Written by Ella Quinlan
Art by Justin Bissonette
My final semester of high school was not what I imagined, expected, or hoped it would be. It was 2020, and I was the Editor of my high school paper, The Brewster Browser. Due to COVID, for the first time in the school’s 200 year history, I made the decision to move the paper online. That year I had big plans to be the next household name; the investigative journalist of our time – like Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. My passion ran deep, and I had spent the entirety of the year investigating the repercussions of administrative proceedings when it came to student’s sexual relationships. My goal with the article was to establish where the institution was committing an injustice towards their students, so they had a chance to make their community a better place in the future. I had worked with a member of the administration to write this piece, and I was laboring over the layout of our last edition that year when I received a call from my faculty advisor. She was clearly crying.
“I’m so sorry Ella,” before she even finished her sentence I knew what she was going to say.
“Mr. Barnett just called… we can’t publish your piece.”
According to her, the administration was uncomfortable with the piece being put online for parents to access. Because Brewster is a private institution, the Constitution backs that they had every right to say no. After a year of crafting and defending the most important piece I had ever written, it would never hit print, and there was nothing I could do about it besides shake my head.
I carried this experience into my first year of college as a Professional Writing Major with a concentration in Journalism. Initially, the entire incident fueled my passion and cemented my beliefs in the importance of the work. The function of journalism ensures that the people will have an accurate understanding of what impacts them, and how it does so. Effective journalism should develop the voice of the people. Journalists with the right intentions should be working to provide the people with the agency to make educated decisions to change the way they currently live. It moves our opinions forward, provides evidence of societal evolution, and grants us the ability to perpetuate change.
I learned quickly at Champlain that those beliefs only take some people so far – a story is not valued over the need to make a living. I learned from my censorship experience what it meant for a story to never hit print and I was more than willing to sacrifice my job if it meant I wouldn’t fail the public like that again. I found myself feeling alone in online classroom debates. When the class was directly asked, “would you sacrifice your job for a story?” I thought the answer was simple amongst a classroom of scholars, but I was clearly out of bounds. Fellow students considered my thinking as impractical professional expectations and my professor mirrored my previous experience in high school with comments along the lines of,
“Yeah, ideally that’s how it should be,” or “that is just not the reality of the industry anymore”. I refused to believe that and continued to strive for others to hear me, but eventually, my devotion sizzled out faster than water hitting embers. I changed my concentration by the end of the year, with no idea what jobs in Creative Writing were available to me, and eventually found a home in Creative Nonfiction, landing me where I am now, writing this paper about the flaws of a passion for journalism– the same flaws that beat the passion out of me.
The morning of October 9, 2023 was a Monday. I woke up and caught up on the news. Starting with my usual morning podcast, The Daily, by The New York Times. I like Mondays in particular because I dedicate myself to catching up on the news that I missed – we all need a break from the constant dread of the world being on fire – but I’m still a junkie for it. Being censored before the age of 20 has a way of killing the journalist but not the consumer — and I had a habit of starting my week and most of my days with The New York Times.
I sat for my morning pee on Monday the 9th and opened Spotify to see “War in Israel” as the headline for The Daily. The caption read, “over the weekend, Palestinian militants with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the Gaza Strip, mounted a stunning and highly coordinated invasion of Israel, rampaging through Israeli towns, killing people in their homes and on the streets and taking hostages,” sourcing Isabel Kershner, a reporter on Israeli and Palestinian politics.
“No shit.” I remember stating out loud to myself in annoyance. The Hamas attack in Israel was obviously a tragedy, but I wasn’t surprised by it. My best friend in high school was from Egypt, and he drove a lot of my interest in Middle Eastern culture and history. Through that connection and personal intrigue, I was relatively aware of the state of the relationship between the two nations. Having studied and lived with students from both cultures, who made their positions clear — I knew describing the situation as tense was putting it lightly.
I do not claim to be an expert on foreign relations. I am a white woman from the Western World. I am the only unbaptized child in a family of Irish Catholics, leading me to have no religious understanding that could drive spiritual motivations or enhance my sense of culture. My culture and explanation for the world, like a lot of Americans, is based on the consumption of large amounts of media — a media that exhorts the illusion of what freedom of the press is. The only qualifications I have to be speaking on the matter is my humanity, my ability to write about it, and having grown up in the current era of western media and mass information consumption.
