It’s absolutely reckless for a group calling itself “Honest Reporting” to insinuate that photojournalists who take pictures of atrocities are complicit in them. Despite Honest Reporting’s recent backpedaling, it’s a virtual certainty that their irresponsible speculation will be cited to justify past and future violence against the press. They’ve put journalists’ lives at risk.
And it’s disgraceful for politicians — from Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, and Danny Danon in Israel to Tom Cotton in the U.S. — to cite the spurious report to call for violence against journalists and baseless investigations of news outlets.
Photojournalists risk their lives to document history. It’s absurd to suggest that photographing atrocities, or failing to somehow disarm gunmen with their news cameras, proves they’re somehow collaborating with terrorists. And it’s equally preposterous to suggest, as Sen. Cotton has, that U.S. news outlets are responsible for hypothetical misconduct by any freelancer overseas from whom they buy a photograph.
The number of journalists already killed in the war in Gaza is shocking. The U.S. government needs to pressure its ally to do everything in its power to mitigate the harm HonestReporting has caused, to refrain from targeting journalists and to protect press freedom.
You can read more about this on our blog.
