Gaza’s journalists get massacred, Western press mollycoddles Israel
David Cronin Media Watch 29 August 2025
Deutsche Welle is among many media outlets that fail to hold Israel accountable.
Gerd Harder ImageBrokerExpressions of horror sometimes ring hollow.
Jack Parrock is among the Western journalists who have protested against Israel’s killings of reporters and photographers in Gaza. His credibility as a protester is compromised by how he shills for the makers of weapons that have more than likely been used in the killings to which he objects.
Parrock – a contributor to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and various other outlets – is much in demand as a moderator at corporate events in Brussels. These include conferences hosted by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD).That umbrella group represents such giants of the weapons trade as BAE Systems and Leonardo.
Both of those firms have played a significant role in developing or equipping the F-35 warplane. The “economy of genocide” report published recently by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, stated that the F-35 and its precursor the F-16 had been “integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power” used in obliterating Gaza.
Parrock’s behavior is unethical. Rules drawn up by the International Federation of Journalists stipulate that a reporter “will avoid any confusion between his activity and that of advertising or propaganda.”
The conferences at which Parrock moderates are pure propaganda. They depict higher military spending as something desirable, without spelling out that the prime beneficiaries will be the management and shareholders of weapons companies.
Parrock – who did not respond to a request for comment – gets away with his unethical conduct because it goes unchallenged.
Club
Journalists in the West tend to see themselves as part of a club. With few exceptions, they do not criticize each other publicly.
It is no accident, then, that the best monitoring of how the mainstream press covers Palestine isn’t found within the mainstream press but on social media.
The historian Assal Rad, for example, constantly uses X to identify cases in which media headlines regurgitate Israel’s dishonest excuses. Rad is particularly scathing of stories belonging to the “Israel says” category.
Cowardice is a major factor behind why many journalists in the West treat Israel with kid gloves. As Greg Philo – subsequently deceased – and Mike Berry documented in their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, fear of receiving hostile phone calls from Israeli diplomats has led editors and reporters at the BBC to practice self-censorship.Fourteen years after it was published, the book remains painfully relevant. David Collier, a pro-Israel lobbyist masquerading as a successful journalist, has bullied both the BBC and The New York Times into removing or altering content about how Israel slaughters and starves Palestinians during the current war against Gaza.
Tiptoeing around Israel is even considered mandatory by mainstream journalists in Ireland – a country in which public opinion is hugely critical of Israel and where the government has officially acknowledged that the violence inflicted on Gaza constitutes a genocide.
RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, echoes the pro-Israel lobby by routinely labelingGaza’s health ministry as “Hamas-run.” Such framing conveys the impression that the hospitals are legitimate military targets and that the casualty statistics which the ministry compiles are dubious, even though they err on the side of caution and their veracity has been confirmed by reputable human rights organizations.
Commercial links between Ireland and Israel also appear to be something of a taboo subject in the Irish media.
Mick Clifford, a prominent journalist, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Irish Examiner arguing that the rock star Bono should be cut a little slack over his comments about Gaza.
After reading the article, I alerted Clifford to how Bono and his U2 bandmate The Edge had profited from a real estate deal – worth more than $45 million – involving Israel’s Bank Leumi. That bank is named in a UN database of firms profiting from colonizing Palestinian land.
The deal – which concerns the sale of The Clarence, a Dublin hotel – was announced in October 2023 and I was the first journalist who drew attention to how it involved a bank which finances Israel’s settlement activities in the West Bank. As I informed Clifford, only one Irish publication – The Phoenix – had, to the best of my knowledge, later mentioned that Bank Leumi is Israeli in its reporting on the Clarence sale.
I have known Clifford since we studied journalism together in the 1990s and always regarded him as a friend. So I was greatly disappointed with the sneering and dismissive nature of his reply.
“I don’t know the detail, Dave,” he said, in a message.
“But if the rest of the media didn’t pick up on it they either believe it is not significant or they are part of some Zionist or government-inspired conspiracy. Who knows?”
Almost 250 journalists have been killed by Israel over the last 700 days.
The bravery our Palestinian colleagues have shown to make sure that the world cannot feign ignorance about Israel’s crimes is the very antithesis of the gutless stenography that too often passes for journalism in the West.