Canceled for Defending Israel — at a Journalism Conference

I have seen the future of journalism. Sadly, it resembles the reporting of the BBC, whose top bosses recently resigned over allegations of bias in its coverage of President Trump and the Gaza war.

This gloomy outlook comes from being canceled—booted from a conference for defending Israel. Not an Arab League meeting. Not a political rally. I was ejected from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) national convention.

The tumult at SPJ’s Washington D.C. annual MediaFest confab last month began at a session about how “religious biases” can soil a publication’s reputation. At issue was a November 2023 article from Florida Atlantic University’s University Press profiling an Israeli student who found solace in soccer after Hamas’s October 7 massacre. The student newspaper policy was to cover the Israel-Hamas war only if there was a campus angle.

The student editor who ran the story — Jewish, like the sportswriter who wrote it — was accused of religious bias for not including a Palestinian voice.

The article about the Israeli student was not provided before or during the lightly attended conference session. Only excerpts were shown on a screen, making it difficult to address the article’s purported shortcomings.

Wearing those blinders, I politely suggested that University Press could have run a separate piece about a Palestinian student. I cautioned against morally linking the Israel Defense Forces, which drops leaflets warning civilians of incoming fire, and Hamas terrorists who fried Israeli babies in ovens, a verified October 7 horror.

One audience member interrupted me. Another said, “This conversation is getting uncomfortable.”

“The truth can sometimes be uncomfortable,” I responded.

After the session I calmly debated a student about the Gaza war. “Perhaps we can educate each other,” I said. She was pulled away as I explained the IDF’s intense efforts to minimize civilian deaths. Moments later five security guards surrounded me. I was no longer welcome at a journalism conference where the free flow of ideas is supposed to be a benchmark value.

On sale nearby were Star Wars-themed SPJ T-shirts highlighting the bulwark of a free press. “May the First be with you,” the shirts read. On the back, the First Amendment, printed like the iconic text crawl opening each Star Wars movie. The irony was thick.

My removal was as misguided as the session targeting the Jewish student editor.

By assuming the student’s Judaism slanted her editorial judgment, session organizers failed to consider that a non-Jewish editor could also support Israel. The bias allegation against the Jewish student editor, Jessica Abramsky, suggests the trope of dual loyalty. 

Abramsky told me good news sense, not her Judaism, shaped the soccer-player story. Abramsky said her editorial team decided collectively not to include a Palestinian perspective. The story was a profile, not political analysis. She ran it by a journalism professor, who agreed.

That professor did not return calls, but Al Tompkins, faculty emeritus at the Poynter Institute journalism think tank, told me “you don’t have to pit students against each other by including them in the same piece. Doing a separate story could work.”

In fact, a month later, Abramsky co-wrote a piece, with twice the number of words as the soccer-player story, spotlighting a former president of the FAU Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. In the article, student and faculty sympathizers with the Palestinians were liberally quoted, but with no counterpoint to misleading claims.

For instance, an FAU history professor who had advised the SJP chapter sanitized Hamas by asserting it targeted civilians only after Jewish gunman Baruch Goldstein in 1994 killed 29 Muslims at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs. Left unreported was Hamas’s 1988 charter calling for mass murder through “obliterating” Israel and all Jews.

No one accused the University Press editor of bias. There was no SPJ session dissecting the distorted claims sources made in that article. Only the soccer-player story was worthy of scrutiny at a journalism conference, even though the alleged violation of journalism principles — not including an alternative voice in this particular story — was nebulous.

Abramsky, who graduated in August, described a campus newsroom hostile to Jewish students. Citing Hamas as the source of Gazan Health Ministry casualty figures was a battle. “I struggled to get writers to provide balance in their stories that tended to portray Israel as the villain,” Abramsky said.

She once found “Where the Jews at?” scrawled on a newsroom whiteboard.

Abramsky was shocked to see the lead paragraph of the soccer-player article had been changed before publication without her oversight. In its place: an inflammatory lead reporting that Israel killed 9,700 Palestinian civilians in retaliation for the Hamas attacks. “That would never have gotten past me” in an edit, Abramsky said.

The hypocrisy runs deeper. The SPJ’s ethics code calls for journalists to “support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.” Yet, at the same conference, organizers — the College Media Association, Associated Collegiate Press, and SPJ  — disinvited several journalists from conservative outlets like The Daily Wire and Daily Signal after one professor threatened to boycott if they appeared.

The journalists were to lead panels on faith and journalism. Their replacement? A senior research manager at an anti-Israel think tank.

Signs of this ideological cleansing and collapse of intellectual honesty surfaced at the 2022 SPJ conference, where three young journalists on a keynote panel all agreed that objective reporting is archaic.

Sadly, the smattering of audience applause they received would likely be more robust today.

Instead of targeting a Jewish student editor, the Society of Professional Journalists would better serve budding reporters with fact-based session topics: How to cover a war responsibly when combatants (spoiler alert: Hamas) and their sympathizers wear press vests, for instance.

Earlier this year, in a peculiar effort to highlight the folly of fake news, the SPJ urged student journalists to enter a “Spread Immoral News” contest for which they would publish an entire newspaper with fabricated copy.

The Society of Professional Journalists risks further erasing the lines between fact and opinion unless it spotlights voices other than those indoctrinating students. Until then, the SPJ is helping to spread the virus created in the petri dish of a tainted education system.