Wael Al-Dahdouh: ‘The Mainstream Media failed Gaza’

Veteran journalist Wael al-Dahdouh has launched a scathing attack on the mainstream media’s “deficient” and “biased” coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

On a visit to London on September 03, organized by Amnesty International, 55-year-old al-Dahdouh spoke to Declassified about his experience of reporting from Gaza, where more than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last two years.

Reflecting on how Western media outlets covered the same events, he said: “They all capitulated to the Israeli narrative and adopted it without challenge, without interrogation, without fact-checking or a semblance of impartiality.

“These are our industry colleagues around the world from news organizations and institutions that we’ve looked up to and respected throughout our lives. 

“They all pride themselves on being apparent shining embodiments and benchmarks of journalistic integrity, transparency, truthfulness – that’s what we were told all these years. 

“But that very notion has collapsed completely. They were all proven deficient. We were let down. 

“They saw what’s happening to us; the killing, the maiming, the wholesale destruction. This is a campaign of aggression of historic magnitude, a calamity that has befallen more than two million besieged people. 

“Journalists were duty-bound to rise to this cause for humanity. They did not.”

Asked whether he was surprised at how the Western media ecosystem so uniformly treated Israel’s conduct as legitimate self-defence, he invoked an Arabic saying, ‘see with only one eye and hear with only one ear’. 

He explained its meaning: “You don’t give consideration to the rounded perspective in a balanced way and instead let biases and pre-established ideas shape your understanding. It was painful to endure.” 

Especially, he added, “because the coverage and the scenes from Gaza, of endless massacres, of extermination, were as raw as they were instant. There was no excuse not to showcase the horrors to the world in an undiluted fashion.” 

Even at this point, when asked what journalists can concretely do, he identifies an important juncture: “Journalists need to first and foremost be steadfast in their understanding of this as a genocide, as war crimes, and a deliberate campaign of erasure. That is the starting point, and without it, everything else is redundant.”

Hamza Yusuf is a British-Palestinian writer and journalist whose work focuses on Palestine. He has reported on daily life under occupation for Palestinians, including home demolitions and forced expulsion, and the conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

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