CNN staffers are upset with the outlet’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, the Guardian reported this week. A “systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” one staffer said, has led to journalistic malpractice.
Journalists’ main source of outrage is that CNN editors have restricted reporters from quoting Hamas but have allowed writers to quote the Israeli government. Hamas statements are “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda,” CNN’s senior director of news standards and practices David Lindsay said in November, to which one staffer said that Israeli statements could be labeled the same. An internal memo told writers to cover the war by “[reminding] our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians.”
“How else are editors going to read that other than as an instruction that no matter what the Israelis do, Hamas is ultimately to blame? Every action by Israel — dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families — the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,” one staffer told the Guardian.
If that was the newsroom’s takeaway from editorial guidance, CNN’s higher-ups should be applauded for their moral clarity. Hamas did have it coming when they marched into Israel on October 7 and slaughtered families, kidnapped babies, and raped women. To suggest that innocent Palestinian civilians, on the other hand, “had it coming” would be egregious. And, of course, no one does suggest that. But Israel’s counterattack was in fact the result of Hamas’s attack.
The outlet should also give proper airtime to Hamas’s statements and claims, CNN staffers said, even if Hamas exaggerates or lies — as Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen did in 1997 when they interviewed Osama bin Laden. But the media landscape was different then. Bergen, Arnett, and photographer Peter Jouvenal were blindfolded and taken into a cave to conduct the interview. So, a little more high-stakes than picking up a statement from a Hamas spokesman on Twitter; it’s easier now for journalists and spokesmen alike to publish propaganda. Bergen also pitched the interview to CNN and spent weeks in London with bin Laden’s media team to build up trust, he has said. As it stands, CNN editors have not banned interviews with Hamas leaders; a journalist would just have to pitch, plan, and clear the hit.
As a point of interest: Arnett in 2003 hopped on state-controlled Iraqi TV to bash Bush’s administration at the onset of the Iraq war. NBC fired him. Media Research Center‘s Tim Graham wrote for us at the time:
The imbalance of media criticism right now is leveled at the embedded correspondents, caricatured by reporter-activists like Time veteran Eugene Linden as government stooges, men and women who have “jumped into this leash like golden retrievers eager to be walked.” But the American people are much more concerned about stooge-reporters in Baghdad who’d rather have the dateline in the Iraqi capital than tell the truth. Arnett’s firing is correcting this imbalance.
The Stalin-style regime of Saddam Hussein is not interested in “independent” journalism that tells the truth. They kicked out willing helpers like those from Arnett’s last home, CNN, who arrived in Jordan still stressing moral equivalence — producer Ingrid Formanek told viewers “all sides want to control the media as much as possible and that goes for the Iraqis, as well as the Americans.”
Weathered editors now have lots of experience reporting on terrorism. I imagine many of them, including some at CNN, remember the point above: Best not to be walked by terrorists.