I’m a journalist, and, like many people watching as a genocide is simultaneously livestreamed by the people of Gaza and whitewashed by much of US media, I’ve become both furious and bereft about contemporary journalism’s failures. But my disillusionment with my profession stretches further back. A few years ago, I started to think of calling it quits.
At the time I was reporting extensively on migration and human rights abuses in Greece, after over a decade reporting on the US border and on climate change. I was commissioned to write a story about the fire that burned down Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, widely decried as a “human rights graveyard.” Soon after the fire, six young Afghan refugees were arrested and convicted of arson in spite of scant evidence against them.
I’d taken on this story in particular because it felt as though my investigation into the credibility of the government’s case against these young men might actually have an impact on what became of them. For I had begun to wonder about what good any of my stories actually did. It felt like no matter what I wrote, the violence of fortified borders and abuses against immigrants only swelled, and our climate emergencies worsened each day. What did I have to show for the work I’d done? What could I offer, in real terms, to the thousands of people I asked to talk to me about some of the most difficult moments of their lives? Maybe this Moria story would be different.
For a long time, being a journalist was my dream job—a moral pursuit, I felt, to grapple with and amplify the world’s crises. I got paid by national magazines to travel the world to cover important matters of justice. It was a good life. But as time passed I noticed its cracks, its failures, its fissures—not just journalism’s lack of concrete impact, but the way it so often undermined its own mandate toward truth.
It wasn’t entirely journalism’s fault, for the field is under attack. Newspapers and magazines are woefully underfunded, and are often subject to the whims of billionaire owners and political despots who now claim “fake news” willy-nilly because they stand to gain from the public’s mistrust of journalism and from reporters’ silence. Already this year, 32 journalists, all but three of them reporting in Palestine, have been killed.
But it is also true that our profession, one I for so long and so righteously believed in, is in trouble from within. Reporting on a crisis isn’t by definition a virtuous act. Words, and the journalists who choose and order them, wield tremendous power. “Been killed,” for instance, is one passive way to narrate the fate against reporters in Gaza right now, as I have done above. “Targeted by the state of Israel” is another way to describe at least a handful of these deaths.
Such questions of language sit at the heart of journalism’s troubles, ignited by a long-smoldering controversy over journalistic objectivity which, however laudable as a goal, is also a myth. Journalism is made by humans, after all: creatures with feelings and lived experiences and beliefs—many of them inherited from elders and accumulated, via osmosis, from the surrounding culture, which journalism had its hand in shaping. Instead of embracing this reality, most US newsrooms cosplay at neutrality, as if it is possible to merely report things as they are, without influence by the way the reporter sees the world.
It wasn’t true, was it, that good reporting was the opposite of getting lost? Good reporting in fact requires it.Our papers are thus rife with dangerous euphemisms that do more to obscure truth than expose it. How about this recent New York Times headline after Israel attacked the civilians it had corralled into the Rafah safe zone: “Gazans Look Through Ashes After Israeli Strike on Rafah.” Oh, those passive ashes—as if merely the unseasonable falling of snow. As the journalist Wesley Lowery wrote in an op-ed during the racial justice uprisings of 2020, “Neutral objectivity trips over itself to find ways to avoid telling the truth.”
So I was in Greece, at a crossroads within a profession undergoing a cataclysmic reckoning—one that the meek, skewed, and sanitized coverage of Gaza now only puts into further relief. Should I keep beating the same drum? I wondered even then. Should I take up another instrument? I was losing my bearings. Maybe this Moria story would be different, I thought again. And then the magazine I was working for decided to kill the story.
I kept reporting it anyway, though, because I just couldn’t let it go. I owed it to the people I’d been writing about to do something with their story, as I’d promised. If couldn’t find a home in a magazine, I would incorporate it into a book I was writing on the violence of borders. That meant spending even more time in Greece.
But a strange thing started happening: I kept losing my literal bearings—getting hopelessly lost. This seemed an apt if harsh metaphor for my relationship to my career. I got lost on the well-trod streets of Athens, in the borderlands with Turkey where immigration officials and shepherds roamed, on the tourist island of Hydra where, sporting a sundress and certain I was taking a modest little hike, I accidentally ended up on a shadeless, 16-mile loop in 90 degree heat with no water. For hours I could see the town down below but the road kept disappearing and reappearing again, sometimes draped with menacing webs of enormous spiders. It was as if the gods were laughing at me. Or was it punishment?
Good reporting should be the opposite, I felt, of getting lost. Reporting was a mission of clarity born of a desire to orient and understand. The fact that I kept getting so fumblingly lost seemed a waste of precious time and proof that I was off track.
At the same time, such defamiliarization, however disorienting, can be a generative force. It was a desire to see things anew that had brought me to Greece in the first place. Having reported on the US border for so many years, it felt as though I’d stared at the sun for too long, a blot of light now clouding my vision. Reporting in Greece required me to navigate an entirely different political, social and topographical terrain while still reporting on migration. At the beginning, it worked. I felt more purposeful again, alive and geolocated within my profession.
But reporting in Greece also meant tangling with political trickery and double speak, which ultimately only deepened my disillusionment. I couldn’t access any key documents or secure interviews with government sources. “Perhaps next time you are here,” the press office would tell me each time I was there. Videos would emerge of a pushback in action, and the government would deny it full out—what you are seeing is not what you are seeing, was the message, like a malignant news headline, you are not where you think you are.
I kept at it, traveling back and forth to Greece from my home in California. I managed to find another home for the Moria story, I got pregnant, I finished the book, I had the baby. I stopped going to Greece and stopped pitching stories for a while, using the baby as an excuse and all along keeping my misgivings about journalism—and my urge to cut and run—mostly to myself.
And then, a few months ago, as the murderous siege against Gaza was well underway, and as large groups of Palestinians were arriving on the Aegean islands in search of safety, my book came out and I returned to Greece. Four of the six young men accused of burning down Moria were back in court on Lesbos for their appeal. I thought I was more or less done with this kind of reporting but I owed it to them, I felt, to show up—and to bring them a copy of the book that told a part of their stories.
When the Lesbos court was ordered into session, the judges postponed the Moria trial for a few days. By then I knew my way around the island. After long days of difficult reporting, I sometimes took respite at a spring where warm water spilled from the earth and pooled in a Byzantine-era grotto that overlooked a great, flickering bay. With this surprise time off, I decided to steal away to the springs.
The purpose of journalism was to simultaneously hold a mirror and shine a light, to constantly question and implicate systems of power and those who hold it.Though I’d driven the northbound road dozens of times before, I managed to miss my turn, suddenly snaking through the narrow roads of Moria, a tiny town surrounded by olive groves where the refugee camp had been situated before it burned, and after which it was named. Perhaps this wrong turn was fitting, a chance to return to the scene of the crime: not arson, as the prosecution claimed, but the sinister alchemy of turning a refugee into a criminal, a catastrophe into a crime.
Instead of the charred landscape of the camp I found myself driving through intact olive groves, the underside of their leaves winking silver with the afternoon light. It had poured that morning and now it was a bright bluebird day, the rain having rinsed and polished the sky. My road narrowed, turned to dirt and then, owing to the downpour, into a thick and menacing mud. I couldn’t figure how to turn the car around without getting stuck. I didn’t have any cell service. Every structure I passed was an empty, partially-built stack of stone. I’d done it again: lost.
For a long time, I’d regarded my vocational crisis just like this car trip: a matter of having taken a wrong turn and ending up somewhere I shouldn’t have. But in truth I wasn’t ever lost in journalism—not really. I always knew where I was, it’s just that as I had become a better and more ethical journalist, the landscape of my profession suddenly became a stranger to me. What you are seeing is not what you are seeing, you are not where you think you are.
All I was seeing now, on that wrong-turn road, was rocks. They got bigger and bigger as my sad little rental blundered uphill. But then I crested the peak and there I was, beholding the Bay of Gera below—the most staggering view of this familiar place I’d ever seen. It was becoming disoriented upon a familiar landscape that now allowed me unequivocal clarity: I knew exactly what I was seeing and exactly where I was. I made my way to the springs with ease.
It wasn’t true, was it, that good reporting was the opposite of getting lost? Good reporting in fact requires it: wading into the muddle and murk of an issue, and above all of one’s own preconceptions, toward eventual clarity.
The same could be said about the larger reckoning within journalism. It can be disorienting to hold both the scope and the details of the problem—the implicit bias at the Guardian, for instance, that, as Mona Chalabi points out, lead to their articles using the word “murder” in reference to Palestinians only once as compared to 101 times for Israelis, and “massacred” once for Palestinians as compared to 23 times for Israelis, even though 36,569 people Palestinians have been killed since October 7th compared to 1,139 Israelis.
It’s not just Gaza, of course. Newspapers routinely quote the lies of police officers without factchecking their claims. In 66 percent of stories about trans issues The New York Times didn’t quote a trans person; 76 percent of working reporters in the US are white. Yet staggering as they are, these details also offer a map out of this dire terrain.
The day after my misadventure to the springs, I was back in court for the appeal, the four young men handcuffed to one another, shoulders slumped, waiting for it all to begin. During the first trial, all journalists and independent observers were barred from court, but now the room was packed.
Not long into the proceedings, the judges announced that three of the four young men would go free on jurisdictional grounds. I watched as Ali, the youngest, fell to his knees, raised his hands toward the sky, and bent forward in supplication upon the filthy tile floor. Another freed defendant, Hassan, turned around to face us all: people there to witness his ordeal. The book? He mouthed to me. He wanted to make sure I’d brought one for him like I’d promised.
Then Faisal, the fourth, stood trial alone. The prosecutor was electric with fury at him, at refugees, at the plight of Greece. Such xenophobic vitriol was present in Greek media every day, just like it was in the US. When Faisal’s defense team tried to introduce key evidence that would exonerate him, the judges refused. Faisal was found guilty again for the reason that so many defendants are: because, within the hulking systems that ensnared him and much of the press that narrated his existence, he had been turned into a symbol and ceased to be a man.
In that courtroom my purpose felt clear again: to write about it all.
I’ll never know what hand my writing had in helping set the three free or keeping the fourth locked up. Maybe it had an impact, maybe not. But I now understood that immediate outcome, however gratifying, wasn’t the point. The purpose of journalism was to simultaneously hold a mirror and shine a light, to constantly question and implicate systems of power and those who hold it—a category that includes myself as a journalist, the one wielding the pen, the one choosing the words and their order.
If I was so infuriated over all of these headlines and tepid coverage of Gaza, bailing on a sullied profession was one option. Insisting on better ones, and trying to write them myself, was another.
So I’m back to reporting on migration and human rights. I had to lose my bearings both in the physical world and on the page to reacquaint myself with my duty, no matter the outcome, to work toward an outcome of clarity and justice. It’s a looping logic, but I’m used to traveling in circles—and there’s nothing more than we need right now than that exposing mirror, that penetrating light.