Like most people with an ounce of humanity, I was horrified by the violence that occurred in Israel on October 7. No one deserves to die over religious or geographical affiliations, and the actions of Hamas cannot be justified. I am not spiritual or religious, and certainly not Jewish, so I am unable to fully feel the extent of the symbolism Jerusalem carries and the horror of the generational violence put onto the Jewish people — but I can acknowledge it. I’m well read and empathetic enough to grasp how a terrorist attack like the one Hamas executed can grip a nation with fear. And I understand how a nation feels the need to defend themselves. On top of the historic prosecution of the Jewish people, I can imagine that feeling can be heightened. It is a country’s response to that fear which can maintain relatively peaceful (non-deadly) foreign relations. The Palestinian-Israeli relationship in particular has a long established, deadly cycle of escalating fear into violence towards one another. To put it simply, I wasn’t surprised that Hamas retaliated, but still, the loss of life was horrific.
My experience as an Editor of a private institution’s paper exposed me to the power that media has in terms of narration and perception. My high school’s administration didn’t want my article published because the audience changed within an online platform. They didn’t want parents to think that their kids were unsafe at their school. I learned that certain stories, based on how they’re told, impact our beliefs. Mass media can dictate a population’s belief, and it is that which is taken advantage of to push agendas within our society. Sometimes, this can come at a great cost – quite literally life and death.
The most prominent example of this that I can think of in modern history is the “War on Terror” that ensued after the September 11 attacks, through the funding and support of the Bush Administration. In the days after the hijackers carried out the September 11 attacks, major news outlets like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, handed the microphone to some of the biggest neoconservative voices of the time 1. On September 12, the same day Bush declared war on Afghanistan2 The New York Times released an interview with Eliot Cohen, a political scientist and former counselor in the Department of State. In the interview he asserts, “We have to stop thinking about it as cops and robbers and start thinking about it as war.” 3
A few days later, The New York Times published another article following a similar story with former CIA officer and neoconservative analysts, Reuel Gerecht. In the interview he is quoted stressing the need for “cluster bombs, even napalm” to fight the war, “not cruise missiles” 4 – which are designed to limit civilian casualties. The New York Times is one of the country’s leading liberal leaning publications, but had no problem amplifying the conversation of war through strategic propaganda that conveniently benefited the administration’s cause. Combined with the visual representation provided by 24/7 cable networks that berated American consumers with images of terrorists, bombed cities, and barefoot children; Americans grew scared, and the image of the Middle East and its people suffered.
Contorted American fears rapidly became violent action. On November 19, 2001, four teenagers burned down the Gobind Sadan, a multi-faith worship center in Oswego, New York, because they believed the worshippers were supporters of Osama Bin Laden5. In a series of similar hate crimes across the country during that year, places of worship were destroyed and innocent Americans were murdered. While citizens were targeting Mosques and their Arab counterparts, American soldiers were preparing for the country’s longest war. The framing of mass media during the “War on Terror” emboldened a timeless moral pitfall within American culture – racism. Through the continued misrepresentation of the Middle East as a war-torn desert by Western mass media throughout the years, those biases have become less obvious but more complex.
Today, The New York Times and other conglomerate publications in the West are mirroring the tactics of the “War on Terror” and pushing propaganda that supports administrative action. It is subtle, but the language chosen, and the context provided (or lack thereof), in something as simple as a headline, primes a consumer for a specific position or an opinion. For example, the United States, Canada, The United Kingdom and a handful of other countries that are members of the UN do not recognize Palestine as a state (138 of 193 UN members do)6, and the calculated language choices of our media reflects those foreign policy beliefs. Articles that label this genocide as the “Hamas-Israel” war sideswipe the important notion that Palestinian civilians are being killed in Palestinian territory. Based on the caption written on October 9, the writers of The Daily were willing to label the Hamas militia as Palestinian, despite Hamas being unaffiliated with Palestine. The choice to only recognize the existence of a state when its occupying government ensues violence, but ignores the statehood of civilian casualties, is an act of justifying Israel in the American narration. For a country that takes pride in its independence, it is bold in its reporting to imply who deserves independence and when – through something as simple as the omission of a word. As the United States continues to supply Israel, my bet is that the language in our mainstream media will continue to defend Israel – despite the majority opinion – because of their long established foreign relationship.
I am not alone in the general feelings of mistrust when it comes to mainstream media. The “traditional” news outlets have been faltering for years. As of 2022, 38% of Americans stated that they “do not trust” mass media when asked in a survey7. Instead of consuming their information from newsstands or on cable, the public is beginning to shift towards social media platforms, where users have complete control over the content being put out into the world. According to the Pew research center, 43% of TikTok users, 34% of Instagram users, and 59% of Twitter (X) users regularly go to the sites to get their news8. There are pros and cons to this new trend of collective behavior that surpass the goal of this essay, but regardless of the countless warnings from the educators within the field, social media has reimagined what journalism can be. Instead of reading a second hand source about first hand encounters, we’re scrolling through first hand experiences from the people on the ground.
