Context, citation when reporting on Palestine solidarity actions is crucial

This piece originally came from The Front Page, our twice-monthly newsletter that examines systems of power and inequity in journalism. Subscribe here.

Since the first tents of the Columbia/Barnard Gaza Solidarity Encampment were hoisted up last week, student journalists at radio station WKCR (also posting dispatches on X, formerly known as Twitter) and the Columbia Daily Spectator have been on the ground interviewing protesters, sharing their demands and articulating campus life. Before national reporters walked onto the encampment, student journalists — who know their campus and are situated among varied student, staff and faculty perspectives — were present. 

When sharing their interview with Barnard junior Isra Hirsi, one of over a hundred students arrested at the encampment (and Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter), on X, Teen Vogue politics editor Lex McMenamin credited Daily Spectator journalists’ reporting: “this ​​piece would not have run without … the reporting done by @ColumbiaSpec journalists!”

Their citation and hat-tip to student campus coverage matters. (Other publications are uplifting coverage in other ways: The Daily Beast spoke to Daily Spectator reporters about their experience, for example.) It’s still far too common in other newsrooms to not cite other outlets reporting, but student journalism is serious journalism and, as with all sources, needs to be cited properly. 

As solidarity actions for Palestine happen across the globe, including on college campuses, the coverage of Columbia is a stark reminder for journalists off-campus to uplift the reporting done by students talking to students — or to talk to students themselves — and to not diminish or hand-wave away young people’s response to Israel’s siege on Gaza, which United Nations officials have already termed genocide.

Israeli military bombardment and siege has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians. Almost 200 bodies were found in a mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis over the weekend. So reporting on the encampments shouldn’t decontextualize why the solidarity actions are happening: “pledging to occupy the space until the University divests from companies with ties to Israel.” 

”The whole point of the encampment was to shed light on Columbia’s complicity in genocide and to focus back on the folks in Gaza,” Hirsi told McMenamin.

With passive voice, opaque nouns, and omission are prominent in coverage describing Israeli bombardment on Palestinians collecting (expired) food aid and former Air Force engineer Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation to “no longer be complicit in genocide,” the New York War Crimes and Media Against Apartheid and Displacement can provide alternatives to mainstream media reporting on Palestine. 

---

Related: U.S. reporting on Palestine fails to live up to basic journalism standards — again

---

The New York War Crimes serves as a direct antidote to the New York Times’ coverage, calling for boycott and divestment of its products while publishing articles highlighting “its present role in fomenting genocide against the Palestinian people.” (A recent Intercept exposé included a leaked NYT memo urging the paper’s journalists to avoid using “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory” in their articles.)

And MAAD collects movement journalism articles from a range of partner outlets.

Crucially, it’s “a resource, a hub for documentation, and a commitment that the stories of genocidal atrocities–and the struggles against them–will be told, shared, amplified, and never forgotten.” One of its most recent linked stories is a Democracy Now interview with Palestinian Jordanian journalist and Columbia Journalism School student, Jude Taha, sharing her reporting from the campus.