We’re seven days into the new year & in the immortal words of Death Cab for Cutie, I don’t feel any different. But I am going into this year with some new writing goals including writing an essay collection (a memoir-in-essays?) and with those goals, a renewed interest the exercise of column writing. I will attempt to write you at least one missive a month, whether it’s cultural criticism, some excerpts from the cutting room floor for whatever reporting I’m doing, or something in between. And there will be news of upcoming readings & the like.
So this is the new year. This dispatch is brief - the writing is just starting to get going, so there isn’t much to share yet. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the most important piece I published last year, “Why Journalists Must Speak Out on Gaza,” co-written with eight other movement journalists:
We are raising our voices to honor the dead and fight for the living, not because media workers’ lives are more valuable than others, but because attacks on journalism carry extreme dangers to us all. In early November, the Palestinian Youth Movement called for media workers to “use their considerable public platforms in video, print, audio, and social media to publish stories about Gaza, speak truth to power, challenge misinformation, reject anti-Palestinian racism, and condemn the targeting and killing of Palestinian journalists and their families.” As the death toll in Gaza mounts, we as journalists and media workers will continue to make noise, joining Writers Against the War on Gaza and the Protect Journalists open letter insisting on a new paradigm for coverage of these atrocities.
In these times of increasingly militarized policing and global consolidation of capitalist power, Palestine is a bellwether. Israel’s repression of Palestinian journalism shows us what is possible under the guise of “democracy.” It also validates violence around the world in other regimes where U.S. or other Western imperialism and intervention have protected authoritarian governments, from Haiti to the Philippines.
Our “democracies” do not protect us. Truth and freedom of speech are being increasingly criminalized all over the globe—especially when the speakers are Indigenous, Black, or Brown people. Journalism that functions as a mouthpiece for the state hinders our fight for collective liberation. People’s movements need movement media now more than ever.
I woke this morning to the news that the Israeli military killed journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera & the son of fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh. The airstrike also killed freelance journalist Mustafa Thuraya, who was in the car with them. Why exactly the BBC asked the Israeli government for a comment (why on earth would Israel openly admit to targeting journalists even though that’s very clearly what’s happening - how many times must Wael’s family be hit? How can one man bear such grief?) is beyond me.
At a time when writing & archiving both feels utterly necessary (in conjunction with direct action) and frustratingly unimportant (when it feels like I’m shouting into a void or preaching to the choir), I hope it serves as a reminder that it is possible for all of us to take action in whatever lane we occupy. We need new paradigms, new forms. My lane is journalism, so it’s what I do. No Glory in the West, indeed.
Currently reading: Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between by Joseph Osmundson