Media Demands

Western media is not only implicated in the genocide unfolding in Gaza through its double standards against Palestinians, but through its deep institutional complicity and collusion with the governments that are funding and committing this genocide. In light of this, and in the lead-up to the planned International Shutdown on Thursday, November 9, the Palestine movement, calls on (1) media workers’ unions, (2) non-union media formations, and (3) individual media workers to:

  1. Organize strikes, resignations, protests, or other acts of disruption to demand fair coverage and honest reporting on Palestine. 

  2. Become or work with whistleblowers to expose the systems and persons complicit in manufacturing consent for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 

  3. Use their considerable public platforms in video, print, audio, and social media to publish stories about Gaza, speak truth to power, challenge misinformation, reject anti-Palestinian racism, and condemn the targeting and killing of Palestinian journalists and their families.

  4. Demand an end to journalistic malpractice with regards to Palestine, including war crime denialism, state stenography, fact omission, fabrication, passive voice, deliberate undermining of Palestinian interviewees, and the use of dehumanizing language and racist and Islamophobic tropes.

  5. Demand that newsrooms insist that their foreign correspondents be let into Gaza as well as trust the expertise of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who risk their lives to provide real-time coverage and analysis of the Israeli army’s atrocities.

  6. Replace pernicious and reductive media framings like “Israel-Hamas war”, “Hamas-run hospital”, “clashes”, etc., with accurate and truthful language that highlights the context of Israel’s decades-long siege of Gaza, including “genocide,” “blockade,” “occupation,” and/or “Israel’s assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.”

  7. Demand an end to all recrimination against media workers advocating in solidarity with the Palestinian people and enact protections that safeguard them from disciplinary action.

  8. Publish the names of Palestinian victims—women, children, and especially men (who are often rendered ungrievable) whose numbers are reaching 10,000 and rapidly increasing every hour, with hundreds, if not thousands, still under the rubble.