When I began my tenure as an Editorial Board member at The Emory Wheel, I thought journalists should exist in a realm where writers could employ unabashed realism and disturb universally accepted lies of comfort. I believed the practice of journalism should be an honest pursuit, one committed to ripping through lies of omission and concealment to write the true pulse of our world’s issues. Lately, however, it seems the field is headed toward the path of least resistance in the narratives it chooses to center. Now, as section editor of the Editorial Board, I feel this forthrightness and refusal of apathy is missing from journalism today — student and professional alike.
Regarding recent coverage indifferent to the hard truths of the world, no culprit is more well-known than The New York Times. Since late 2023, the Times has been rightfully under fire for its reporting on the Gaza Strip because of the language deemed neutral by the newspaper’s editors. According to a leaked memo on their Gaza coverage obtained by The Intercept in 2024, Times Standards Editor Susan Wessling, International Editor Philip Pan and their deputies explicitly told journalists to restrict the use of terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.” These terms refuse to hide behind niceties, and the writers who employ them are targeted and admonished. This phenomenon is not only endemic to supposedly objective news — language neutrality has bled into all aspects of journalism, including opinion writing, and has caused writers to hang onto their own moral discrepancies.
As a result of the Times’ mandate of false neutrality, over 300 writers, scholars and public intellectuals have pledged to boycott the Times op-ed page as of Oct. 27 due to anti-Palestinian bias in its coverage. Those participating in the boycott have three demands: For the Times’ newsroom to conduct a review of anti-Palestinian bias and produce new editorial standards for its coverage of Palestine, to retract the widely controversial investigation “Screams Without Words” and for the Times’ Editorial Board to call for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.
Additionally, journalistic expectations of language neutrality force both opinion and news writers into a middle ground through self-policing of their personal language. As an editor, when I encountered language in reference to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, I found myself genuinely wondering if the wording was adhering to the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook’s guidelines. The AP Stylebook begins its Middle East Conflicts Topical Guide with a discussion of “Hamas-led militants storm[ing] into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023,” rather than recognizing that Palestinians have suffered under the Israeli regime for decades. Israel and its occupied territory of Palestine’s histories did not begin on Oct. 7, yet journalists using the stylebook are expected to treat it like the origin point for the current “conflict.” The horrors of apartheid in Palestine have existed long before Oct. 7, and continue to persist as major news outlets push their stories toward a fate of irrelevance. Journalists must realize that to ignore history is to do a disservice to the stories we wish to tell.
It has always been dangerous to be a journalist. Since October 2023, Israeli military actions have killed 220 journalists in Palestine, with at least 62 of these journalists having been explicitly targeted because of their media coverage. On Oct. 12, an Israel-linked militia killed Saleh Aljafarawi, a 28-year-old freelance Palestinian journalist, while he was covering violent clashes in Gaza City. For journalists like Aljafarawi, the price of reporting has become death.
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has admitted “the Times is privileged to be one of the few news organizations with the resources to cover the world in all its complexity.” Yet, the complexity the Times claims to value is lost when it disallows facts that disrupt the reality it has chosen to platform. Both objective and opinion writers who center narratives of those on the edge of representation have been disparaged to no end. In her article “When Neutrality Is a Constraint,” journalist Lisa Armstrong argues that “news outlets continue to use euphemisms and the passive voice rather than naming bad actors and their actions directly.” In a genocide, people do not simply die — governments actively kill and starve, and we, as journalists, must not be afraid to say who is doing the killing and the starving.
The journalist holds a special sort of responsibility and power: to imbue language with the attention and intentionality it deserves. Former fact-checker at The New Yorker Ismail Ibrahim shared that he found it difficult to move the needle of progress in how the publication discussed Palestinian genocide, stating that his colleagues turned to calling him a “terrorist sympathizer.” But Ibrahim understands that the journalist has a certain calling to truth-tell, something beyond writing articles and op-eds that win awards and industry approval.
Emory University pays for students to have free access to the Times. If the headlines that grace our inboxes focus more on comfort and maintenance of the status quo than on truth-seeking and truth-telling, we will find ourselves entrenched in asinine messaging that excludes peripheral perspectives. Until the Times complies with these demands, Emory students should be critical of the authority of the newspaper’s content and seek out news sources that, unlike the Times, value an unfiltered detailing of the world.
As a student journalist at a private institution, I have the relative freedom to speak my mind without the fear of an oppressive regime taking my life. But I am still afraid of what could happen to my future because I have chosen to call an apartheid state what it truly is. Student journalists who take seriously the gravity of their words have been doxxed, harassed and even detained for their commitment to the truth. When I read Palestinian Declaration of Independence author and poet Mahmoud Darwish’s words, “Language might preserve the land from the plight of absence if poetry wins,” I am reminded that the most poetic language is that of honesty. The truth can be told through words, but the world will soon be devoid of our truth-tellers if we keep up the pretense of the straight and narrow and refuse to call atrocities by their name.
Contact Carly Aikens at caikens@emory.edu
Carly Aikens (she/her) (27C) is majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology & Cultural Anthropology. She is from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Outside of the Wheel she enjoys collecting moths, scrolling on Fragrantica and list-making. You can find her biking in Lullwater Preserve or conducting research in churches around Atlanta!
