By Collette Watson

During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, I watched something incredible happen. As many others have quipped, my social media timeline went from learning “how to make banana bread” to “defund the police” in just a few weeks. The police murder of George Floyd sparked a global uprising and mainstream questioning of the value of policing in society. 

I believe a similar seismic shift is afoot today. 

Social media users are demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and affirming the value of Palestinian lives, despite generations of U.S. propaganda. In response, our media system is being forced to change its tune.

Same script, different cast.

When Hamas assaulted Israel on Oct. 7, U.S. networks like CNN and publications like The Washington Post immediately began to brand the attack as “Israel’s 9/11.” I instantly recognized that the corporate media was gearing up to do just what it did after Sept. 11– use its power to sanitize and justify an unjust “war.”

U.S. President George Bush and his supporters justified the Iraq invasion with claims of “weapons of mass destruction,” a historic deception that couldn’t have been done without corporate media’s help. When the U.S.-led invasion began, U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Rick Long was asked why more than 700 journalists were embedded with the troops. His reply: “Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.” 

According to the findings of the Costs of War Project, approximately 200,000 civilians were killed in the Iraq war from 2003 to 2018. 

How did this happen? Politicians colluded with media barons to cultivate an environment thick with Islamophobic fear. Twenty years later, we seemed primed to repeat this atrocity in Gaza— until social media users entered the chat.

Immediately following the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, I watched the corporate media provide a typical lineup of government and military “sources,” all justifying the slaughter in Gaza. The indiscriminate bombing of an area that’s home to a population of nearly 50 percent children went largely unchallenged in their coverage.

But within weeks, I began to see something remarkable: Major platforms started to intermittently interview a different set of people: Voices from the Muslim world. Pro-peace and anti-Zionist Jewish people. Healthcare workers and journalists testifying to the carnage in Gaza.

Have the major networks and publications had a change of heart? A change of politics? Absolutely not. Our media system is a capitalist business operation. Decision-makers respond only to ratings and profits, and racism has been profitable for generations. 

Media leaders are feeling the pressure of millions of social media users, who are sharing reports from frontline journalists and connecting dots between state violence within the U.S. and colonial aggression in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and beyond. 

In response, we’ve seen small shifts in coverage, although the motives are not altruistic. They are, however, an important indication of our grassroots power to transform the media.

When you consider the demographics of ownership, it’s not surprising that the dominant U.S. media system perpetuates a worldview of white racial hierarchy. Out of 11,000 commercial AM/FM radio stations, only 217 stations were owned by Black people in 2017. Black journalists accounted for just 5.6 percent of all newsroom staffers in the same year.  Less than 1 percent of full-power TV stations are Black-owned and controlled. 

Our government has placed the reins of public narrative into a very few rich, white hands. Through his company News Corp, Rupert Murdoch is the owner of both The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, book publisher HarperCollins, and Fox News, the highest-rated cable news channel and an endless source of racist, Islamophobic falsehoods disguised as news.

Jeff Bezos owns not only the online commerce behemoth Amazon but also The Washington Post, MGM Studios, and even the Ring smart doorbell company, which privacy advocates like MediaJustice point out, “gives Amazon unprecedented power to record everything we say and do and the places we go.” And Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s owners the Smith family are able to reach 75 percent of the adult population every evening through their ownership of local TV news.

This level of consolidation makes it easy for political actors to blanket the public with propaganda. 

Despite these conditions, many independent news outlets do the work of truth-telling. They do this while deeply under-resourced and struggling to survive. Meanwhile, the history of corporate media’s misconduct has resulted in public apathy toward the value of journalism.

A report on local news in the United States revealed that 2,514 weekly publications closed or merged with other papers between 2004 and 2022. The number of journalists at U.S. newspapers overall has dropped 39 percent since 1989. 

This industry can be saved, but only if we learn to prioritize local news operations that serve marginalized communities. These outlets are inherently positioned to question institutional power and restore public faith in the press. In the current moment, I find myself seeing a glimmer of what’s possible in the future, if we reckon with the past.

The nation’s first weekly newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, wrote in 1706 that the local Black population was “much addicted to Stealing, Lying, and Purloining.” In nits coverage of New York’s 1712 slave revolt, the paper wrote that Black people were arrested because they “knew of the Late Conspiracy to Murder the Christians.” 

From these beginnings, the U.S. mainstream media establishment has profited billions from criminalizing Black people, as well as perpetuating myths about Muslims, Jews, and other religious minorities. 

Nonetheless, brave community journalists have persevered to make an alternative worldview heard and felt. I’m reminded of courageous Black journalists like L. Alexander Wilson, who ventured into the Jim Crow South to report on desegregation. Wilson was beaten savagely by an angry white mob in Little Rock, Arkansas, and later succumbed to his injuries. 

Despite a myriad of dangers, the Black press and other community media continued to report the truth – truths that were critical on the road to winning the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Acts, the Immigration Act, and other victories of that time.

This month, the International Federation of Journalists has reported that 68 journalists have been killed covering the attacks on Gaza since Oct. 7, making this the deadliest conflict ever for journalists since such data began to be recorded. 

And yet, journalists are continuing to risk their lives in reporting from Gaza’s front lines. Social media users are spreading their reporting like wildfire online. And changes are happening in the real world. On Dec. 12, the United Nations approved a resolution calling for a ceasefire. 

The spirit of L. Alexander Wilson, the true spirit of journalism, is still alive. 

Despite toils and hardships, we will all be free.

In 2018, I found myself incensed when Marc Lamont Hill’s contract was ended at CNN over a speech he gave in support of Palestine. Today, we are still seeing repercussions for those who publicly voice their support for Palestinian liberation. Every day, I find myself shocked anew that the call for a ceasefire in hostilities that have left nearly 20,000 people dead in Gaza, is still somehow controversial. 

For those of us in the United States, it’s critical to understand the power of our voices and attention, online and IRL, in changing the tide. We must continue to share frontline reports, learn about the roots of the violence, and take action against the wholesale slaughter in Gaza. We must also demand justice in the U.S. media system, which has been the source of generations of propaganda and warmongering that has cost millions of lives around the globe.

We must demand media reparations — the process of redistributing media power and resources to redress the media’s history of anti-Black harm.

Transforming our media system will create narrative conditions for all kinds of justice: housing, climate, body autonomy, queer and Trans liberation, and so much more. Media reparations provide a path toward decolonizing our minds, bodies, and lands.

Palestinian lives, Black lives, and the future of our planet depend on our tenacity to continue calling for justice, in the tradition of our ancestors and in the hope of our descendants.

I believe that we will win.

Collette Watson is an advocate and creative culture worker based in the U.S.