Why I call myself a 'recovering journalist'

On Palestine & disillusionment of news media

I've increasingly taken to calling myself a recovering journalist. I adopted the phrasing after hearing my friend, and the brilliant filmmaker Dina Amer, the woman behind the award-winning and ground-breaking film You Resemble Me, referring to herself that way.

Her film, released in 2021, uses fiction to try and make sense of reality, telling the true story of Hasna Aït Boulahcen; the French-Moroccan woman who was implicated in the Paris Attacks of 2015, alleged as Europe’s first female suicide bomber.

It was Dina, in her work as a journalist, who was among the first to inadvertently contribute to what later turned out to be a false narrative: French investigators found that Hasna was not, in fact, the perpetrator, but rather killed, when someone next to her detonated a suicide vest.

It was in part Dina’s dismay at the role she had played in perpetuating the false narrative, and the media machine at large that assumed and expected that of her, that led her to want to tell stories in different ways; in formats that can often afford more nuance and honesty.

“I got wildly disenchanted by the news as a medium, and found it to be incredibly fictitious, sensational, and problematic,” she said, in an interview with Harpers Bazaar Arabia.

“I was not proud of my work. I felt like I had no story, my story was chasing after other stories, and yet they were reduced to these very simplistic and even sometimes racist world views.”

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Of course, that’s not the lesson that we are taught about journalism, growing up. Especially not those of us who want to be journalists. We are taught that journalists are purveyors of the truth, megaphones in fighting injustice, in raising awareness. That it is a noble profession.

And of course, in many ways, it absolutely is. Shout out the Palestinian journalists in Gaza at the moment, for example, who even while at risk of death at any minute, are still documenting the atrocities happening to and around them, for all the world to see.

Indeed, there are many journalists who, the world over, from breaking news to social and cultural commentary and beyond, capture eras with their work, moments in history; capture aspects of the human condition and, in translating them, offer humanity and understanding and posterity and legacy to us all. It is - or can be - a noble profession.

But that many have long had a mistrust of the media is something I learned early on in my Journalism career, and a lesson that the professor of my Journalism Masters clearly wanted us to learn, when he sent us on assignment, each to a different area of London, to speak to locals and uncover a story to report about.

No one wanted to speak to any of us.

We returned to the class dismayed and surprised. Why did no one want to tell us of their stories, of their gossip, their injustices? How could they not?

There are lots of valid reasons, it turns out. From seemingly less innocuous things like the treatment of people in the public eye - predominantly women (see the recent Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson documentaries, for starters), to often warranted fears of journalists exploiting or twisting people’s pain and stories for headlines, to the often racist misrepresentation of people of colour, to the use of strategic language to shape a specific narrative, the list is long.

Indeed, the news often has an agenda, it transpires. As Dina put it, “the news networks that are meant to be the Mecca of truth telling, [turned out to be] the custodians of certain world views that need to be protected.”

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That has never been more obvious than in the media’s current handling - or mishandling - of reporting on the genocide taking place in Palestine.

From the strategic use of passive vs active language - who was killed vs who just happened to die, for example - to choosing *when* to begin reporting on the story (this did not begin on October 7th, despite what the media would have you believe, but has, in fact, been going on for over 75 years), to incendiary headlines, to conflating a terrorist organisation with an entire nationality, to deciding who and what to call terrorism in the first place… - I could go on - there are countless ways in which the media is currently portraying only a certain truth that could, because of that, perhaps not even be called truth at all. It is egregious and heartbreaking and utterly gaslighting to see.