Journalists rush into danger to cover the Israel-Hamas war

The horror continues to play out in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Following the Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli response, war has broken out. Deaths now total more than 1,000. Thousands more have been injured. The situation deteriorates by the minute.

Israel’s military has ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, meaning food, fuel and supplies will be stopped for the 2.3 million people who live there. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Hamas said attacks on people sheltering in the Gaza Strip would lead to the executions of captured Israelis. One report said the executions would be carried live on TV.

While this goes on, media from around the globe have rushed to the scene to report on the story.

So here are various links, thoughts and analyses of the media coverage, starting with some of the work of particularly brave journalists.

Running into the fire

The most powerful reports in the past day have come from reporters who are in the danger zone, forced to take cover with explosions all around them. These aren’t reporters who are a mile or two from the explosions. We’re talking about buildings being hit from just up the street, or less than a block away.

Here are some of the examples:

Here’s a clip of CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who said, “Forgive me, but I’m in a slightly inelegant position.” She was lying in a ditch because, as she explained, “We just had a massive barrage of rockets coming in here, not too far from us.” And here is the scary clip of how she ended up in that position.

Ward told viewers, “We're just about five minutes away. Gaza is in that direction. We can hear now a lot of jets in the sky. We can also hear the Iron Dome intercepting a number of those rockets as they were whizzing overhead and making impact in that direction. We came to this location because this was ground zero for this entire operation of carnage. Hamas militants came on a pickup truck. This was the first place where they breached that border wall.”

Meanwhile, viewers got to experience exactly what it looks and sounds like when a journalist and his team are literally in the war zone in this jarring clip with NBC News’ Richard Engel. Mortars could be seen overhead and then heard crashing nearby, breaking glass and rooting up dust and smoke. Engel implored his team to “stay down!” as they lay on the ground and huddled against a small wall.

Then there was this clip from Fox News’ Trey Yingst, who has spent the past 72 hours dodging bombings. In another scene at night, Yingst was in the middle of a report when loudspeakers warned of another attack. He told his colleagues, “Get down, everyone. Lay down flat. Everyone down flat. Cover your head. More rocket fire now. Loud explosions coming off another time there, they're trying to overwhelm the Iron Dome again. I can see them coming off the Gaza Strip from multiple locations. Stay down, guys, stay down.”

In this clip, Yingst cooly and calmly reported on rockets being intercepted overhead.

In yet another clip, CBS News’ Holly Williams and her crew had to scramble to safety. She told “CBS Mornings,” “We are two miles from the border with the Gaza strip and we have been hearing incoming rocket fire, forcing our team to scramble for cover not long ago. … Many people are calling this Israel's 9/11 and it certainly feels that way. In a nation that's used to living with the threat of violence, people here are profoundly shocked.”

ABC News’ Matt Gutman, after sprinting with his crew to safety during a bombing, said, “That tells you how close you are — there was almost no warning,”

CNN political commentator David Axelrod tweeted, “Watching @CNN's intrepid war correspondent @clarissaward and her crew dive for cover under fire reminds us of the risks courageous journalists take to bring stories like the ghastly terrorist attack on Israel & its aftermath to the world. They deserve our thanks & our prayers.”

A personal note

“CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil said on the air Monday morning that two of his children and his ex-wife are in Israel as the war rages. He said, “It’s been a roller coaster weekend.”

Dokoupil told viewers, “It's tough. I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old who live in Israel. They live there with their mother, my ex-wife. They are safe. But just as a father, I think people can understand, if somebody, anybody, is firing rockets in the direction of your children without regard to whether they are struck or not, you're going to feel a thing or two.”

He added, “I come to this fairly as a journalist, but I'm also a father … you can't separate those two at a certain point.”

Is it a war?

For this one, I turn it over to my Poynter colleague Ren LaForme.

Precise language rarely matters more than when journalists are covering ongoing conflicts. Our reporting shapes our audiences’ understanding of such moments. That’s why I spent Monday morning speaking with colleagues about how to refer to what’s happening in Israel.

Is it fighting? A conflict? A war? Between Israel and Palestine? Israel and Gaza? Israel and Hamas?

Lacking the specific expertise to address these questions on our own, I reached out to John Daniszewski, vice president and editor at large for standards of The Associated Press, to learn what the publisher of the influential AP Stylebook was considering. Here’s the advice he shared with colleagues:

The Associated Press has decided to call the present conflict between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza a war, given the widespread and ongoing nature of military operations in Israel and Gaza, now in their third day.

The decision was taken in consideration of the high number of casualties, the mobilization of armies, the organized, cross-border fighting and bombardments, and Israel’s declaration of war and announcement that Gaza will be under siege. The fighting has already resulted in more deaths than earlier conflicts that we have called war.

In addition, Daniszewski advised colleagues to call it the “latest war between Israel and Hamas,” the “Israel-Palestinian war,” the “latest Israel-Hamas war” or the “latest Gaza war.” He also noted that “war” is only capitalized when it is part of a formal name, and no formal name exists for this war.

Other notable coverage and news from the war …

• All three network evening news anchors — ABC’s David Muir, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and NBC’s Lester Holt — anchored Monday from Israel.
• NewsNation, which is trying to make a dent in the cable news landscape, is throwing lots of resources at covering this story. Anchor Chris Cuomo and national correspondent Robert Sherman are both in the region. Cuomo hosted his prime-time show from Israel on Monday night.
• Somber clip of a survivor talking about the massacre of hundreds of Israelis at a music festival. And CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviews another survivor, whose sister is missing.
• In addition, here’s Amanpour’s interview with Israel Defense Forces international spokesperson Jonathan Conricus.
• Reporting from Jerusalem, The New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley with “Israeli Father Tells of Moment His Wife and Children Became Hostages.”
• Pieces like this are always valuable: The Washington Post’s Timothy Bella with “The Gaza Strip and its history, explained.”
• This one, too: The Washington Post’s Niha Masih with “What is Hamas, and why did it attack Israel now?”
• This is disturbing: The Atlantic with “Images of the Mass Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas.” Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted out the story and wrote, “Don’t look away.”
• Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt criticized some of the coverage he saw on MSNBC and “Morning Joe” — while appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr has the details.
• Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg with “Who’s to blame for the Hamas attack on Israel? That debate is already going off the rails.”
• My Poynter colleague Alex Mahadevan with “How to avoid misinformation about the war in Gaza.”
• Elon Musk’s decision to remove news headlines from tweets on X has made it even more difficult to identify reliable news stories the past few days.
• Meanwhile, Wired’s David Gilbert’s latest: “The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation.” Gilbert writes, “While all major world events are now accompanied almost instantly by a deluge of disinformation aimed at controlling the narrative, the scale and speed at which disinformation was being seeded about the Israel-Hamas conflict is unprecedented — particularly on X.” Gilbert added, “Rather than being shown verified and fact-checked information, X users were presented with video game footage passed off as footage of a Hamas attack and images of firework celebrations in Algeria presented as Israeli strikes on Hamas. There were faked pictures of soccer superstar Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag, while a three-year-old video from the Syrian civil war repurposed to look like it was taken this weekend.”

Thompson takes over

Mark Thompson officially took over as head of CNN on Monday and, in a message to staff, stressed the importance of digital as opposed to TV. Late last month, Warner Bros. Discovery added CNN to its Max streaming service. And when Thompson was hired back in August, it was known he would place an emphasis on more than just the cable TV network.

According to Puck’s Dylan Byers, Thompson said in his message on the Monday morning editorial call: “Conventional TV will remain critical, but it can no longer define us, it's one platform in a growing portfolio of platforms.”

New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin tweeted that Thompson told staff, “TV is also too dominant at CNN and digital, too marginal. … Despite some recent encouraging developments like the launch of CNN Max, this company is still nowhere near ready for the future.”

Thompson’s predecessor, Chris Licht, came in and tried to push CNN’s coverage more to the center. About its political coverage, Thompson told staff, “Let's not second-guess ourselves or get distracted by complicated arguments about balance or whataboutism or false equivalency. Let's cover political news proportionally and fairly but not be frightened of our own shadows.”

RFK’s big announcement

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dropping his bid to be the Democratic nominee for president. But he is not dropping his bid to become president. Kennedy announced Monday that he will run as an independent. Although, if the rest of his new campaign is anything like his announcement — check out this awkward clip — then he’s already in trouble.

And he’s not getting any help from his siblings. Kerry Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend put out a strongly worded statement saying they were not endorsing their brother.

They wrote in a tweet: “The decision of our brother Bobby to run as a third party candidate against Joe Biden is dangerous to our country. Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision, or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”

Yikes.

As to what RFK Jr.’s independent run means, Politico’s Steven Shepard has “RFK Jr. goes independent. Does that hurt Biden or Trump?”

Media tidbits

• Variety’s Brian Steinberg with “CNN and NBC Set to Battle for Future of Streaming News.”
• Mediaite — the Dan Abrams site that writes about the media — has started a UK version. It’s called Mediaite UK. The site is being led by David Gilmour. No, not the Pink Floyd guitarist, but the reporter who has covered media, tech and politics for Vice News and The Daily Dot. Gilmour will be based in Belfast, Ireland.
• Reminder: Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is scheduled to appear on today’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.
• The New York Post’s Ryan Glasspiegel with “76ers beat writer out at PhillyVoice after ripping team’s Israel tweet.”

Hot type

• In a collaboration between The New Yorker and the Outlaw Ocean Project, Ian Urbina looks into the human-rights abuses aboard China’s fleet of fishing vessels and in its seafood processing plants in “The crimes behind the seafood you eat.”
• Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott with “Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?”

More resources for journalists

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Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected].