Sometimes editorial ‘neutrality’ means propagandizing for totalitarians

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, some newsrooms struggled with words. But the concern was not over how to convey the horror and tragedy of what happened to hundreds of fellow human beings that day. No, it was finding adjectives to describe the group freely taking credit for the atrocities that did not make that group look bad.

The word “terrorist” was out. Never mind that Hamas had been on multiple governments’ lists of terrorist organizations for years. Never mind that this latest murderous adventure of theirs perfectly fits the dictionary definition of terrorism. The word has a nasty ring to it, so from the Associated Press to the New York Times, editors shied away in favor of Hamas’s preferred label, “fighter.”

Much like university administrators’ lopsided treatment of threatening speech when it comes to Jews, bowdlerized reporting on Hamas distorts public discourse and normalizes the idea that some classes of people are inherently superior to others, even when they embrace violence.

Henryk Grynberg, my friend and former colleague in the Voice of America Polish Service, observed that “the president of a leading American university cannot apologize for her lack of basic human values” toward Jews. This much-admired writer, poet and chronicler of Jewish history in Poland, who is also a child survivor of the Holocaust, said that the real culprit is “the culture that brought her up so high.”

That culture must purge itself of antisemitism before apologies can be made, Grynberg added.

As journalists, he and I are both sorry that our former employer, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, also does not want to refer to Hamas murderers and war criminals as “terrorists,” preferring instead to call them “fighters” so as to remain “neutral.” But can those who murder defenseless women and children — people who cannot fight back — be called “fighters”? Doesn’t the word “fighter” imply an actual fight between combatants, as opposed to the systematic rape and massacre of civilians?

Grynberg rightly observes that deliberate murders by terrorists are not the same as regrettable collateral civilian deaths in a conflict, as with Israel’s war to protect its Jewish and Arab citizens from Hamas. Otherwise, all war veterans who have ever seen combat would be murderers.

Henryk Grynberg and I lived under a Marxist regime. We know all too well the effect of assigning rights and worth to people according to their group identity. We can also spot media silence and censorship about crimes committed in the name of a favored ideology. It is, therefore, quite frightening for us that, in America today, some journalists and scholars can no longer express their thoughts and use accurate language without negative consequences. They fear, and not without reason, that if they call Hamas’s genocide what it is and call its killers “terrorists” instead of “fighters,” their management and colleagues will turn against them.

Voice of America journalists who objected to pro-Hamas censorship by their leadership, editors and some senior reporters could not voice their protests internally, for fear of ruining their careers. They became whistleblowers, but asked outside media and congressional contacts that their identities be protected from disclosure. This is a return to McCarthyism, this time from the far left.

American journalists have sided with the dark side of fashionable movements before. Back in the 1930s, when communist sympathies were popular among the literati, the way one handled reports about Russian policies in Ukraine became a test of respectability. Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who dared circumvent Soviet censorship and write unvarnished reports about the famine there, was ostracized by his colleagues, who falsely accused him of lying. The leading Stalin apologist, Walter Duranty, even received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the New York Times, which the 2003 Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke. 

That failure of reporting covered up the Holodomor. Millions of lives were extinguished, supposedly to create a just society but really just for the sake of communist repression. Had the public known, at least some humanitarian aid could have been sent, even to Soviet Russia. Some lives could have been saved. President Franklin Roosevelt might have also been more reluctant later to trust Stalin and, at the wartime conferences in Tehran and Yalta, less willing to sell millions of Eastern Europeans down the river to the brutal communist dictator. 

We can’t be silent when the single most deadly genocide of Jews since the Holocaust happens, and much of Western media sends the message that it is excusable because the perpetrators are an “oppressed group” or “anti-colonialists,” accepted by naive journalists as aggrieved but noble left-wing liberators, rather than Nazi-like, right-wing terrorists.

No reporter who sees through this charade should be silenced for wanting to expose ideologies on the right and left that encourage hatred and violence. No scholar should require police protection to speak at a university in America because he or she calls Hamas “terrorists.” 

The Holocaust of 6 million Jews reminds us that the world cannot again afford to explain away terror and murder with euphemisms. The fight against censorship needs to be taken to America’s newsrooms and universities, because that’s where the future of freedom will be decided.

Unless journalists and academics regain their moral compass, there will be new and more horrific incidents of genocide against Jews than even those committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. The consequences of the media protecting Hamas terrorists with words can indeed be deadly.

Sometimes, true neutrality requires using words with negative connotations to describe reality accurately. Anything softer would be misleading.

Ted Lipien is a journalist and media freedom advocate who was chief of the Voice of America’s Polish Service and later served as VOA’s acting associate director.