Two top Reuters editors face backlash for sharing contentious social media content during the Israel-Hamas conflict, sparking concerns over journalistic integrity.
Two top news editors at Reuters have shared unsettling social media posts throughout the Israel-Hamas war, HonestReporting revealed this week, casting doubt on their adherence to journalistic impartiality.
The revelation, which comes after a series of exposés by HonestReporting of the news agency’s Gaza-based photojournalists who had either infiltrated into Israel with Hamas on October 7 or praised its terrorists, raises concerns that anti-Israel bias in the wire service hasn’t plagued only its bottom ranks.
The online posts, by Reuters Executive Editor Simon Robinson and Global Foreign Policy Editor Samia Nakhoul, have been visible to many Reuters journalists who follow the two senior editors on LinkedIn and social media platform X. Yet the message of these posts is not a call for fair and balanced reporting on Israel, nor is it a demand for journalists’ objectivity.
On March 3, Robinson posted on his LinkedIn a 7,500-word anti-Israel essay from the London Review of Books that includes criticism of Western media coverage of the Jewish state.
Titled “The Shoah after Gaza,” the essay by Indian author Pankaj Mishra asks questions like: “How can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its [Israel’s] clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?”
It also includes claims such as: “The liquidation of Gaza… is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military & cultural hegemony,” including “prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza.”
Another paragraph reads: “Why have Western politicians and journalists kept presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?”
And there’s also, as the title suggests, an inevitable shoehorning of the Holocaust: “A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel.”
The post is still visible on Robinson’s profile, with comments ranging from “excellent article” to “that article is horrifically anti-Israel” and “Why can’t you call for fair and balanced reporting on Israel?”
But the senior editor–who is also Reuters’ Deputy Editor-in-Chief–has kept silent. He hasn’t removed the post nor tried to justify the unprofessional and inhuman spread of anti-Israel content online.
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