entirely controlled Israeli military visits. That has two effects. One is it increases the pressure on local journalists, local journalists who, remember, are suffering the same things that ordinary citizens and civilians are suffering. They're suffering from a lack of food. They're suffering from a lack of shelter. They're suffering from a lack of power. It also puts the burden on them to be the eyes and ears for the rest of the world as to what's happening.

David Remnick: Just to be clear, I took a couple of trips recently to the Middle East and what you were seeing on television was highly circumscribed. You saw Gaza mainly as a matter of military operations. You did not see, certainly not very often, suffering Gazans, dead babies, dead people, destroyed homes. That was something you went elsewhere to see.

I guess the biggest question here is whether these Palestinian journalists are being targeted. In a recent article, CPJ expressed concern, and this is very carefully worded, I think, expressed concerned about 'the apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families by the Israeli military'. What do we know and what do we not know?

Jodie Ginsberg: If I may, I'll take a step back first before we talk about what's happened since October the 7th. In May last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a report called Deadly Pattern, which looked at the pattern of killings by the Israeli military of journalists over the preceding 22 years. We found that 20 journalists have been killed, 18 of them Palestinians. Not one single case has anyone been held accountable.

That was a pattern that we were already seeing prior to this war. Since October the 7th, we've seen a number of cases in which journalists have been killed when clearly wearing press insignia. For example, the Reuters journalist, Issam Abdallah, who was killed on the Lebanese border, operating from an area known to be somewhere where journalists frequently filmed from, clearly with a group of other journalists.

We've seen that in the case of Hamza Dahdouh, the son of the Aljazeera Gaza City Bureau Chief, Wael Dahdouh, who was targeted in a drone strike. Israel has admitted that they targeted that car, but have accused the two journalists who were killed of being terrorists, and evidence they've produced, again, as we saw in previous years, extremely flimsy, very questionable. Many of the journalists who've been killed have been killed in airstrikes.

It's difficult to know at this point in time when we're still in the middle of a war, whether that happens to be that dreadful phrase, 'collateral damage'. People are reporting at places where it's extremely dangerous to report from. There have been cases where journalists have also been killed in their homes, or their homes have been attacked after they've received warnings to stop reporting or to leave.

Those are the cases where it's still unclear whether they were deliberately targeted for being journalists or they happen to be in a place that was under bombardment. Those are things that we are looking into to try to understand.

David Remnick: What's your access to the evidence?

Jodie Ginsberg: It's limited and increasingly limited because the more the bombing goes on, the less you have evidence. No one can get into Gaza to do these investigations, so we're talking as much as we can to local journalists. We spoke recently to a journalist who was close by when Hamza Dahdouh's car was attacked, but it's extremely difficult. Of course, the longer the war goes on, the harder it becomes.

David Remnick: Does CPJ confront Israeli officials with these cases?

Jodie Ginsberg: We ask for comment. We very rarely get any-

David Remnick: Who do you appeal to?

Jodie Ginsberg: -response. We appeal to the Army authorities, and we get very little back. The case that spurred us to do the Deadly Pattern report was the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, who was the voice of Arab Media, of Palestine for many people. She was an Al Jazeera correspondent. She was shot and killed in May 2022 by Israel. Initially, again--

David Remnick: Was shot by Israel. Shot by whom, and where? What were the circumstances?

Jodie Ginsberg: She was shot by an Israeli soldier. Initially, Israel said, well, perhaps she was shot by Palestinian fire. There was no Palestinian fire. It became clear that she was shot by an Israeli soldier. They claimed that it wasn't a targeting, yet she was shot when she was very clearly visible as a journalist, again, in her press insignia. She was wearing a helmet. She had a press flak jacket on a bulletproof vest, and she was shot between the helmet and the press flak, so in the neck. She was such a well-known, well-loved, well-respected figure in the region. The death is incredibly shocking.

We still see no investigation into the killing and no one held accountable despite the fact, by the way, that she's also an American citizen. She was not just a Palestinian citizen, she was an American citizen and we're still waiting for a more detailed outcome of the investigation. into her.

David Remnick: Was there any interest from the State Department?

Jodie Ginsberg: There was interest from the State Department. I met Antony Blinken last year to talk about the killings in Gaza. The State Department continues to stress how important it views press freedom and how concerned it is by the killings of journalists and yet--

David Remnick: Did you feel that you were being fobbed off with cliches about how important press freedom is?

Jodie Ginsberg: Blinken is a former journalist. I feel he is sincere. I feel the State Department and USAID, Samantha Power, also a former journalist, I feel they are sincere, but their actions do not meet their words. We hear a lot about how important the president, the State Department thinks press freedom is. Yet, we continue to see these high numbers of deaths. You will have seen that the deaths of journalists were specifically mentioned in South Africa's submission to the ICJ in its accusations of genocide against Israel. We do expect some--

David Remnick: Do you take a stand on that case, the South African accusation of genocide against Israel?

Jodie Ginsberg: We don't take a stand on those more what you might call macro cases. Our focus is on journalists and justice for journalists and making sure journalists can be protected and are protected. One of the things that we have really focused on in the past three months is the documentation, having the evidence. I'm a journalist, you're a journalist. I became a journalist because I think information is the most powerful tool we have for achieving justice. One of our key roles is to be the people documenting what's happening. It might not change things immediately, but hopefully, that can provide some of the information that will help to achieve justice in the long run.

David Remnick: Jodie, you and I are creatures of what Sarah Palin so charitably called the lamestream media, the mainstream media. You worked at Reuters for a long time. Things have changed. In many ways, the influence of TikTok dwarfs some of the mainstream media outlets that we've grown up criticizing, but respecting.

Jodie Ginsberg: I think it's easy to think of journalism as being with no offense, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post. The vast majority of the journalists that we work with are local journalists doing really important, impactful work that impacts their local communities. You think about places like Mexico, the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist outside of a war zone.

Those journalists are doing incredible work trying to expose the nexus between government corruption and organized crime and paying the ultimate price for it, and with very little protection without the name recognition that you would have if you were a well-known CNN reporter or a BBC reporter. If we as CPJ can keep reminding people, that's why it's valuable. That's why it's important. That's why we defend it. I don't defend journalists because I think we're some special--

David Remnick: Species.

Jodie Ginsberg: Some special species. I defend it because I genuinely believe that by getting to the truth and the facts we can make the well the world a better place and we can do things and make changes that have direct positive impact on our lives as individuals.

David Remnick: Now, many of our listeners will have heard about, and we've talked about this on the program before, the reporter Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal. Putin has kept Evan in jail on bogus espionage charges for the better part of a year now. Speaking as an editor who assigns reporters around the world, it's a very dicey thing sending somebody to Russia right now, even if they have all the proper accreditation. You take a lot into your hands doing that.

Jodie Ginsberg: That's intentional, because what editor wants to have the responsibility of sending someone abroad, someone to Russia in the knowledge that they might well be jailed. The thing about Evan's detention is because it felt unexpected, because foreign journalists had been able to operate somewhat freely, as you say. It felt almost like Russia was trying something out to see whether it would work. Actually, the Committee to Protect Journalists does a census every year of journalists who've been arrested, who are in jail on December the 1st every year. Russia has the majority of foreign journalists who are detained. The challenge that the US and others have is, what--

David Remnick: What possible leverage do you have?

Jodie Ginsberg: What leverage do you have? In the case of Evan Gershkovich, there was much talk about prisoner swap. We can't be reliant entirely on having someone that Russia or someone else wants to swap with in order to be able to assert the importance of press freedom worldwide.

David Remnick: No, that's not a good economy.

Jodie Ginsberg: It encourages international state-sponsored hostage-taking.

David Remnick: We've been through this experience once and everybody has noted about not just the name calling, but the bullying and the rhetoric and all the rest. What do you fear in a second Trump presidency? I see all the color rushing out of your face.

Jodie Ginsberg: I fear that the gloves come off. Trump supporters have already said-- we heard, I think, Steve Bannon on one radio show talking about the fact that they would come for the media in a second term. In a country that has the highest gun ownership in the world, that worries me. I know of journalists who now take off the foam part of their microphones, which indicates the news outlet that they might be from because they don't want to be targeted.

Death threats have become the daily experience of pretty much political reporters everywhere. I don't just mean those people who report on the White House. That includes people working for local newspapers in Texas and elsewhere, enabled by this narrative from the top, but also, frankly from individuals like Elon Musk. As we saw in Las Vegas last year, a young female journalist was reporting on the hit-and-run of a police chief. Social media misrepresented and misunderstood the coverage.

There was a pile-on, and Musk came in and escalated it to the point where she was felt so threatened she had to move. This, by the way, was a reporter who worked for a newspaper where the year before a journalist who received threats online was killed at the Las Vegas Review Journal. I think there's a lasting legacy of that, and certainly, there's a lasting legacy in which those in positions of authority feel empowered to clamp down on journalists. We've seen that in some of the legislation proposed in Florida for weakening defamation laws. We've seen that in the behavior of some police authorities in various parts of the United States. I think it has, if you like, created a new low bar.

David Remnick: What would you like to see happen from either the mouth of the President of the United States or anyone else with political or moral influence in this country? There's a limited amount that CPJ can do from day to day, alas. What would you want Joe Biden, or pick your influencer in the broadest sense, to get up and say, and would it matter?

Jodie Ginsberg: The one thing that I always found impressive about American media was that you would come out in support of one another. Everyone's fiercely competitive. Yet, at the same time, news outlets tended to be supportive of one another's right to report. Whenever that seemed to be restricted, would come out very publicly in support of one another. That's not always the case elsewhere. That's not the case in UK.

It's not the case, certainly, in places like Turkey and Poland. I would not want the divisiveness that we have seen in the political landscape and somewhat in the media to result in a situation in which news outlets failed to defend one another's right to report, because that would be really dangerous. We were slow, as journalists, to recognize the threats against us and to talk about them.

Yet internationally, we know that when democracies decline, the first people to be attacked are journalists in the media. It's a leading indicator of democratic decline. Unfortunately, we are on a trajectory in which democracies are imploding, which means that we're going to see more journalists under threat, more journalists needing support, more journalists needing our help than ever before. We can play a powerful role in helping those journalists and highlighting their importance.

David Remnick: Sometimes it's because governments are shamed, and if you have the capacity for shame, it means you have at least in some corner of your soul, or political being, a conscience. That seems to be in rarer supply.

Jodie Ginsberg: Shame is less of a stick than it used to be. It used to be the case that governments and non-profits like CPJ could publish a story about the poor behavior of a government, and particularly if that government wanted to be seen publicly as respectable or was trying to gain respect, it might put its hands up and say, "We made a mistake," and release the journalists in question, or prosecute someone. That's not the case anymore, so we have to find new avenues. There is a link, of course, between information and the economy. If China kicks out every single journalist and every single reporter, how do those people investing in China know what's happening?

Hong Kong is a very good case in point. Hong Kong, which is currently holding the media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, has always prided itself on its ability to attract investment and holds itself up in opposition almost to Singapore, and now has rapidly fallen down in press freedom indices and democracy indices. That inevitably at some point will have a knock-on effect of people's willingness to invest and trade there. I think we have to find new tools other than the name and shame.

David Remnick: Money walks, is what you're saying?

Jodie Ginsberg: Exactly.

David Remnick: Jodie Ginsberg, thanks so much.

Jodie Ginsberg: Thank you.

[music]

David Remnick: Jodie Ginsberg is the President of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and I'm on the board of CPJ.

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