Young journalists who are still alive in Gaza are taking advantage of these platforms and have not shied away from their emotions when reporting their stories. Bisan, a younger woman who has been capturing her life in Gaza during the war through online platforms like Instagram and TikTok, starts every day with a jarring phrase, “Hi everyone, my name is Bison. I am still alive”. The work of people like Bison, and others who are relentlessly exposing the conditions of life on the ground, and the history of this conflict, are taking the responsibility of “traditional” journalism and are having more success in making a lasting impression on the consumers of the world. Digital activism9, and its power to reach a larger breadth of people, have influenced, carried, and dictated the public’s opinion in the way “traditional” journalism intended. Social media has confirmed that it is more effective for locals to be telling their stories in times of crisis instead of paying international journalists to westernize their version of events, which are rooted in Western narrative tactics focused on entertainment and agenda setting.
Western media tiptoes around the arguments of land ownership and terrorism, while people across the globe beg for a ceasefire; Israeli officials from the past and present are unapologetically flaunting the end goal of this war: to flatten Gaza. David Azoulai, head of the Metula settlement council in Galilee, told an Israeli radio station, “the entire Gaza strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the State of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip,” according to the Jerusalem Post10. Comments like these, and the casualty with which war crimes are reported within the media, grants Israel the ‘OK’ to escalate.
Early on in the war, Israel hinted at catastrophic consequences for the citizens of the Gaza Strip that were reported with the same tone as a shrug. On the same morning that The Daily released their “War in Israel” episode, BBC published an article by Rushdi Abu Alouf and Oliver Slow. The headline read, “Gaza ‘soon without fuel, medicine and food’ – Israel authorities”. It is stunning to me how the implication of war crimes is confessed in a story headline like it’s a confession booth. The next week, Israel cut off essential supplies to the Gaza Strip; confirming the beginnings of Israel’s blatant war crimes. Since then, these crimes have escalated – the bombing of schools, hospitals, and street executions have all been revealed online without any ramifications beyond public disdain.
If we are a nation which preaches freedom of the press, it is our duty as reporters and writers to use our constitutional right to call out this type of behavior. Western media has failed to be the watchdog it claims to be at the cost of civilian lives because it would rather align with the country’s political motivations and narrative preferences. Our desire to tell stories through a “neutral” lens allows the ethics of the reporting itself to seep between political motivations on the page. If we are the standard of what “Freedom of the Press” should be, we should not be reporting war crimes without spelling out the inhumanness of the situation or describing the occupation that occurred prior.
Today is January 2, 2024 and I am not the writer I thought I was going to be Senior year of high school. I gave up my morning ritual weeks ago without replacing the vice, but I keep coming back to my experience as an Editor. Unlike my faculty advisor, I never cried over the death of my article. My grief jumped to anger, and translated as the ethics of a “silly girl” that had, “too high of expectations”. I’m beginning to realize that my anger is a projection of fear. In reality, the platforms that I mentioned before as a symbol of hope for journalism are still subject to biased censorship due to the same “private organization” label as my high school. Instagram, owned by Meta, is guilty of removing audio from clips describing daily events, flagging posts as “inaccurate,” despite the footage coming directly from Palestinian civilians on the streets, and outwardly removing accounts/posts that have been keeping a close eye on the situation. So although digital activism is taking strides in changing mass media narration, I fear that the true function of journalism will be lost in the “Big Brother” aspect of our society. Companies like Meta provide the illusion of freedom of the press by granting us creative agency but hide behind a curtain of logistical loopholes to remove ideologies that do not align with the brand or the company’s goals. I am at a place where I do not know what to trust besides my moral compass in seeking information. This, to me, is terrifying. When we can’t trust the meaning of “Freedom of the Press,” the function of democracy suffers. Instead of working with the people, journalism is beginning to push against the beliefs of the public, and the work of the editors for publications like The New York Times are playing a heavy hand in that role. So now, instead of aspiring to be Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, I write with my name, Ella Quinlan, paired with the firm beliefs that stem from the moral compass of a girl who has read too many newspapers.
- Branko Marcetic, Jacobin ↩︎
- “War on Terror” timeline ↩︎
- Branko Marcetic, Jacobin ↩︎
- Branko Marcetic, Jacobin ↩︎
- Catie O’Toole, “2 in Temple Case Denied Shock Camp; Joshua Centrone, William Reeves Can’t Get Out Early After Admitting Hate Crime,” Post-Standard Syracuse, June 23, 2002
↩︎ - World Population Review ↩︎
- Gallup poll on media trust, 2022 ↩︎
- Pew Research Center, 2022 survey ↩︎
- Vice Article, By Bianca Ferrari, Dec. 13, 2023 ↩︎
- The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 18, 2023 ↩︎
Additional sources: