Muna Khan
Published August 17, 2025
DAWN
The writer is an instructor of journalism.
ONE of the hardest things about solidarity is actually doing it versus the social media hashtag variety, ie, doing it for optics, like keyboard activism. The hard part consists of getting out to the press club every day, as we did, for example, when Gen Musharraf pulled the plug on Geo in 2007. I remember my two female colleagues from this paper and I going to the press club together to protest and then going to two police stations to check on our colleagues who had courted arrest. It did not matter that Geo was a competitor or that the young girls who also courted arrest were at another paper. The issue of freedom of press was far more important.
The channel would shut down again a decade later, but this time, there wasn’t as much solidarity. A lot had changed, mainly the fissures within press organisations, the co-opting of journalists into regimes to push narratives, along with a lot of repression and censure. People forget that you couldn’t say ‘establishment’ in the PTI government whereas that word is freely bandied about. This isn’t to suggest things are rosy as much as to say they’ve never not been.
Today, you only care about a person you define as a journalist because you subscribe to their viewpoint. That journalists have viewpoints and may as well be known as party spokespersons is the problem right there. Partisanship panders itself as news.
This is not unique to Pakistan. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025, global trust in the media is declining rapidly. More people are dependent on social media and video platforms for their news. Online personalities and influencers shape public opinion now. I was most disturbed to read that 58 per cent of respondents (across 48 markets where the report was conducted) said “they feel unsure about their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood in online news”.
We have to find ways to preserve journalism.
This is where the hard work comes in. As journalists, we must stand by the very people we know are peddling falsehoods and benefiting monetarily from disinformation. Removing them from screens violates the provision of freedom of speech so we must stand for the principle. Because it can happen to us.
Imagine then the deafening silence from the West after Israel killed Gaza-based Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues, wiping out the entire Al Jazeera team there in the process. There is no justification for killing a journalist but this one in particular deserves the strongest condemnation from every single press organisation, politician, president, prime minister etc. But it has been slow to come because Israel said Anas was with Hamas.
We have reached new levels of ludicrousness and very few are calling it such.
“Frankly, I don’t care if al-Sharif was in Hamas or not,” president of the Foreign Press Association Ian Williams told CNN. “We don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats. Al-Sharif worked 24 hours and couldn’t possibly have time to work in a cell on the side.”
Plenty has been written on Israel’s murder of Anas and his colleagues — or total 238 journalists since the war began — including by Zahid Hussain on Wednesday, so I don’t have anything new to say except this: we have to find ways to preserve journalism. And for that, it requires expressing solidarity with all journalists trying to do their job under excruciating circumstances. In Pakistan that means working in terrible conditions like delayed salaries and job insecurity. In India it means sensible journalists suddenly sounding like ‘godi media’ during the war in May.
In Gaza, it is reporting a genocide as it unfolds before our eyes while the Western world refuses to recognise it as such. Israel said it would kill Anas and every Palestinian knew it would happen. Anyone outside the Global North knows Israel plans to occupy Gaza next. Once it kills all the reporters, it is free to continue with its atrocities without impunity for there is no one left to report on its crimes.
Israel may let Western journalists in but given what we have seen of their reporting so far, we can imagine what they will do. When discussing Anas’s murder, a BBC anchor posed a question about proportionality. “Is it justified to kill five [Al Jazeera corrected the figure to four] journalists when you were only targeting one?” It is outrageous to suggest that targeting one was OK.
As the news director of Al Jazeera Asef Hamidi wrote in the Guardian, the world’s silence on Israel’s murder of journalists signals “a global collapse of the moral responsibility in safeguarding those who risk everything to shed light on the realities of war”.
Israel has so much blood on its hands but those who do not condemn the murder of journalists are equally complicit. No one will be left to speak up for us if we stay silent.
Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2025
The writer is an instructor of journalism.
ONE of the hardest things about solidarity is actually doing it versus the social media hashtag variety, ie, doing it for optics, like keyboard activism. The hard part consists of getting out to the press club every day, as we did, for example, when Gen Musharraf pulled the plug on Geo in 2007. I remember my two female colleagues from this paper and I going to the press club together to protest and then going to two police stations to check on our colleagues who had courted arrest. It did not matter that Geo was a competitor or that the young girls who also courted arrest were at another paper. The issue of freedom of press was far more important.
The channel would shut down again a decade later, but this time, there wasn’t as much solidarity. A lot had changed, mainly the fissures within press organisations, the co-opting of journalists into regimes to push narratives, along with a lot of repression and censure. People forget that you couldn’t say ‘establishment’ in the PTI government whereas that word is freely bandied about. This isn’t to suggest things are rosy as much as to say they’ve never not been.
Today, you only care about a person you define as a journalist because you subscribe to their viewpoint. That journalists have viewpoints and may as well be known as party spokespersons is the problem right there. Partisanship panders itself as news.
This is not unique to Pakistan. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025, global trust in the media is declining rapidly. More people are dependent on social media and video platforms for their news. Online personalities and influencers shape public opinion now. I was most disturbed to read that 58 per cent of respondents (across 48 markets where the report was conducted) said “they feel unsure about their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood in online news”.
We have to find ways to preserve journalism.
This is where the hard work comes in. As journalists, we must stand by the very people we know are peddling falsehoods and benefiting monetarily from disinformation. Removing them from screens violates the provision of freedom of speech so we must stand for the principle. Because it can happen to us.
Imagine then the deafening silence from the West after Israel killed Gaza-based Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues, wiping out the entire Al Jazeera team there in the process. There is no justification for killing a journalist but this one in particular deserves the strongest condemnation from every single press organisation, politician, president, prime minister etc. But it has been slow to come because Israel said Anas was with Hamas.
We have reached new levels of ludicrousness and very few are calling it such.
“Frankly, I don’t care if al-Sharif was in Hamas or not,” president of the Foreign Press Association Ian Williams told CNN. “We don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats. Al-Sharif worked 24 hours and couldn’t possibly have time to work in a cell on the side.”
Plenty has been written on Israel’s murder of Anas and his colleagues — or total 238 journalists since the war began — including by Zahid Hussain on Wednesday, so I don’t have anything new to say except this: we have to find ways to preserve journalism. And for that, it requires expressing solidarity with all journalists trying to do their job under excruciating circumstances. In Pakistan that means working in terrible conditions like delayed salaries and job insecurity. In India it means sensible journalists suddenly sounding like ‘godi media’ during the war in May.
In Gaza, it is reporting a genocide as it unfolds before our eyes while the Western world refuses to recognise it as such. Israel said it would kill Anas and every Palestinian knew it would happen. Anyone outside the Global North knows Israel plans to occupy Gaza next. Once it kills all the reporters, it is free to continue with its atrocities without impunity for there is no one left to report on its crimes.
Israel may let Western journalists in but given what we have seen of their reporting so far, we can imagine what they will do. When discussing Anas’s murder, a BBC anchor posed a question about proportionality. “Is it justified to kill five [Al Jazeera corrected the figure to four] journalists when you were only targeting one?” It is outrageous to suggest that targeting one was OK.
As the news director of Al Jazeera Asef Hamidi wrote in the Guardian, the world’s silence on Israel’s murder of journalists signals “a global collapse of the moral responsibility in safeguarding those who risk everything to shed light on the realities of war”.
Israel has so much blood on its hands but those who do not condemn the murder of journalists are equally complicit. No one will be left to speak up for us if we stay silent.
Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment