Tag: journalists

Portland Police Arrest Conservative Journalist Nick Sortor

Portland Police arrested conservative journalist Nick Sortor on Thursday night.

According to X user, C.K. Bouferrache aka Honeybadgermom:

“Looked like @nicksortor got jumped. We are on the lower roof at ICE but difficult to tell exactly what happened at this distance. Portland liaison officers stand nearby and watch.”

She added in the following post:

“I cannot believe they arrested this guy for defending himself. The woman that went after him has taken part in a few assaults this last week.”

X user Mark Wilson posted video footage of the arrest, writing:

“Portland PD arrested @nicksortor tonight. Unclear why, as he wasn’t doing anything criminal. This comes after Portland police refused to arrest the lady who assaulted @KatieDaviscourt.”

Keep reading

Western news agencies demand Israel grant international journalists access to Gaza

The world’s most prominent news agencies released a short film and a joint statement on 25 September calling on Israel to allow international journalists into Gaza to report on the horrors of the ongoing war.

The video, produced on behalf of the BBC, Reuters, AP, and AFP, features iconic photos and clips of news reports from previous wars over the past century alongside the message that “history is told by those who report it.”

“The world ignored Rwanda until reporters revealed thousands a day were being massacred; the report of a child’s body washed up on a beach revealed the stark reality of the Syrian refugee crisis; in Ukraine, journalists from around the world risk their lives every day to report the suffering of the people,” BBC journalist David Dimbleby narrates.

“But when it comes to Gaza, the job of reporting falls solely to Palestinian journalists who are paying a terrible cost, leaving fewer to bear witness,” Dimbleby states as photos of the devastation from Gaza are shown.

“The Israeli government will not allow international reporters into Gaza to do their work and to document freely what they see. International journalists must now be allowed into Gaza to share the work with Palestinian reporters there so we can all bring the facts to the world,” he concludes.

Since Israel began its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, it has blocked access for foreign news correspondents unless they are embedded with the Israeli army. Their reports are then reviewed and approved by Israel’s military censor before publication.

In perhaps the only exception, CNN journalist Clarissa Ward briefly entered Gaza via Rafah in a convoy of UAE medical volunteers in December 2023.

As foreign news agencies relied on local journalists to produce reports on the ground, the Israeli military has mercilessly targeted them for assassination.

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), at least 210 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza since the war began nearly 23 months ago.

Keep reading

The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists

There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones. They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.

Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger. They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat. They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.

The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field. I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleague Robert Fisk.

When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.

“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson recalls. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels. We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’”

“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”

You can see an interview I did with Anderson here.

This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.

Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers. Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness. No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Journalists in Palestine leave wills and recorded videos to be read or played at their death.

Keep reading

The Palestine Chronicle Case: When Truth Becomes the Crime

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity – grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.

At the heart of this endeavor stands Ramzy Baroud. His career is the antithesis of clandestine. For decades he has written, taught, and spoken in public, producing books translated into multiple languages, contributing columns to international publications, addressing audiences in universities and public forums across continents. He is not a shadowy figure; he is a man whose work has been consistent, transparent, and intellectually rigorous. His life is not untouched by the tragedy he describes: many members of his family were killed under Israeli bombardments. Yet while mainstream media rushed to amplify unproven allegations against him, they remained deaf to his personal grief. His tragedy was ignored, his integrity overlooked, his voice distorted – because his engagement is unbearable to those who would prefer silence.

A Crime of Conscience, Not of Law

He is an engaged journalist in the noblest sense: independent, lucid, unflinching. His so-called crime is not collusion with violence but fidelity to memory. That is why he is demonized – not for what he has done in law, but for what he represents in conscience. America, unable to silence Palestinian voices through censorship alone, now instrumentalizes its justice system to achieve by indictment what it failed to achieve by argument. Having harassed universities, intimidated students, and punished professors for their solidarity with Gaza, it turns the courtroom into a new battlefield. And Congress, captive to the whims of its Zionist masters, joins the manhunt, targeting a journalist for the sole offense of telling the truth of his people. As for the mainstream press, it chooses cowardice: ignoring his family’s suffering, ignoring the emptiness of the charges, while echoing the accusations of power as if they were evidence.

Law Twisted into Weapon

The complaint filed against Ramzy Baroud and the organization (People Media Project) that runs the Palestine Chronicle rests on the Alien Tort Statute, grotesquely overstretched to criminalize editorial decisions rather than acts of war. It alleges that by publishing articles from Abdallah Aljamal – described by Israel as a Hamas operative killed during a hostage rescue – the Chronicle “aided and abetted” terrorism. But here lies the first fissure: this characterization of Aljamal comes exclusively from Israeli military sources, themselves a belligerent party. It has never been independently verified. The claim that he was both a journalist and a Hamas operative remains an allegation, not an established fact. To treat it as judicial evidence is to replace proof with propaganda.

Even if – hypothetically – Aljamal had, at the demand of a militant group, harbored hostages, such a circumstance would not in itself render him culpable: what ordinary civilian in a war zone can refuse the command of militants under threat of force? And even if it occurred, how could Ramzy Baroud have known of it? Even taken at face value, the allegation collapses upon scrutiny. No evidence demonstrates that the Chronicle or its editor had actual knowledge of Aljamal’s supposed operational role, nor that modest freelance payments – if any at all – bore any causal nexus to hostage-taking. The federal judge, in February 2025, dismissed the original complaint precisely for lack of proof of knowledge or intent. The plaintiffs returned with an amended filing, repackaged in rhetoric and pathos, but still devoid of the material elements required under international law: actus reus (a substantial contribution to the crime) and mens rea (intent or knowledge).

To equate the publication of articles with material support for terrorism is not jurisprudence but a juridical contortion. It is the substitution of law by politics, the criminalization of journalism under the mask of counterterrorism. What is sought is not justice but intimidation – to cast suspicion on every Palestinian voice, to brand their words as weapons, their witness as crime.

Keep reading

The War on Truth: Why Are Palestinian Journalists Being Systematically Erased?

The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza on August 10 has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no substantive action. This has become the predictable and horrifying trajectory of the international community’s response to the ongoing Israeli genocide.

By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.

More journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a “terrorist”. This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli officials in the past, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza “is responsible” for not having rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent people in Gaza.

This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes entire populations based on a vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve their country’s image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, callously argued that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels,” implying that all of Gaza is a valid military target.

This cruelty of language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric, except that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports, destroyed over 70% of Gaza’s infrastructure.

While extremist language is often used by politicians around the world, it is rare for the extremism of the language to so precisely mirror the extremism of the action itself. This makes Israeli political discourse a uniquely dangerous phenomenon.

There can be no military justification for the wholesale annihilation of an entire region. Yet again, the Israelis are not shying away from providing the political discourse that explains this unprecedented destruction. Former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin chillingly said, last May, that “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not a single Gazan child will be left there.”

But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals, journalists, artists and poets. While children and women remain the largest categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society, deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding Gaza impossible.

These figures powerfully illustrate this point: according to a report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, based on the latest satellite damage assessment conducted in July, 97% of Gaza’s educational facilities have been affected, with 91% in need of major repairs or full reconstruction. Additionally, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been killed.

But why is Israel so intent on killing those responsible for intellectual production? The answer is twofold: one unique to Gaza, and the other unique to the nature of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism.

Keep reading

Former Adams Aide Winnie Greco Bizarrely Claims Cash-Stuffed Potato Chip Bag Handed to NYC Reporter Was ‘Birthday Gift’ – But Her Birthday’s Months Away

In a bizarre twist to an ongoing scandal surrounding New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, former adviser Winnie Greco has claimed that a potato chip bag filled with $300 in cash, which she handed to a local reporter, was merely a “birthday gift” rooted in Chinese cultural traditions.

The problem, aside from it being in a shady sour cream and onion potato chip bag, is that the reporter’s birthday is not until November.

The incident unfolded after a reelection event for Mayor Adams, where Greco allegedly gave The City reporter Katie Honan a bag containing an envelope stuffed with cash.

Many obviously interpreted the gesture as a potential bribe or payoff attempt, but Greco insists it was innocent.

When confronted about the secret envelope full of cash by The New York Post, Greco said, “I don’t have purpose, and I treat people everyone is the same. It’s angel, OK, but if somebody want to hurt me because I have love to my community, and I have love to the world, to my family, my people, and somebody try to hurt me, I cannot say nothing.”

“Before I didn’t know how much in my envelope because it’s my birthday gift that’s Chinese culture. Somebody give me my birthday gift, I made big mistake I’m so sorry. Talk to my lawyer.”

When asked to clarify if she believes the reporter was trying to “hurt” her, Greco said, “Yes. Talk to my lawyer.”

Keep reading

Reporter Thrown Out of Fed’s Jackson Hole Conference, Charged With Criminal Trespass For Asking Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook Questions About Her Mortgage Fraud Scandal

A reporter was thrown out of the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole conference and hit with a criminal trespass notice for asking Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook questions about her mortgage fraud scandal.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Governor of the Bank of England, President of the European Central Bank and others were present at the Fed’s annual press conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday.

CNBC reported on Lisa Cook’s attendance at the annual conference in Jackson Hole.

Federal housing regulator Bill Pulte has produced documents alleging Lisa Cook committed mortgage fraud – specifically occupancy fraud – when she lied about her out-of-state Atlanta condo being her ‘primary residence.’

According to Pulte’s criminal referral, Lisa Cook committed mortgage fraud by lying on her mortgage application and falsifying bank statements when she designated her out-of-state Atlanta condo as her “primary residence”—just two weeks after taking a loan on her Michigan home, which she also claimed as her “primary residence.”

By claiming “primary residence” on her out-of-state condo, Lisa Cook received more favorable loan terms and a lower interest rate.

On June 18, 2021, Cook acquired a loan on a property in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On the mortgage agreement, Cook represented to “use the Property as Borrower’s principal residence within 60 days after the execution of her agreement, Pulte said.

On July 2, 2021, just two weeks later, Lisa Cook also purchased a condo in Atlanta and entered a 30-year mortgage agreement and affirmed the property would serve as her primary residence within 60 days of the execution of the mortgage and would serve as her primary residence for a full year, Pulte’s referral said.

Pulte dropped more receipts on Friday morning as Lisa Cook attended the annual conference in Wyoming.

Keep reading

Journalist defends an illegal immigrant accused of child sexual assault

David Pérez-Teofani, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was arrested on August 20, 2025, near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., after attempting to flee from federal agents. The arrest was captured in a viral video and took place shortly after President Trump declared a public emergency due to rising crime in the capital, which resulted in a massive deployment of federal agents and the National Guard throughout the city.

Pérez-Teofani had previously been charged in January 2024 in Fairfax County, Virginia, with aggravated sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl, among other related charges. However, the charges were dismissed when the victim and her mother stopped cooperating with authorities. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Pérez-Teofani had entered the United States illegally on three occasions and defied a final deportation order, despite having voluntarily returned to Mexico twice before.

The case has drawn criticism toward local prosecutors for their handling of serious accusations involving illegal immigrants. The Fairfax County prosecutor’s office emphasized the difficulty of prosecuting such cases without the cooperation of the victim, noting that the charges could be reinstated if the victim decides to proceed in the future.

Keep reading

Western Media Manufactured Consent for Israel’s Murder of Palestinian Journalists

Israel’s targeted assassination of six Palestinian media members in the Gaza Strip on August 10 sent shockwaves through the journalism community. Though the murder of journalists has been a common tool of the Israeli’s government’s suppression of information coming out of Gaza, the loss of Al Jazeera‘s Anas al-Sharif was particularly harrowing.

Many of us had been moved by al-Sharif’s heart-wrenching coverage, from watching him remove his press vest in relief when a ceasefire was announced (1/19/25), to seeing a languid al-Sharif reporting on the famine (7/21/25) as people fainted around him. “Keep going, Anas, don’t stop,” said a voice off-camera. “You are our voice.”

Three of the victims were al-Sharif’s colleagues at Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets that was able to keep journalists reporting in Gaza despite Israel’s blockade. As millions around the world grieved not just for al-Sharif but for his colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Mohammed Noufal and Ibrahim Zaher, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi, we were also gravely concerned about the vacuum their murders created of on-the-ground coverage of the genocide.

Establishment media, however, used these courageous journalists’ murders as an opportunity to continue parroting the same Zionist talking points that contributed to manufacturing consent for their killings. FAIR looked at 15 different news outlets’ initial coverage of the murders: the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press and Reuters.

We found that they overwhelmingly centered Israel’s narrative, attempted to delegitimize pro-Palestinian sources, and failed to contextualize the killings within the larger context of the genocide.

Keep reading

Israeli unit tasked with smearing Gaza journalists as Hamas fighters – report

A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, to target them and to blunt international outrage over the killing of media workers, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports.

The “legitimisation cell” was set up after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack to gather information that could bolster Israel’s image and shore up diplomatic and military support from key allies, the report said, citing three intelligence sources.

According to the report, in at least one case the unit misrepresented information in order to falsely describe a journalist as a militant, a designation that in Gaza is in effect a death sentence. The label was reversed before the man was attacked, one of the sources said.

Earlier this week, Israel killed the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and three colleagues in their makeshift newsroom, after claiming Sharif was a Hamas commander. The killings focused global attention on the extreme dangers faced by Palestinian journalists in Gaza and Israel’s efforts to manipulate media coverage of the war.

Foreign reporters have been barred from entering Gaza apart from a few brief and tightly controlled trips with the Israeli military, who impose restrictions including a ban on speaking to Palestinians.

Palestinian journalists reporting from the ground are the most at risk in the world, with more than 180 killed by Israeli attacks in less than two years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel carried out 26 targeted killings of journalists in that period, the CPJ said, describing them as murders.

Israel has produced an unconvincing dossier of unverified evidence on Sharif’s purported Hamas links, and failed to address how he would have juggled a military command role with regular broadcast duties in one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Israel did not attempt to justify killing his three colleagues.

Keep reading