Where the fuck is lefty media on Gaza?

All day long my Twitter feed has been filled with the sweet young face of Hassan Hamad in a press vest that looks slightly too big for him. He was the 19-year-old reporter who kept filming and sending and filming and sending footage from Gaza into the world hoping his reporting would help stop the genocide.

Since at this point no one, except for lying rat Matthew Miller, is even bothering to pretend that Israel isn’t targeting journalists, Hamad had separated from his family to keep them out of harm’s way.

Apparently, he recently received the following message from the IDF:

“Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we'll come for you next and turn your family into [...] This is your last warning.

"

Today, the pictures of his face are juxtaposed on social media with footage of a man scooping his shredded, charred, and bloody remains into a funeral shroud from a shoe box and blue plastic bags.

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A few days ago, Al-Jazeera released a blockbuster documentary that, as a few people pointed out, should be what everyone is talking about. It runs through major developments since October 7th, chronicling atrocity after atrocity. It juxtaposes the atrocities next to dumb, morally repugnant videos posted to social media by IDF soldiers and Israelis. In between, they interview human rights experts. Pretty much they’re all like, “Yes. That’s a war crime. Yes. That’s a war crime. Yes. A war crime.” This is interspersed with their utter disbelief that the soldiers are documenting their war crimes in real time. Al-Jazeera even identified some of the soldiers in the videos. One French national runs his camera over blindfolded handcuffed men and literally says, “Yes we just tortured them.” (“Torturing prisoners is … obviously a war crime,” a befuddled human rights expert says).

You should watch it. But give yourself a generous timeframe, it’s very hard to watch in one sitting. And there were parts I couldn’t handle, and literally clamped my hands over my eyes and screamed, like the segment on rape in the detention facilities.

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The documentary is like “Hearts and Minds,” a 1974 classic of cinema verite about the war in Vietnam. The director Peter Davis juxtaposes horrors in Vietnam with daily scenes of belligerence, or indifference in America, like some US high school cheerleader smacking her gum and saying something about trusting US leaders. I’ve cited this before, but a repeat:

A scene described as one of the film's "most shocking and controversial sequences" shows the funeral of a South Vietnamese soldier and his grieving family, as a sobbing woman is restrained from climbing into the grave after the coffin.^[7] The funeral scene is juxtaposed with an interview with General William Westmoreland—commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972—telling a stunned Davis that "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." After an initial take, Westmoreland indicated that he had expressed himself inaccurately.

The film landed to mixed reviews, but it was reviewed. In the New York Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times.

(Stefan Kanfer of Time magazine noted in 1975 that "Throughout, Hearts and Minds displays more than enough heart. It is mind that is missing. Perhaps the deepest flaw lies in the method: the Viet Nam War is too convoluted, too devious to be examined in a style of compilation without comment.") (Sound familiar? “It’s complicated!”)

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I like to rag on the New York Times, because it sucks. I wouldn’t expect a review, or coverage of all the dead journalists like the teenager Hamad, murdered for reporting. I wanted to yank my brain from Twitter so I went to all the big lefty sites to see decent coverage of Gaza.

The Nation. Mother Jones. etc. These are the publications that are invaluable for covering income inequality, immigration, etc., and became, in my opinion, seminal during the Iraq War.

But …

I mean …

The Nation: there are currently two Gaza-adjacent pieces of content: one is a podcast and the other is more generally about waning US power in the Middle East. Both are low down on the front page. The rest is dumb election drivel and like … a story about ballet dancers unionizing, placed far above the Gaza-adjacent content. The most popular story is “On the rise of New York clubbing.” OK. Gaza content isn’t in the most popular top 4. But, “The Industry Behind Your Filet-O-Fish Is Destroying Alaska’s Oceans” though, is.

Mother Jones: the main story shows people crawling around in rubble, so I thought. … oh wait, maybe they have something. “Secondhand Is Feckin’ Grand”: How Clothing Swaps Took Off in Ireland,” is the story. I guess it’s about the trade in used clothes in Ireland, the global issue of our time. There’s only one Gaza-adjacent story on the front page, and it’s about an American professor being investigated for pro-Palestine activism. I perused a few other left-wing sites, including some I’ve worked for full-time, and it’s the same thing.

Israel isn’t letting reporters into Gaza, sure. But these places publish blogs and op-eds. And really? No one has any thoughts on 19-year-old Hamad? On the blood-curdling Al-Jazeera documentary?

Also I can think of at least three people off the top of my head, who came up through the Nation, who extensively cover Gaza—surely they’d share sources.

This is really, really depressing. We expect the New York Times to mindlessly carry water for the atrocities of empire. The Lefty press is supposed to be the alternative. But, you can comfortably be a proud progressive who regularly reads “independent” left-wing media and have the details of what’s happening in Gaza more or less off of your radar.

Let me be clear: I am 100% sure that this is due to pressure from donors. I’ve been in editorial meetings at progressive publications that rely on big donors to keep running. Every. Editorial. Decision is at least partly colored by the issues that donors care strongly about, negatively or positively. There are never directives necessarily. Certainly not obvious efforts at censorship. But, you pitch a story, or a beat for deeper coverage. When it’s not met with enthusiasm by your boss, maybe you try to fight for it — but eventually you stop.

I think you can judge a society by its journalists, and so, shame on us.