“Everyone Wants Us to Pick a Side”: Reporters Grapple With Covering Israel-Hamas War

Brian Stelter
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Clarissa Ward was about to begin a top-of-the-hour CNN live shot in Sderot, Israel, when a Red Alert siren started to blare. The alert is “telling us to find shelter,” Ward said, as her crew hurried toward a bomb shelter. They didn’t make it in time. As Hamas rockets whizzed overhead and Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted some, creating explosions in the sky, Ward and her colleagues ducked in a ditch. The pulse-pounding scene showed that, as Ward said on air, “even with the most sophisticated military technology, the Israelis are still up against a really tough fight.”

The world’s biggest news outlets, now in 24/7 war coverage mode, are up against a parallel fight against disinformation and defamation. Reporters say they have never seen it this bad. Ward’s compelling Oct. 9 live shot, which should have been a point of pride, prompted weeks of pain. Videos of her report were met with hateful comments calling her an actress. “She deserves an Oscar.” “Next time write a better script.” Then a click-hungry YouTube creator added an audio track of a faux director giving Ward stage instructions, and the fabricated video went viral on apps like Telegram and Elon Musk’s X, with titles like “CNN Busted FAKING Attack in Israel.” Musk reacted with a laughing-crying emoji, delighting his fans, and prodding one lone editor at Condé Nast to reply and say what I felt: “None of this is funny,” legal affairs editor Luke Zaleski wrote. “It’s tragic. X is a high-speed information-blender puréeing facts and news and minds into mush during major world events. And the effect is massive confusion with potentially disastrous results.”

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The past two weeks have proven Zaleski right. Confusion is the unfortunate byproduct of the collision between social networks and newsrooms. CNN publicists urged people to watch Ward’s real report “for themselves on a trusted platform” — meaning, not Musk’s X — and the meme-maker said he wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, but Ward, the network’s chief international correspondent, was deluged by trolls anyway. “My reporting has been spliced and diced, twisted and faked,” Ward wrote on an Instagram Story post for friends. She later turned off comments altogether because, she wrote, there were “one too many threats to kill my children and I just don’t think it helps anyone. Really desperate to keep the focus on the immense suffering and bloodshed” and the need for aid in Gaza.

That’s how other correspondents feel, as well. “This is the absolute most emotionally charged story to cover,” one exasperated reporter said in a late night conversation. “Everyone wants us to pick a side,” another said. “No,” a third reporter chimed in, “everyone already thinks we’re on a side. They don’t believe that impartial news is possible.”

In conversations with two dozen staffers at outlets like The New York Times, ABC and Al Jazeera, some of whom are working in the war zone, I heard about four overwhelming and overlapping challenges: dangerous conditions, factual disputes, distortions and disinformation.

Physical dangers are paramount: Press freedom groups say that two dozen members of the media have died amid the fighting, mostly Palestinians. Mohammed Mhawish, a journalist in Gaza City, told me he harbors no illusions that his flak jacket labeled PRESS will provide any real protection from Israeli air strikes. Several of the Gazan producers who work for Western networks are actively trying to evacuate their families. At the same time, as a correspondent in Israel said, “We’re desperate to get into Gaza, but it’s impossible.” Reporters can hear blasts in the distance but can’t see the effects for themselves.

The result: a shortage of facts. When a powerful explosion occurred near Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17, and Hamas-aligned spokespeople immediately blamed an Israeli air strike, many outlets blasted out news alerts before it was possible to have any independent sourcing or reporting. Israeli officials were furious, and so were some journalists in the offending newsrooms. “We claim to care deeply about disinformation, but we’re part of the problem,” one Times staffer said to me, a point echoed by several others.

Information is scarcest when public interest is greatest and the inverse is also, sadly, true; by the time The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and other outlets produced in-depth assessments pointing to a misfired rocket from Gaza as the most likely cause of the hospital blast, minds were made up. Masthead editors at the Times grappled for several days with both external criticism and internal concerns about the initial “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” headline, which was updated multiple times as new information arrived. An editor’s note on Monday said, “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.” (The cause of the hospital blast is still under investigation.)

To the extent that the Times deserves blame for the early error, it also deserves credit for the note of contrition. Factual disputes will continue for as long as the war does. “This is a test for executives,” one network source observed, as the conflict prioritizes execs with international expertise and veteran staffers who have the standing to say “Wait” before publishing. (“Wait” may be the single hardest word to say in a newsroom, but that’s why it is also the most important.) CNN Worldwide chairman and CEO Mark Thompson officially started his new job on the third day of the war, but he spent the entire weekend beforehand on calls and email threads about editorial coverage and security posture; so far, he is receiving high marks from staffers.

Attention is now turning to long-term planning, which means rotating journalists in and out of the region. “We all need to pace ourselves and take care of ourselves and each other,” CBS News president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews wrote in a memo, pointing out that “no one is spared the pain of watching so much death and destruction — whether in person or over video.”

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, reports from news crews embedded with U.S. military units were likened to a “soda-straw” view of war. We’re now each holding whole handfuls of straws, yet unable to trust what we’re seeing. The number of violent videos from Israel and Gaza is almost limitless, capturing every conceivable angle — snuff films from the body-worn cameras of Hamas terrorists, silent films from Israeli aircraft showing bombs hitting Gaza targets, TikToks from civilians in the crossfire, drone videos of the aftermath. Some of the videos are deceptive while others, wrongly purporting to be from the war zone, are outright disinformation. This is why media literacy lessons should be woven into news coverage, so that consumers know what steps are being taken to vet information ahead of time. MSNBC showed how to do this by booking Eric Carvin, the director of NBC News’ Social Newsgathering team, for an explainer segment on Oct. 21.

Of course, no amount of transparency will appease the critics who are certain that the press is their enemy. Ward went viral again last week when Egyptian protester Rahma Zein confronted her at the Rafah Crossing between Egypt and Gaza. “You own the narrative,” she shouted. “Where are our voices?” Ward interviewed her and used Zein’s voice in a CNN report, but the thoughtful, edited package was no match for the shaky cellphone clips of Zein’s roar. What viewers didn’t see was that Zein began by invoking the made-up meme from Sderot: “You are the actress!”

This story first appeared in the Oct. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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