[music]

Hisham Awartani: I don't like seeing my name plastered everywhere but I condone it. It sucks to say but people here find it hard to empathize with people in Gaza than they would me.

Micah Loewinger: When a Palestinian college student was shot in Vermont, he became a media focal point. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. When it comes to coverage of Israel and Palestine, cries of media bias come from all sides but what do the data say?

Mona Chalabi: The issue here is disproportionality. Israelis were far more likely to be described as murdered, massacred, slaughtered than Palestinians.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, Mehdi Hasan reflects on what it was like covering the region from the Anchors chair.

Mehdi Hasan: My position is, this is what I want to do. To hell with everyone else. Is the result of that, that my shows seem to be a corrective to other shows in the media landscape? Maybe.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. On Monday, President Joe Biden took questions about Gaza while licking an ice cream cone with late-night host, Seth Meyers.

President Joe Biden: My National security advisor tells me that we're close. We're close. We're not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we'll have a cease-fire.

Seth Meyers: Shame on me, by the way, for forgetting the first rule of comedy. When the Middle East comes up, put your ice cream cone down.

Micah Loewinger: Then on Thursday.

Female Speaker 1: Witnesses say Civilians were gathering around newly arrived aid trucks when gunfire erupted, triggering panic as a result, and many were run over by aid trucks and killed.

Male Speaker 1: We're hearing starkly different accounts, Chris, of what happened. Palestinian authorities called the Killing a massacre. Now, the Israeli military said that Palestinians were looting the aid and that Palestinians were killed from being run over by those trucks after those aid trucks tried to escape the crowd.

Micah Loewinger: The Gaza Health ministry's latest death toll for the war, over 30,000, and in the US, protests calling for a ceasefire have escalated.

Female Speaker 2: An active duty US Air Force member set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington protesting US support for Israel.

Male Speaker 2: In a video, 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell is heard saying, "I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest."

Female Speaker 2: He later died in the hospital.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, student protests are still making headlines.

Male Speaker 3: An event violently disrupted by protesters on the UC, Berkeley campus.

Male Speaker 4: The group of 200 protestors surrounded Zellerbach Hall where a student group was going to hear from a notable pro-Israel advocate. The protestors broke doors and windows to get into the event causing people inside to really fear for their safety.

Protesters: Free Palestine. Free, Free Palestine.

Male Speaker 5: Stanford University is evicting students who have been holding a sit-in protest on campus for the last 112 days. The students are protesting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and have refused to leave the white plaza.

Micah Loewinger: During protests at Brown University, the name of Palestinian American student Hisham Awartani is often invoked.

Protesters: Brown Corporation is a scam, no others like Hisham.

Micah Loewinger: Last November, Hisham was walking down the street in Vermont along with two of his friends, Kenan Abdul Hamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed. All three men grew up in the West Bank and came to the US for school. They were in Burlington for their Thanksgiving break.

Hisham Awartani: We walked downtown. We watched TV shows together. We messed around. It was fun. Young men.

Suzanne Gaber: The same thing you would've done at home in Palestine?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. Palestine has more to do but we managed to have fun.

Micah Loewinger: Our colleague, Suzanne Gaber, a producer with Notes from America, met with Hisham to learn about everything that followed.

Hisham Awartani: We were walking along the sidewalk and the guy comes down from the balcony and pulls out a gun and before I know what's happening, it's like I'm on the floor. I didn't know that I had been hit until I saw blood on my phone.

Female Speaker 3: Tonight, a gunman remains at large following the shooting of three college students in Burlington, Vermont, all of them of Palestinian descent. It happened--

Hisham Awartani: I ended up calling 911. I didn't know if I was going to survive. Didn't know if my friends were alive. The main thing I was afraid is, how much blood am I losing. Whatever. Is this how it ends? It was never outside of the realm of possibility for that to happen to me but I always expected it to be in the West Bank and never in Burlington.

Suzanne Gaber: When do you realize that you're also fairly injured?

Hisham Awartani: When the EMT people come. They tell me to move my legs and I realize that I couldn't.

[audio playing]

Suzanne Gaber: Hey.

Male Speaker 1: Hello.

Suzanne Gaber: I was just checking in to see Hisham Awartani.

Elevator: Sixth floor.

Female Speaker 1: Is this Suzanne?

Female Speaker 2: Hi, [crosstalk].

Female Speaker 3: Hi, I wanted to go with--

[end of audio]

Suzanne Gaber: I've been following Hisham's story for a while. From his very first statement just days after the attack. Hisham and his mom, Elizabeth have used their newfound platform to advocate for a focus on Palestinians in Gaza. It was a decision they came to very quickly. In part because Hisham has been able to process his own injuries at a speed that seems surprising for someone so young.

Hisham Awartani: It's I guess just growing up in the West Bank and growing up under occupation, just growing up Palestinian in general it's like you learn fairly quickly that life is absurd and you just have to suck it up and keep moving forward.

Elizabeth: My children are from-- we're from a background where we have resources in Palestine.

Suzanne Gaber: Elizabeth, who's Irish American, moved to Palestine right out of college. She met her husband there while in study abroad her junior year. She's an international development worker who has worked with refugees. She's lived in the West Bank for 25 years and she's raising three kids there.

Elizabeth: They go to a good school. They have education. They have opportunities to travel. I didn't think that they would be on the front lines. I didn't think that they would be targeted because I thought that they would be somewhere safe. I think one of the things that Hisham has found and the boys have found is that I think they're less traumatized. No, they have a different type of trauma obviously, but existentially, they're not shaken as they would've been if they had been someone who didn't grow up with this. He got shot in his knee with a rubber bullet and came home that night and we never knew anything had happened.

Suzanne Gaber: When did he get shot in the knee with a rubber bullet?

Elizabeth: About two years ago and we just found out.

Suzanne Gaber: You just found out?

Elizabeth: Yes. His friend, I don't know how this came up and his friend said, "Oh, yes, and of course, when he got shot in the knee." I'm like, "What?" He'd gone out to a protest and an Israeli military sniper had aimed his knee and I think at that protest, one of his friends was also shot in the leg with a live bullet. We were very lucky. I had no idea.

Suzanne Gaber: Did you intentionally keep that from her?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. She didn't have to know about that. I was fine in the end. It was a rubber bullet.

Suzanne Gaber: Those still hurt.

Hisham Awartani: It did hurt but I was fine.

Suzanne Gaber: What are you anticipating going back to school is like?

Hisham Awartani: Who knows? I'll try to keep a low profile but it's not that easy in a wheelchair.

Suzanne Gaber: It's also not that easy when you're now like a national news story.

Hisham Awartani: Yes. Especially on Brown campus.

Suzanne Gaber: Especially on Brown campus. You're right.

[crowd chanting]

Male Speaker 6: Tonight, Brown University students grappling with the shooting of one of their own.

Suzanne Gaber: Almost immediately after Hisham was shot, he'd become a symbol of Palestinian oppression and resistance for many at Brown University where he goes to school, which not everyone on the Providence Rhode Island campus had taken kindly to, including university president, Christina Paxson.

Christina Paxson: This is how you want to honor your friend?

Student: Palestinian students told you not divesting made them unsafe. What are you doing? Not divesting. Hisham was short because of your complicity.

Hisham Awartani: I don't like seeing my name plastered everywhere but I condone it in as much as using my name and my experience can elicit more of an emotional reaction and can get the point home better than just-- like it sucks to say, but people here find it hard to empathize with people in Gaza than they would me. Palestinians in Palestine the way that people excuse it is that they're always assumed to be a terrorist. Here it's just-- It's absurd to use the same logic that the Israeli army uses on me because I'm literally in Burlington, Vermont. You can't say he was trying to stab someone. You can't say he was part of a terrorist organization even though in so many of the cases, they'd shoot people unarmed or walking away or doing nothing.

Suzanne Gaber: We head out from the rehab facility to drive straight down to Brown and when we get to Providence, I meet Hisham at a cafe just around the corner from where his new dorm will be. How was the drive for you?

Hisham Awartani: It was good. First time being in a seat.

Suzanne Gaber: For the first time, I see a more open version of him. Genuinely, how are you feeling being here? I feel like this must be kind of, I wouldn't be able to answer.

Hisham Awartani: Yes, I take it one step at a time.

Suzanne Gaber: You might not be able to tell from his deadpan delivery, but Hisham loves making walking jokes now that he's in a wheelchair. As we sipped our coffee, we talked a lot about what his new life on campus would be. The attack left him with five classes with homework or exams that he needs to take before passing. His connection to Palestine and standing up for his community is central.

Hisham Awartani: The main thing I've been focusing on is the idea of the dehumanization of Palestinians. How I feel like in my case, it was one of the few cases where I was able to escape that. If I was shot in the West Bank, no one would care. Here is another American citizen being shot in the West Bank, and no one cared.

Suzanne Gaber: He's talking about Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, who had been killed in the West Bank while visiting family, just weeks before. Tawfic had grown up in Louisiana, but was just miles from Hisham's hometown of Ramallah when an IDF soldier fatally shot him.

Hisham Awartani: No, I remember looking up his name the first few days after he was killed, it was only Middle East Eye or Al Jazeera reporting on it. I remember there was an article. They go through three quarters of article of somebody talking about October 7th, and hostages, and Israeli army and their losses, and then like as an appendix, a small footnote was like, yes, they killed someone.

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Micah Loewinger: There were a flurry of stories about Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, the Louisiana teen killed in the West Bank, but Hisham is right, there's a ton more interest in his story. There's a feature about Hisham in The New York Times magazine this weekend, and a GoFundMe set up in his name that's raised over $1.5 million.

Hisham Awartani: In Gaza it's not over. I'm getting treatment, but if the same thing had happened to me there, I'd probably be carried around on a stretcher.

Suzanne Gaber: Is that a thing you've thought about a lot in this process?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. I'm very lucky.

Micah Loewinger: Hisham Awartani spoke to Suzanne Gaber for Notes from America, a show made at WNYC, our producing station. It's hosted by Kai Wright. You can listen to the show when it airs live every Sunday evening at 6:00 PM Eastern on stations across the country or on your podcast app of choice. Coming up is Media Bias in the Eye of the Beholder. This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. In early February, The Guardian ran a story about CNN staffers, who say that the news outlets internal editorial policies around the conflict in Israel and Palestine amount to "journalistic malpractice." Six staffers spoke anonymously and shared dozens of internal memos and emails, which showed that--

Staffer: Daily news decisions are shaped by directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, setting strict guidelines on coverage. Additionally, every story on the war must be green-lit by their Jerusalem bureau before it's published or makes air.

Micah Loewinger: The staffers claim that the very guardrails that CNN put up around reporting on this conflict to protect against perceptions of bias are actually perpetuating a pro-Israel bias. It's not just CNN. There are calls of bias from all quarters.

Female Speaker 4: There's a dehumanization, vilification, and demonization of the state of Israel, that is manifested in media bias against Israel.

Activist: The New York Times is manufacturing consent for genocide, and we're here to say, "Shame."

Crowd: Shame.

Jonathan Greenblatt: I love this show and I love this network, but I've got to ask, "Who is writing the scripts? Hamas?"

Micah Loewinger: In the first week after October 7th, the BBC received over 1,500 audience complaints about its coverage. Those complaints were evenly split between those who felt the coverage was biased against Israel and biased against Palestine, according to The Guardian. There is no shortage of outrage and critiques. What's lacking is a ton of credible data sets. There are some, but they're just snapshots of the media universe. It's difficult to get a complete picture of bias because the reporting is ongoing. It's happening as we talk about it.

We decided to look at a couple of the available studies. I began by speaking to William Youmans, a professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. Youmans reviewed 51 hours of television from NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, and Fox News's Sunday, between October 8th and January 14th. He says he plans to submit his study for peer review, but decided the need for his findings was too urgent to wait upwards of a year for an academic journal to share it with the public.

William Youmans: Part of why I rushed to publish these findings is because I saw so much chatter about bias that's very impressionistic, anecdotal, one-offs, but I wanted to conduct a systematic study.

Micah Loewinger: He wanted to understand what kind of people these shows were featuring to discuss the war.

William Youmans: Were they mostly pro-Palestinian, neutral, or pro-Israel? What was the framing that they used to talk about this issue? I wanted to see if the balance of framing was related to the balance of who gets invited as guests on these programs.

Micah Loewinger: What did you find?

William Youmans: I found that overwhelmingly, most of the guests were American, 120 out of 140. Of those guests, not one of them was Arab or Palestinian-American. The driver of the pro-Israeli arguments in these shows was US officials.

Martha Raddatz: For the latest on the conflict, we're joined now by Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

Presenter 1: We go now to White House National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

Presenter 2: Now, Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor with the Biden administration.

Presenter 3: Joining me now is John Kirby, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications. John, welcome.

William Youmans: Well, who were the 20 that were not American in terms of guests? Of those, half of them were Israelis, officials for the most part, and some of these were repeat guests, people from the Netanyahu administration or cabinet, or official spokespeople.

Micah Loewinger: Like Israeli diplomat, Michael Herzog.

Michael Herzog: We are not after innocent civilians. We are after the terrorists who've been hiding behind civilians.

William Youmans: I was surprised to find out that there was only one guest who was Palestinian, Husam Zomlot, who is the PA's representative to the UK.

Husam Zomlot: This is not A war against Hamas. It's clear since it started, it's a war against our people.

Micah Loewinger: He found that the guests were 4.6 times more likely to be sympathetic to Israel than Palestine. I asked him, "How do you measure something like that?"

William Youmans: Well, basically I use a five-point scale. That's acknowledging that someone could be pro-Israeli unconditionally. That means everything that they were saying was considered pro-Israeli. That would be something like, "Israel has a right to self-defense," or, "Israel's mission is to destroy Hamas." These are comments that are really aligned with what the Israeli government's saying. Something that would be very pro-Palestinian would say, "Palestinians are resisting against the military occupation." I would code that as very pro-Palestinian. Then there's neutral statements that are just descriptions of fact, that aren't evaluative statements that are meant to be more sympathetic to one side or the other.

Micah Loewinger: I'm sure there's some listeners who heard, "Israel's mission is to destroy Hamas," and they would say, "That's a fact."

William Youmans: Who is mostly getting killed in Gaza are Palestinians who are not members of Hamas. To assume that this is a correct framing and a factual framing embeds a certain degree of bias that reflects the Israeli government's talking points. Now, to be honest with you, I know that there would be concerns about this particular part of the study. Aware of that, I was very conservative in that I over-counted, if anything, what would be considered pro-Palestinian discourse.

For example, if they mentioned how many Palestinian casualties there were, I counted that as being pro-Palestinian, in sympathy, even though that would arguably be neutral. The reason why I coded it as that is because there is some debate about the statistics that have been given. There's been a demand on the Israeli side to identify the source is Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, even though the State Department relies on these statistics as well.

Micah Loewinger: Using the schema that you've described, you did an analysis of seven key words, occupation, hostages, Israel, Palestine or Palestinians, Hamas, ceasefire, and genocide. What did you find?

William Youmans: One key word, especially in the Palestinian narrative and the Palestinian explanation of what's happening, is the word occupation, in reference to Israel's military occupation, which began in 1967. A lot of pro-Israel advocates denied that Gaza was still under Israeli occupation.

Micah Loewinger: The Israeli government says that the occupation in Gaza ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew its troops. This week The Hague finished hearing testimony on this very subject, and will offer its opinion in due course. Though many organizations, including the Red Cross and the European Union say Gaza is still an occupied territory. Youmans agrees.

William Youmans: Israel still controlled what goes in and outside of Gaza, enforces through military means the defenses, and also doesn't let Palestinian fishermen go out into the water beyond a certain distance from the shoreline, and the airspace is completely controlled by Israel. Very effectively, it's a territory that does not have complete control over itself.

The word "occupation," which would be a key frame for understanding this was mentioned only 15 times in about 51 hours of television that I analyzed. This can only happen if you don't have any Palestinian guests on. There's a direct connection between who's booked as guests and what gets talked about.

I was also interested in the difference of distribution between talking about hostages versus talking about prisoners. The groups that took hostages explicitly said that they were taking hostages in order to have the prisoners released. There are thousands of Palestinian prisoners under Israeli custody. A lot of them aren't charged. They're just held in detention without any formal legal procedure or process. This is something that's been pointed out by human rights organizations.

Then a good number of those Palestinian prisoners were under the age of 18. Some of them are being held with charges. Some of them did commit crimes and were subject to legal process. Of course, those were mostly in military courts, which have a lot of fundamental problems with them in terms of rights to defendants, but Palestinians have used hostage-taking in order to try to secure freedom for Palestinian prisoners. What we heard though was talking about hostages on these shows in isolation, hostages were talked about 529 times but Palestinian prisoners were only mentioned 17 times.

Micah Loewinger: Youmans says that of the 51 segments he studied, the term ceasefire came up 94 times, and genocide was mentioned 23 times. He says only one of those times was it in reference to Gaza.

William Youmans: 20 of those times, it was guests talking about protest slogans for Palestinian freedom being equivalent to calls for Jewish genocide. In reference to "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," or "Free Palestine," guests on these programs equated those to calls for genocide.

Micah Loewinger: Youmans notes that his study didn't span the entire first news cycle of the International Court of Justice hearings when coverage focused on the question of genocide became more common.

William Youmans: Now ICJ preliminary rulings came out more on the tail end of my study, to be fair, but there were certainly claims circulating in the public sphere that there might be an unfolding genocide in Gaza. Yet it was completely absent from the discussion on these programs.

Micah Loewinger: Youmans sent me a link to a 2012 book by Shraga Simmons, co-founder of HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog group. The book titled David and Goliath, alleges that liberal American media have used an underdog narrative to highlight the plight of Palestinians and vilify Israelis, which speaks to one of the major challenges of studying bias in media, especially on this topic, what's known as the hostile media effect.

William Youmans: Hostile media effect is basically a theory about perceptions of bias and it says that those who perceive bias are themselves biased in their own way and that affects how they perceive bias.

Micah Loewinger: The term comes from a 1985 study in which pro-Israel and pro-Arab students at Stanford were asked to review news stories about the conflict. After watching the same news coverage, both groups of students said that the coverage was biased against their side. Youmans says by studying media coverage in the aggregate and encouraging other scholars to scrutinize his research, he thinks it's possible to overcome the hostile media effect.

William Youmans: That's how you protect against your bias shaping research too much but I would also point out that there is still an underlying reality and sometimes the underlying reality is itself in a way biased against the perspectives of one group or the other.

Micah Loewinger: What do you say to listeners right now who might be thinking that your study is, in fact, anti-Israel?

William Youmans: It's not anti-Israel to say that there needs to be more perspectives than just the Israeli perspective. To me, this is about are the US media doing what's journalistically appropriate in presenting a diverse array of viewpoints or are they overwhelmingly presenting one set of standpoints that would be more sympathetic to Israel. I found, unfortunately, overwhelming evidence for the latter.

Micah Loewinger: William, thank you very much.

William Youmans: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: William Youmans is an associate professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. So far, we've heard about the Sunday morning talk shows. According to data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi, the language and framing used in straight news reports likely plays the greatest role in shaping impressions of the war.

Male Speaker 7: The Pulitzer Prize for illustrative reporting and commentary, Mona Chalabi, contributor, The New York Times.

Micah Loewinger: When Chalabi took the stage on October 19th, to accept her Pulitzer Prize, she called out other journalists who had been referring that evening to the Israel-Gaza war.

Mona Chalabi: I don't think it's the Israel-Gaza war. I think it's the Israel-Palestine war. No one in this room is willing to mention the P word and I think it's really important. I'm sorry, I know I'm not supposed to make speeches here but it felt important.

Micah Loewinger: How did they respond when you said that?

Mona Chalabi: It was awkward. It was really awkward. Why isn't this being framed as the Israel-Palestine war? To do so, would be to use the word Palestine, which is not recognized in journalistic style books as a legitimate word for journalists to use. That in itself is a deeply bias choice.

Micah Loewinger: Mere hours before the Pulitzer ceremony, she posted a chart on Instagram where she now has half a million followers, an illustration depicting mentions of Israeli and Palestinian deaths in The New York Times. The data came from Holly Jackson, a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley. You created visualizations of two main trends from the Holly Jackson data. The first is a graph showing that The New York Times consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths from October 7th to the 18th, even as more Palestinians were dying.

In the graphs, it's striking. You can see the mentions of Israeli and Palestinian deaths following similar trajectories. We see a trend of when there's an article talking about deaths in the war. The articles appear to be at the same time mentioning Israeli deaths and Palestinian deaths, even as Palestinian deaths way outpaced Israeli deaths. Can you just tell me a little bit about how you approached illustrating this data?

Mona Chalabi: The issue here is disproportionality. To cite the fact that Israeli deaths are mentioned more often than Palestinian deaths isn't inherently in itself problematic. It's problematic because Palestinian deaths are occurring at a far higher rate and pace right now than Israeli deaths. The chart was trying to show both things at once, which is relatively complex. I was actually worried when I would publish this, that it might not fully resonate.

It's two-line charts. It's both boring and confusing. I don't normally use these kind of styles of visual depiction but it felt also really important to me to not use my hand-drawn methods that I use elsewhere that imply sometimes, in precision, and they play in precision deliberately. But actually, counterintuitively, this research is much more robust than, for example, I don't know I'm thinking of another piece that I'm working on right now, which is just surveying how many Americans take acid or take hallucinogens. That polling data has a high degree of imprecision. The research that Holly Jackson has done is undeniable. She has literally taken all of the articles that appear on The New York Times website and counted all of these mentions. It felt really important to me to actually rely on more traditional methods of data visualization.

Micah Loewinger: She says she pitched this analysis to The New York Times and was rejected. In late December, she illustrated more research, this time from Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, who scraped language from 600 articles and 4,000 posts on the BBC website.

Mona Chalabi: In BBC reporting, Israelis were far more likely to be described as murdered, massacred, slaughtered than Palestinians. There were 23 times that Israelis were described as being massacred and only occurred once for Palestinians. The term slaughtered was used 20 times to describe Israeli deaths and zero times to describe Palestinian deaths.

Micah Loewinger: The Intercept found a similar pattern in its review of The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times. "The term slaughter was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians, 60 to 1, and massacre was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians, 125 to 2. Horrific was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4."

Mona Chalabi: Similarly, by the way, when BBC reporting, Israelis were more likely to be humanized in the reporting. Israelis would be described as mothers, grandmothers, daughters, fathers, husbands, sons.

Micah Loewinger: I'm looking at your post here. The term mother or grandmother was used 51 times to 32 times for Israelis versus Palestinians. Daughter and granddaughter was used 35 times to describe Israelis, 15 for Palestinians. The term father and grandfather was used 33 times for Israelis, 9 for Palestinians. Husband 30 times to 5 times for Palestinians. Son/grandson was used 25 times to 11 times for Palestinians.

Mona Chalabi: Those numbers might not sound that high, which was my first instinct when hearing them but when you take into account that by the end of December, maybe 20 times more Palestinians had been killed than Israelis and yet the numbers are still lower for the Palestinian side to use these descriptors that basically lend humanity to somebody who has died.

The nature of the reporting on this has also been that Israel has stopped journalists from entering Gaza to be able to report on this. There is fundamentally an informational asymmetry that is baked in that replicates and mirrors these patterns of bias that aren't necessarily about the nefarious intent of the person that has the byline. It's also that they have access to a different degree of information in reporting on these deaths.

Micah Loewinger: CNN's Clarissa Ward is one of the only reporters who was granted brief access to Gaza without an IDF escort. She wrote a Washington Post op-ed in January calling on Israel to allow other journalists in.

Clarissa Ward: This was our first time being able to gain access into Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: Clarissa Ward on CNN.

Clarissa Ward: You have a perfect storm here with massive bombardment, an inability to create safe zones, an inability to get humanitarian access where it's needed, and incredibly brave journalists who are doing everything they can to tell the stories and bring the reality to the world but the frustration of international journalists who can't get in to try to complement and supplement their efforts.

Micah Loewinger: This week, more than 55 foreign correspondents signed a letter asking for Israel and Egypt to lift their restrictions and allow journalists into Gaza. When asked about [unintelligible 00:30:10] peace on Israel's Channel 13, a reporter said this.

Male Speaker 8: [foreign language]

Micah Loewinger: If indeed Western reporters begin to enter Gaza, then for sure, this will be a big headache for Israel and Israeli Hasbara. Hasbara, by the way, means explanation in Hebrew, but in practice, it's shorthand for pro-Israel propaganda.

Micah Loewinger: All this at a time when Palestinian journalists in Gaza are being killed at an alarming rate, Mona Chalabi told me she stands behind her decision to criticize the coverage she's seeing in mainstream outlets, though it's come at a professional cost.

Mona Chalabi: Yes. I haven't been commissioned once since October except to write a single opinion piece, which was canceled after I refused to write from the perspective of being an Arab Muslim woman. That is not the perspective that I'm doing this journalism from. I'm doing this journalism from a perspective, which is my perspective on every single article that I write, which is how can I report on this accurately, honestly, and fairly.

Micah Loewinger: Mona, thank you very much.

Mona Chalabi: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Mona Chalabi is a data journalist and illustrator. We requested comment from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, the BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. Most did not respond. A New York Times spokesperson said that, "We have documented the death toll. The Israeli response has visited on the civilians of Gaza. Our coverage bears witness to the unfolding atrocities and brings readers firsthand accounts from Palestinians and Israelis."

A Washington Post spokesperson responded that, "The Washington Post has consistently published balanced and sophisticated coverage of the complex Middle East War over the past months, in both its news and opinion reporting." A BBC spokesperson said that, "The BBC has made clear the devastating human cost to civilians living in Gaza and Israel. We do not think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words used and do not believe this analysis demonstrates bias." For the full statements, head to onthemedia.org.

Coming up, journalist Mehdi Hasan on how to change up the guest list on Cable News. This is On The Media. This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Up until January of this year, Mehdi Hasan was the host of his own MSNBC show. As his peers in Cable News invited government spokespeople to list off talking points, Hasan interrogated them like his 2021 interview with then-Israeli embassy spokesman Elad Strohmayer.

Mehdi Hasan: How would you describe these quotes from the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King, who told The New York Times on Friday that these evictions are, "Of course, part of a wider strategy of installing layers of Jews," his words, "throughout East Jerusalem." Okay, it's not apartheid. What would you call that

Micah Loewinger: On the Israel-Palestine conflict, in particular, Hasan had a knack for skewering the pageantry of diplomacy in the region.

Mehdi Hasan: Former Israeli generals and liberal Israeli journalists finally come round to seeing how badly the Palestinians have been mistreated. We have liberal Democrats from the United States, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, to do fawning photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Micah Loewinger: In February of 2022, he covered a story largely ignored by US Cable News, the beating and death of 78-year-old Omar Assad at the hands of Israeli police.

Mehdi Hasan: The man was detained, taken to an abandoned yard, blindfolded, handcuffed, gagged, and forced to lie on his stomach until he died of a cardiac arrest.

Micah Loewinger: Hasan says his goal, in part, was to make his audience pay attention to issues beyond the borders of the US and to speak with people they don't often see on American TV.

Mehdi Hasan: The week of the Afghan withdrawal, when Kabul fell, it was August 2021, first year of Biden's presidency. It was nonstop rolling coverage across our media. It was on the front page of newspapers. It was one of the rare moments where foreign policy, foreign news really dominated American media. I happened to be guest hosting for Chris Hayes on primetime MSNBC that week. It was a really great opportunity to say, "Okay. I've got this primetime real estate. Let's do something a little bit different to everyone else. Everyone else has the usual foreign policy experts from the DC foreign policy blob on. Let's get some Afghan voices on. Let's get some people from on the ground. Let's get people with skin in the game. Let's get famous Afghan novelists. Let's get Afghan women's rights activists. Let's hear from people who are not heard from in Western media."

Micah Loewinger: How did people react to that?

Mehdi Hasan: Very positively. This is what's so interesting when you do this stuff, it's not like your ratings go down, or people call you and tell you off, or people say, this is boring. In fact, the opposite. People say, "This is a breath of fresh air."

Micah Loewinger: You grill people. You have a very confrontational style. Not always. It seems like it's deployed carefully and deliberately. Is it something you've had to develop throughout your career?

Mehdi Hasan: My parents and my sister would say it's something I've always had, even at the dinner table as a child, probably argued over who would pass the bread and et cetera. Look, I wrote a book on this as well, literally called Win Every Argument, which tells the story of how I became obsessed with arguing and debating and discussing, both, which I think is fun, but also because I think it's actually very important. I actually think it's an important part of democracy, and it's vital to a free press and a media that's willing to hold power to account.

I appreciate your kind words about the grilling, but those grillings are not easy. We have to make sure we've done our homework. When we're interviewing, for example, Mark Regev, the Prime Minister spokesman who I interviewed MSNBC, it's really important to think, "Okay, what is the game plan? What has this guest been saying elsewhere? What have they dodged answering?" Then, really honing in on that and having a set of questions and follow-ups and facts and figures that really brings to light issues that need to be brought to light. We're not just doing this for the heat. People say, "Light versus heat." I like both. I don't think we should have to choose between the two.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Let's dig into the interview that you did with Ambassador Mark Regev. This is a spokesman and advisor for Benjamin Netanyahu. You spoke to him in November. It was one of your last really big grill interviews.

Mehdi Hasan: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: He had been on so many outlets and many since CNN, BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg, but your interview felt different because of how you pushed even as he tried to wriggle out of your questions.

Mehdi Hasan: I have a lot of respect for Mark Regev, not for what he says. I think he tends to dissemble like a lot of spokespersons, but I have respect for him as a media performer. I've been watching him since I was a very young man. He was ambassador to the UK. He was a spokesman on UK media when I was coming up in the UK media in the 2000s. He goes back a long way, and I hadn't really seen anyone make any kind of dent in his armor. Apart from there's a guy called Jon Snow who retired in the UK, very famous anchor. He did a very powerful interview with Regev and one of the previous Gaza conflicts, but that aside, I'd never really seen anyone corner him.

He's very eloquent. He's very sharp. He's very savvy. He's very knowledgeable. We took this interview very seriously, and one of the things we wanted to get from that interview is the Israelis, through their PR campaign, seem to be saying things that are not true, demonstrably false statements. Let's challenge him on those.

Micah Loewinger: Two of those specifics were tweets, material that IDF spokespeople and Israeli government spokespeople had put out on Twitter and that were widely circulated. One of them was a video of an IDF spokesperson. He was in one of the hospitals in Gaza, and he walks by a calendar.

IDF spokesperson: This is a guarding list. Every terrorist has his own shift.

Mehdi Hasan: In this room. He says a guard list that begins October 7th.

Micah Loewinger: Very quickly, it was fact-checked to just be a calendar with Arabic text.

Mehdi Hasan: CNN and Nic Robertson aired that unchallenged on air. Big mistake by a media organization here. I think they corrected the record later, but it was really bad and completely wrong and false. I was able to confront Regev on that.

[video playing]

Mark Regev: I'm not sure that's true.

Mehdi Hasan: Why did your military spokesman on Monday point to a calendar in Arabic and say, "These are the names of terrorists on them? That's false. Can you accept that here and now?"

Mark Regev: I am not aware of the incident so I cannot comment on it.

Mehdi Hasan: Let's put up the image. We have the image. You have no comment--

Mark Regev: I couldn't read Arabic. It doesn't help me. I have no comment. I am not familiar with the incident.

Mehdi Hasan: Does your spokesman read Arab?

Mark Regev: I have a question, Mehdi. You're a journalist. Have you made a professional mistake ever? Not intentionally, but have you made a professional mistake?

Mehdi Hasan: Exactly, and I own up to it.

Mark Regev: Have you made a mistake? Can--

Mehdi Hasan: Can you own up to the mistake now?

Mark Regev: I've made mistakes, you've made mistakes, but there's a difference between making an honest mistake and between Hamas that deliberately exaggerates numbers to suit its propaganda purposes. There's a huge difference.

Mehdi Hasan: Sir, hold on. You said propaganda--

[end of video]

Mehdi Hasan: I felt in the moment, wow. I've never heard Mark Rege say on air that they got something wrong.

Micah Loewinger: He only said that after many follow-up questions.

Mehdi Hasan: Follow-ups are key, Micah. Follow-ups are the key. The other issue was this colleague who had put out a video from a Lebanese documentary behind the scenes claiming it was Palestinians pretending to be injured in Gaza. When I challenged him on that, he said, "Look, Alpha--" I think the guy's name is Alpha, "Alpha, is a good guy and maybe a mistake, and we'll get it fixed." Interestingly, that night, that tweet disappeared. They took it down. A small win, but a win nevertheless against Mark Regev and against the Israeli PR machine.

Micah Loewinger: In the aftermath of October 7th, you spoke with multiple Israelis with relatives who had been killed or captured. I want to talk to you about your interview with Maoz Inon.

Mehdi Hasan: That was the first show that we were able to put on air after October the 7th. There had been a bit of a gap where we were off air, and I was very keen to speak to an Israeli family member because October 7th, what happened was grotesque and appalling and very different to previous episodes in this conflict. Just the sheer volume of Israeli deaths unprecedented and Maoz was fascinating because I'm always fascinated by ordinary people who do extraordinary things. I always look in people and say, "Well, I wouldn't be able to do that."

Micah Loewinger: That's very TV news of you.

Mehdi Hasan: It is TV news of me, but it's also just who I am. I'll tell you honestly right now, if Hamas killed my parents or if the Israeli military killed my parents, I would not behave as magnanimously as some Palestinians and Israelis have in this conflict.

Micah Loewinger: I think you said that to him, right?

Mehdi Hasan: It was amazing in that moment to hear him speak in that way. I just got stunned because he's all about peace, he's all about forgiveness, he's all about not shedding more blood in order to avenge the blood of his parents.

Maoz Inon: I beg you Mehdi, cry with me. Cry with me and our tears will heal the wounds from both sides. Our tears will wash the blood from the ground and then on the pure land of the Holy Land, we'll be able to see the path to peace.

Mehdi Hasan: It's a heartbreaking story but also he's a deeply inspiring man and since that interview, by the way, Micah, he's been I think at times camped outside parliament or the Prime Minister's home, I can't remember where, but he's been doing physical protests of his own standing up and calling out other Israelis.

Micah Loewinger: I found this interview so powerful. I actually was watching it this morning and I started crying, I think, because as a Jew, it just made me remember the horrors of that day, but also how little time it felt like we had to process it before the bombing in Gaza began. Just as you mentioned, this man's moral clarity in this moment where he could have very easily just not willingly put himself in the spotlight and taken an unpopular stance against more bloodshed. In that same segment, you aired a montage of several other people like him. Family members of victims who are saying, "Do not use my loss as a justification for more war."

Mehdi Hasan: It's so important for us as journalists, to give voice to these people because the worst thing you can do as a journalist is to present communities as monoliths, to present issues as one-sided, to pretend there is no debate or discussion where there is actually plenty.

Micah Loewinger: Did you have a guiding philosophy in covering this conflict?

Mehdi Hasan: For me, something that I've always found valuable is the old line that the job of a journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Too often, we reverse that. We're too cozy with people in power. We're not tough enough. I think that was one important issue for me but more importantly, and I've said this many times, context matters. For a lot of American journalists and a lot of American news audiences, Israel-Palestine began on October the 7th. That's hugely problematic because, of course, it didn't. There is a context to what happened on October the 7th. Again, context is not causation, context is not justification, context is explanation. When you explain something, it doesn't mean you justify.

Anytime you talk about context, someone says, "Ah, you're saying what Hamas did was justified?" No, of course not. Of course, it wasn't justified, but to understand where it came from, you have to understand the occupation. You have to understand the siege of Gaza. You have to understand a right-wing Israeli government's militaristic and nationalistic mentality and ideology. You have to understand what Palestinians are going through. You have to understand America's role in all of this.

Micah Loewinger: How do you think journalists writ large, the media writ large, has covered this war now five months in?

Mehdi Hasan: Abysmally. This is one of the great crimes of our time. The International Court of Justice says this is a plausible genocide. Multiple human rights groups have documented war crimes and crimes against humanity. Micah, just for context, the week we're speaking, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has come out and said this is a situation of genocide in Gaza. The Israelis are deliberately starving the people of Gaza. He says and I quote, "Never has a civilian population got so hungry so fast so completely." That is the context of what is happening right now and when you look at what is happening and then look at the media coverage, of course, there's a mismatch, there's a failure.

Micah Loewinger: What is the failure? Give me some specifics.

Mehdi Hasan: I'll give you some big picture and some specifics. Big picture failure is we're not covering enough. We're not covering it consistently. We cover Ukraine with much more moral clarity than we cover Gaza so there's a double standard at play. In terms of specific examples, we're cowards. Journalists are scared. Scared of being attacked as anti-Israeli or antisemitic. Scared of being pressurized by bosses or lobbying groups and therefore journalists are pulling their punches. You can just see in the coverage of not just American organizations, the BBC has come in for a lot of flack for always using the passive voice.

I saw someone joking on Twitter, "Find someone who looks at you the way the BBC looks with a passive voice on Gaza." There's a meme showing how media organizations would cover other major events in the way they cover Gaza. The joke being, "If 9/11 was covered the way Gaza was covered, the headline would be Building Collapses." I read a BBC Online story the other day, Micah, where it took till the 32nd paragraph to identify the fact that the guy in the story who says he's lost 103 family members, 103 killed, it took till the 32nd paragraph of the piece, for the reporter to identify that the Israelis may have been responsible for those 103 deaths. Now, that's a complete dereliction of duty.

I also think the way we've cut editorial corners in our reporting, I don't know if you're following this week the big story out of The New York Times, where their big investigation into whether Hamas had used sexual violence as a weapon of war, huge claim, a huge story that many Israelis used to justify bombing Gaza. That turns out one of the co-authors of that story is being investigated by The Times for liking genocidal tweets. What was she doing bylining a front page globally acclaimed investigation into October the 7th?

Micah Loewinger: You are also now a regular Guardian columnist. I'm going to ask you about your first piece that you published for The Guardian last week. You argue that President Biden could stop the bombardment of Gaza right now if he wanted to.

Mehdi Hasan: I wanted to make the case that actually, there's a lot an American president can do. I started The Guardian column by telling the story of what happened in 1982 in Beirut when the Israelis were besieging Beirut, killing hundreds of Arab civilians in Beirut in an effort to try and root out and defeat the PLO, the Hamas of its time, who were also hiding in tunnels under Beirut. Ronald Reagan saw pictures of children with their limbs missing, and Ronald Reagan of all people, a president who I'm not a fan of, was horrified. Calls up Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, very right-wing, the Netanyahu of his time, and says, "Menachem, we're witnessing a holocaust here." Reagan uses the H-word and Begin gets upset. He sarcastically says to Reagan, "I think I know what a holocaust is." Reagan says, "Look, we need a ceasefire." Begin calls him back 20 minutes later and says, "It's over."

Of course, no two historical situations are alike, we're in a very different place today. October 7th has made the Israeli assault much harder to stop both within Israel and internationally, that's understandable, Joe Biden isn't Ronald Reagan, but my point in the piece was to say American presidents have huge leverage. In fact, Biden in 2021, was able to stop Netanyahu when he was doing a bombing campaign of Gaza at the time. He called him up and said, "There's no runway left it's over," and Netanyahu stopped.

Micah Loewinger: This narrative that you point out, the limits of leverage, is a storyline and a phrase that we've heard from American officials and from print outlets, I heard it on TV.

Male Speaker 9: We do have leverage over the Israelis, but I think what we're seeing is that that leverage is limited. President Biden--

Male Speaker 10: Honestly, I'm a little skeptical. I think the US has limited leverage.

Male Speaker 11: I think President Biden has leverage. It's probably limited leverage given--

Micah Loewinger: Break it down. What leverage does the US have and why, in your opinion, is it enough to pause violence?

Mehdi Hasan: Don't take my word for it, don't listen to Mehdi Hasan on American Radio, listen to Israeli military officials, I cite them in the piece. Defense Minister Gallant, who said at the start of the conflict, when Likud lawmakers were outraged that Israelis were allowing even a little bit of humanitarian aid into Gaza. What did Gallant say? He said, "The Americans give us our planes and our weaponry. What am I supposed to say to them? No?"

There's a former Israeli general who I cite in The Guardian piece, Itzhak Brik, if I remember his name correctly, who said, again, in an interview later on, I think a month later, he said, "Everyone knows we can't do anything without the Americans. We can't fight this war without America. They could turn off the tap at any time." This is what Israeli military officials are saying, that they can't do this war without American military and financial and logistical support. Why are we not using our leverage and why is Joe Biden risking re-election for Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich?

Micah Loewinger: Is anyone in the press covering the war well? Who do you think is doing a good job?

Mehdi Hasan: I do think there are some journalists who are doing good jobs. First of all, I would say journalists on the ground. A lot of the brave reporters, especially the Palestinian reporters, that's first thing. Second thing, there's been a lot of great reporters. Some of our foreign correspondents, some of the British crew at Sky News have done a great job on the ground reporting. At home, in terms of Cable world, I would do a shout-out to former Cable colleagues of mine like Ayman Mohyeldin, Ali Velshi, Chris Hayes, Joy Reid.

I don't know if you saw Joy's interview recently with a friend of mine who just came back from Gaza, Dr. Irfan Galaria, who's a plastic surgeon who volunteered in Gaza, talked about the annihilation he saw. The kids killed, shot by snipers. She did a very powerful, very human, very touching, very emotional interview with him. There are people trying to highlight human stories, trying to highlight the human suffering, but they're too few and far between, sadly.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi, thank you very much.

Mehdi Hasan: Thank you, Micah. I appreciate it.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi Hasan is editor-in-chief and CEO of a new media company called Zeteo. He's also a columnist for The Guardian US and a former MSNBC host. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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