As Morgan reported on mass deaths of Palestinian civilians, they received directives from higher up suggesting they work on other subjects not connected to the daily events of the war. Morgan recalled, “It half came straight from CAMERA,” or the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, a pro-Israel media watchdog group that purports to expose skewed news articles.

“It was like a veiled letter, like, ‘You need to do some stuff that shows you’re tough on the terrorists, because you’ve been doing all these stories on the stuff that was actually happening, which was bombs hitting houses, killing many civilians.’ ”

“I’d have many, many small and large negotiations with editors to adjust details in stories. It was extremely exhausting,” Morgan told me. Morgan worried these took a toll on their status at work: “Every time you had one of those conversations, you were increasing your reputation as a frictional reporter who’s difficult to work with.”

Now, Morgan finds some relief in how the conversation has started to shift. “Speaking broadly, throughout all the topics that we cover, there’s an increased sensitivity toward not having the default person be a white, straight male, or even American,” Morgan told me. But they see the issue as even more basic. “Frankly, the issue here is—are Palestinians human? Are Arabs human? Are Muslims human? It’s hard for me to talk about it without getting angry. But that is what it’s about. It happens to be an intense example of a much broader issue, and I think there’s going to be a big change generationally that we’re already seeing in American Jews under 40 having a completely different take on this. And you can see people tweeting a lot about ‘I can’t believe I was sold on this lie in Hebrew school or Birthright.’ And some of those people are in newsrooms. You also have generations of first-, second-generation Muslims and Arabs who—increasingly, as people of color, and in issues of representation and fairness—have the confidence and ability to stick up for themselves.”

Issa, an Arab American correspondent for a major U.S. news service, was reporting from Gaza around the same time as Morgan. (Issa isn’t his real name.) He recounted many of the same experiences about trying to report on what he and his peers were seeing. “We commiserated over the fight we were all having with our desks,” he told me. “We were all reporting similar things, and having similar fights.”

Issa was singled out by CAMERA, which created a profile for him on its website and published a series of articles seeking to discredit him and his reporting. He said it seemed intended to intimidate him and his employer, but he wore it as a badge of honor. Still, because of industrywide budget cuts, his and other outlets scaled back their foreign operations and recalled their journalists in the region.

“The scary part now is that there’s so many fewer foreign operations than there used to be. So, there’s less diversity,” he told me. “If the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal are intimidated, you still had correspondents running around from the Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News,” he told me. “When I moved to the Middle East, there were three times as many correspondents than there are now. And when there’s fewer of us, that could only make us easier to control.”

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a Palestinian journalist who has worked for HuffPost, Vice, and Al Jazeera, said one memory of his coverage haunts him especially. In 2015, he was filming a documentary for Vice. He came upon a group of settlers destroying a Palestinian family’s home in the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem. He said a group of homes had been slated for eviction nearby, but not this home. After a mother who lived there came home with her young daughter, he watched as the settlers threw the young girl’s toys out of the house, removing pipes and destroying furniture. “And we’re filming, and all of a sudden, there’s a torrential downpour, and they’re locked out of their home,” he told me. “Literally if we had done all the planning with millions of dollars to try and capture the scene that unfolded in front of us that we captured by chance, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Shihab-Eldin said the scene was cut from the documentary by Vice. “They had completely removed that scene and added all this archival footage. Like 30 percent of the film became archival. Not only did they censor the doc, but they took out the heart of what we had captured,” he said. “They sent me a script, and it was super different than what I had written.”

“ ‘Dude, the settlements are crazy controversial,’ ” Shihab-Eldin said he was told. “ ‘Some see them as illegal. Israel doesn’t. So we can’t show the confrontation because it will make it show too much of one side’s argument.’ ”

When we reached out to Vice to ask about this incident, a Vice spokesperson said, “Vice News does not comment on our editorial decisions.” Instead, the spokesperson referred us to Vice correspondent Hind Hassan’s more recent reports from East Jerusalem.

Shihab-Eldin said he’s been heartened by what he’s seen the past couple of weeks. “Veteran journalists on Sky News are each day remarking on the context, focusing on the disproportionate nature, and using terminology like ethnic displacementor ethnic cleansing,” he said. “The way we talk about it has changed. Eight years ago, when I was working at the New York Times and PBS and other places, I would have to have arguments about using the word occupy, just to point out that these cities are occupied,” he told me. “Now, we’re using terms like apartheid.”

This week, Shihab-Eldin spoke publicly for the first time about the footage cut from his documentary himself.

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“I think there’s a lot of self-censorship. People are always beholden to the editors directly above them who are enforcing it,” said Salam, an Arab producer at a cable news network who asked to use an anonymized name. He said there is a group chat where his colleagues can privately discuss the ways they’ve felt unable to do their job in the coverage of Israel and Palestine. “I feel a little apprehensive saying this, but it is almost like it’s instilled in you that this is a ‘sensitive’ topic, and everything needs signoff,” he said. (Indeed, multiple editors at Slate read this piece.) He told me there are internal concerns over who exactly is making the decisions about what can and cannot be said in their coverage. “It’s easy to see how that can trickle down in the form of self-censorship,” he told me.

Salam said that at his network, there is a strict policy against using the word Palestine. “They say Palestine as a country doesn’t exist, so we say ‘Palestinian territories,’ ” he told me. “URLs have slugs with keywords that identify the topic for SEO purposes.” Someone used “Palestine” in a slug, and he got a message from someone senior saying “We do NOT use the word Palestine in our coverage.” “And now every time there’s an article that’s out, I scour it to see,” he said, “if people are trying to slip through the net. But it’s so carefully edited.”

He added, “We have a triad—fact-checkers, standards, and legal—but on this topic, everything has to be read and OK’d by the Jerusalem bureau chief. So it’s not possible to sneak something through if you wanted to.”

“People still use ‘Palestine’ in editorial meetings and over Slack. It’s quite funny,” he said. “I’m not sure they’re doing it as an internal act of resistance or they’re just clueless, but people do.”

Salam said he has remained mostly dispirited by the coverage, but he’s found some hope. “I remember when HRW [Human Rights Watch] accused Israel of apartheid. That was a big deal. People were like, ‘Look, this is something we can actually say now with attribution.’ Obviously, we will always have to give the right of reply to Israel, who will deny it, but the fact we can now say an NGO is now accusing Israel of practicing apartheid is a big step, because doing that before would be too opinionated,” he said.

“I think there’s a bit of an awakening among journalists who aren’t so quick to believe the shiny government narrative that’s put in front of them. I think now with social media being so prevalent, people can see with their own eyes what’s being recorded by people who are actually there. And you’re not so dependent on government press releases,” Salam said. “Gaza can come to you through your mobile phone. The only people long ago who were covering this properly was Al Jazeera, and they were stigmatized for being ‘terrorism TV.’ ”

As I reported this story, a nightmare professional scenario many of these journalists feared played out in real time. Emily Wilder, who had only been at the Associated Press as a news associate for two weeks, was fired after she was attacked by right-wing groups and became a focal point for attacks online.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Wilder said on Thursday, not long after she was fired. “That’s the only coherent feeling at this point. It’s a lot.” Unlike most journalists quoted in this story, Wilder didn’t even cover Israel or Palestine. But the 22-year-old Arizona-based reporter was part of a pro-Palestinian group in college and tweeted about bias in coverage of Israel and Palestine. She said she was told she violated social media policy when she was fired, but said the AP declined to elaborate.

Lauren Easton, the director of media relations for the AP, confirmed Wilder was fired for her social media posts but did not specify which ones violated policy. She added, “We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story.”

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“I’m a Jewish journalist. I’m not denying I’ve ever been involved in activism. I’m not going to claim that I don’t have opinions,” Wilder said over the phone. “Yes, I have opinions about something that is deeply important to my community. I don’t think those opinions, or my past as an activist, preclude me from ever being a journalist ever again.”

Besides, she said, “I was a news associate. I did not ever write about Israel and Palestine.”

Wilder, like a lot of reporters, has been closely watching the most recent news, and has been particularly interested in whether the language used to describe Israel’s grip on the daily lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza is shifting. She thought things might be different now.

“And then this happened,” she said. “I’ve seen people be braver with the words that they’re using. And regardless of this happening to me, I do think there’s a movement in that direction. I think that’s evidenced by the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of support that I’m really appreciating.”

• Israel
• Journalism
• New York Times
• Palestine