Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual round-up on 9 December, documenting 67 journalists killed worldwide over the past year.
Gaza accounted for nearly half of them.
RSF reports that 43 percent of all journalists slain in 2025 were Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in targeted attacks, a scale the organisation says is “unprecedented in recent history”.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed close to 220 journalists, leading the press freedom watchdog to describe it as “the worst enemy of journalists”.
Yet, despite the severity of these findings, major western news outlets that sanctimoniously champion press freedom and human rights found little space for the deadliest year in RSF’s records, much less that the overwhelming majority of those journalists were Palestinian.
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This silence would be troubling in any context, but more than two years into a genocide, it has proven to be one of the key strategies that sustain it.
And few institutions illustrate this selective outrage more clearly than The New York Times, whose editorial board had the gall last month to condemn US President Donald Trump over his meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, citing the crown prince’s “almost [certain]” role in ordering the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Selective outrage
“No, Mr President, We Cannot ‘Leave It at That’!” This was the headline of a New York Times editorial on 19 November, chastising Trump for brushing aside a reporter who reminded Saudi Arabia’s strongman, bin Salman, of his responsibility for the killing of Khashoggi.
You might imagine that The Times editors were speaking of the genocidal garrison state of Israel … but you would be wrong again
Alas, the NYT declared that “the realities of geopolitics have long required the United States to ally itself with foreign leaders who commit terrible deeds”. You might assume they were speaking of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but you would be mistaken. They were referring to an Arab potentate murdering an Arab journalist.
The editorial continued: “Defeating foreign threats often requires the help of countries that fall far short of being liberal democracies that respect human rights.”
You might again imagine, for a moment, that The Times’s editors were speaking of the genocidal garrison state of Israel, which has subjected its Palestinian citizens and the Palestinians under the boot of its occupying forces to relentless violence. But you would be wrong again.
The New York Times was indignant that Trump had let bin Salman off the hook for the murder of a single journalist. The paper of record, as it likes to congratulate itself, was upset that he had so swiftly dismissed the killing of one solitary Saudi reporter.
Senile, delusional, or hypocritical?
I believe the editorial board of the NYT – every single one of them consigning that editorial – ought to be exhibited in a natural history museum for close psychopathological examination.
They actually gather together and compose a whole script pretending they care about a murdered Arab journalist – and still imagine the world will take them seriously. This editorial is, I submit, a clear clinical symptom of moral depravity.
I much prefer the unleashed vulgarity of a rank propagandist officer such as the self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, newly installed as the head of CBS News, which has become the de facto Zionist Reich ministry for public enlightenment and propaganda here in New York City.
She makes no pretence of caring about a single Arab or Muslim, let alone Palestinian journalists murdered in their scores by her cousins in the Israeli army.
The New York Times editorial board, by contrast, thinks it is being very clever. They have a corner office at the service of the selfsame Israeli army, with a window looking down upon the liberal side of the empire they believe they own and run.
The Times’s editors pontificate that there are three reasons why Trump’s defence of bin Salman was alarming: first, that truth was made irrelevant; second, that he whitewashed brutal human rights violations; and third, that he showed open disdain for principles of press freedom.
Elegantly put, indeed, every single item. Now let the NYT be judged by these very principles when applied to the murderous settler colony it unfailingly defends.
Does The Times value truth when it comes to Palestinian journalists? Does it report on systematic human rights violations against them? Does it care at all about the freedom of the Palestinian press?
How many hundreds of Palestinian journalists has Israel deliberately targeted and slaughtered? How many editorials has The Times written about Shireen Abu Akleh, or Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and hundreds of others?
What the vaunted newspaper does is worse than merely ignoring these murdered Palestinian journalists. It camouflages the moral depravity that caused their killing – precisely as, and indeed worse than, the Saudi authorities seeking to exonerate bin Salman for Khashoggi’s murder.
How so? Allow me to explain.
No moral authority
Does the NYT pay attention to Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian journalists?
Of course it does.
It attends to these mass killings only when the whole world has already witnessed them, just as the Saudi security services and judiciary moved to do damage control and “investigate” the brutal murder of Khashoggi.
How could The Times branch of the Israeli hasbara allow the world’s major human rights organisations to have their own assessment of their murderous acts without intervening to discredit the evidence, justify the killing machine, and conceal Israel’s intention to prevent the truth from ever seeing daylight?
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In this respect, the NYT’s coverage of the murder of Palestinian journalists is worse than the efforts of Saudi officials to conceal bin Salman’s responsibility for Khashoggi’s killing.
Those Saudi authorities make no claim to journalistic integrity. The delusional New York Times does.
What The Times has done with the murder of Palestinian journalists is identical to the pattern the late public intellectual Edward Said has detailed in his classic 1981 work, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World.
When it comes to the en masse murder of Palestinian journalists, The Times behaves exactly like Mohammed bin Salman’s propaganda apparatus, exonerating him of any wrongdoing.
In fact, the Saudi legal system does a far better job of excusing and explaining the crown prince’s innocence than the habitually clumsy efforts of The Times to shift the blame for Israel’s killings onto the journalists themselves.
The Times dutifully gives extensive space to Israeli hasbara: they were Hamas operatives, or it was an accident, or the Israeli army will investigate, ad nauseam – anything and everything except the plain truth that the Israeli military, its ruling regime, and the public who enthusiastically vote for them, constitute a mass-murdering, genocidal cult.
Every time Israel kills a Palestinian journalist, we lose a piece of our truth
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The delusional editors of the NYT seem to hallucinate that they still possess the moral authority to speak about anything at all, let alone the defence of a murdered journalist.
Saudi Arabia ordered the killing of a single reporter, one too many – and the crime has been thoroughly documented by Arab and Muslim journalists. Israel has murdered scores of Palestinian journalists in plain sight of the world.
Where was the NYT’s outrage?
Rabid Zionists such as Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman, who have justified or camouflaged the slaughter of Palestinians, continue to be fully employed at the outlet.
The world, and particularly Americans, is watching The Times exposed in its glasshouse.
Evidence of this spectacle abounds in the astronomical rise and popularity of vociferous American white nationalists such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
They are fighting fire with fire, militant US nationalism rising in waves against shameless genocidal Zionism, both cut from the same racist cloth.
There are, therefore, three ways to read such editorials. One possibility is that the members of the editorial board have genuinely lost their marbles, incapable of preserving even a shred of their paper’s dignity. Another is that they remain delusional enough to believe they can still fool the world.
But the most plausible explanation is that they have simply lost the plot. They think they can have their cake and eat it too; concealing Israeli genocide one day, dumbstruck the next as they rush to defend a single Arab journalist in order to masquerade as kind, ecumenical humanists.
Atonement required
There are, however, ways for The Times to begin paying penance for its generations of advocacy on behalf of a settler colony and its genocidal practices.
The New York Times must exponentially increase the number of its staff writers, reporters and editors of Arab, Muslim and particularly Palestinian descent.
If The Times wishes to lay any claim on the word ‘New York’, it must compensate for its generations of cheerleading for the Israeli mass murder of Palestinians
It must add at least two Palestinian or other Arab or Muslim columnists and publish their work with the same frequency it gives its two incurable Zionist propagandists, Stephens and Friedman. (All their columnists are Zionists without exception. One of them has even sent his son to Israel as a “lone soldier” to kill Palestinians, and The Times sees no problem with this.)
The new mayor-elect of this city, Zohran Mamdani, represents a seismic political, ideological and demographic shift in New York.
If The Times wishes to lay any claim on the word “New York”, it must compensate for its generations of cheerleading for the Israeli mass murder of Palestinians.
Until it does so, it has no claim on this city at all. It remains the Tel Aviv Times, occupying the name of New York the same way Israel has occupied Palestine.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
