Five Questions On The Media’s Coverage Of Israel’s War In Gaza

by Bridge Initiative Team

June 27, 2024

In Episode 15 of “Unpacking Islamophobia,” our guest is Emmy Award-winning journalist Laila Al-Arian who is the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a Peabody Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Award in journalism, Overseas Press Club award, National Headliner Award, and has been nominated for 19 News and Documentary Emmys for her work in journalism.

Al-Arian begins by discussing the similarities and differences between how she believes Israel’s war in Gaza has been covered by American and western media outlets. “Well, you don’t actually have to be a journalist to see that there are some major problems with the western media coverage of what’s happening in Gaza,” she began. After October 7, 2023, she noted that western media outlets began “disseminating unverified sensationalist allegations and reporting them as fact” making it hard to discern fact from fiction. According to her, whenever the right-wing Netanyahu government would push out a narrative, it was not long before Western media outlets began amplifying those narratives “based on misinformation, disinformation, or straight-up propaganda campaigns.”

She also discusses the staggering number of journalists who have been killed during the war. As of June 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that at least 108 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ started gathering data in 1992. “Journalists in Gaza say they are being targeted when they wear their press vests and their helmets when they’re visually identifiable as journalists,” Al-Arian noted. “We saw that with the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. We see that with journalists in Gaza who say we can no longer feel safe wearing our press vests because we believe that that actually puts us at risk.”

Al-Arian concludes her interview on biased media coverage during the war in Gaza by somberly noting that, “Often times the western media does not hold Palestinian lives and Israeli lives equally. There’s this inherent kind of suggestion that they’re not equal in value, that Israeli lives matter more than Palestinian lives. You see that with sort of the normalization of Palestinian death” today.

Featuring

Laila Al-Arian is a Washington DC-based journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an
award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has produced
documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to
the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into factory
conditions producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. For her work,
she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a Peabody Award, a
Robert F Kennedy Award in journalism, Overseas Press Club award, National Headliner
Award, and has been nominated for 19 News and Documentary Emmys. Prior to joining Fault Lines, Laila worked for Al Jazeera English’s news department, covering everything from Guantanamo Bay’s youngest detainee to the re-settlement of Iraqi refugees in the U.S. She received a BA in English literature from Georgetown University and an M.S. from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Independent, and other publications, and she is co-author of the book Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

Arsalan Iftikhar is Senior Researcher for the Bridge Initiative at the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Arsalan is a prominent human rights lawyer, an internationally recognized researcher on the topic of Islamophobia, and a global media commentator. He is the author of several books including FEAR OF A MUSLIM PLANET: Global Islamophobia in the New World Order and Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms which President Jimmy Carter called “an important book that shows Islamophobia must be addressed urgently”. Throughout his career, Arsalan has been a regular on-air commentator for National Public Radio (NPR) and his interviews have appeared on prominent global media outlets like CNN, Al-Jazeera English, BBC World News, The Economist, New York Times, Rolling Stone, NBC News “Meet The Press” & many more. A native of Chicago, Arsalan was awarded the 2013 Distinguished Young Alumni Award from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where he received both his undergraduate and law degrees.