For readers discovering your work for the first time, what do you mean by “the new censorship”? What makes it different from the censorship of the past?
Ayala Panievsky. – “What we’ve seen over the last decade is a much more elusive and confusing strategy for censorship. We still very much have the old censorship. Journalists are still being killed and imprisoned in unbelievable numbers. But today, you don’t have to kill a journalist to kill the news.
You can do it through financial measures, legal threats, legislation and what I call a loyalty regime, where journalists trying to do their job independently and critically are targeted on multiple fronts.
At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a new media sphere where organisations adopt the look and feel of journalism to spread propaganda, government narratives or hate speech.
We should be working on all fronts if we want to make sure that our right to know is safe.
Nothing is entirely new. But what new technology and social media have allowed for is scaling up. It is much easier today to target journalists, incite audiences against them and bypass journalism altogether. Many populist leaders no longer sit down with journalists who ask difficult follow-up questions and hold power to account. That is what is new.
Many media outlets today are owned by businesspeople or politically connected owners. Can journalists working in those organisations still remain independent?
“I think they can. There is a lot of discussion today about partisan media and political bias. I agree that every society needs journalism that is for everyone, where everyone can participate in the conversation.
But partisan media isn’t necessarily bad for democracy. If you think of newspapers like The Guardian or Haaretz, where I worked for many years, they are transparent about certain values or causes they support. Yet their newsrooms still operate according to journalistic standards. They verify information, rely on multiple sources, correct mistakes and don’t hide facts simply because they don’t fit an editorial position. You can produce outstanding journalism while being transparent about your values.
The real question is whether your commitment is ultimately to your audience or to your owners. If you feel you can no longer pursue important stories because you’re being censored, then you have to ask yourself why you’re in journalism in the first place.
You say journalists have not yet really started fighting. Should the response come only from journalists?
“The new censorship operates on audiences as much as it does on journalists. The idea of targeted attacks on journalists is to undermine public trust and intimidate journalists at the same time. In the end, everyone loses because we get a much more restricted and weakened media environment.
That’s why journalists have to collaborate much more than they do today. Research shows that newsrooms with strong solidarity are much more resilient to attacks. Journalists traditionally don’t like collaboration – I understand, I used to be one – but we don’t really have a choice anymore.
Audiences also have a role to play. Messages of support matter far more than people realise. They remind journalists that there are readers who value this work. It is also important that we, as the public, put forward demands from our representatives, because politicians won’t take action unless we push them to do so. We should be working on all fronts if we want to make sure that our right to know is safe.
If a politician shuts down a question and no other journalist asks it again, is that censorship?
“That is the chilling effect, for sure. That is self-censorship. What I call in my research ‘strategic bias’ is what happens when you are constantly called, in our case, a lefty traitor. It could be liberal, corrupt elite or anything else. You work really hard as a journalist to prove that you are not. It changes your reporting and it harms our right to know because you end up not telling certain stories, not inviting certain interviewees and not mentioning certain topics.
We have seen this not just in Israel, where I grew up, but also in European countries around immigration and in other countries as well. This constant attack has long-term implications for the public conversation.
How should journalists respond when they feel pressure to leave certain stories untold?
“It is inspiring to think about journalists operating in much more difficult situations. Palestinian journalists in Gaza have shown incredible resilience and willingness to risk a lot, sometimes everything, to do the journalism they care about. In other non-democratic countries, journalists face incredible pressures.
Of course, I would never tell anyone to do something that could put their life or well-being at risk. But those of us who are lucky enough to live in the Global North, in countries that still offer significant freedoms, agency and opportunities, should be slightly braver, and sometimes willing to lose something in order to do this work.
Once you are ‘obeying in advance’ as Timothy Snyder calls it, once you are censoring yourself, you are making it so much easier for bad-faith actors to manipulate the news and audiences. It is all about the public.
What role should artificial intelligence play in newsrooms? Could it ever replace a large part of journalism?
“I think we got overhyped. The term artificial intelligence makes this technology sound superhuman. There is something very powerful about this metaphor that is not very helpful for how we think and negotiate this new technology.
Like any technology, AI can be used for incredible things or terrible things. At the moment, we’re mostly doing terrible things because we don’t know what we’re doing. There is zero transparency about how generative AI works, what biases it contains or whose data it uses. This is unacceptable and not sustainable.
We need accurate, reliable data, and we need journalism for that.
Everything that is valuable in journalism, AI can’t do: investigative reporting, talking to people, putting pressure on those in power and building sources. It can help with visualisation, translations and big data, provided a human remains in control.
My hope and belief is that we can have more journalists doing meaningful work, while AI, or whatever technology comes next, does the boring stuff we don’t actually need humans to do.
Will the newsrooms that thrive be those investing more in people than in AI?
“What we are seeing now is this craze, this rush by newsrooms not to feel left behind – as if, if you don’t have AI and you don’t use it for everything, you won’t survive. I am not sure that is where their strength is.
The same happened with social media. Newsrooms rushed to put all their content online for free. Nobody made them do it. They just did it all around the world. A decade later, people are still trying to retract that and they don’t know how.
I honestly believe in the value of real, reliable journalism. Everybody needs it: businesspeople need it, citizens need it, politicians need it. We need accurate, reliable data, and we need journalism for that.
What will never disappear from journalism?
“There is nothing like investigative reporting. These are the moments where journalism holds the powerful accountable. Journalism still has original value to offer society, as well as critical thinking. We are being told that to be patriotic, you have to be uncritical of your country. That’s not true. Being critical is super patriotic and super important.
There are many things only journalism can do for us. But it is much easier to see them and value them once they are gone. When a pandemic breaks and you don’t know how to protect yourself, or when elections happen and you are not sure who won, it becomes very clear. But we shouldn’t wait until that happens, because then it is hard.
As a media scholar and teacher, are there skills or challenges you now prepare students for that simply weren’t part of journalism when you were starting out?
“One hundred percent. At City St George’s [University of London, ed.], we have people working on how to include AI in newsrooms, and we have master’s degrees in podcasting that we didn’t have before.
I am developing a module on media under attack because, on many fronts, we don’t train journalists for the hostile environment they might meet. You don’t always know when it will happen.
It is important to prepare students for digital threats – not just harassment, but also surveillance and other ways technology is being weaponised against journalists. There is the digital front, mental health and well-being, knowing how to handle hostile communities, hostile sources and political pressures.
It is also about how to cover these things, because it is sometimes very difficult to cover people who call you ‘enemy of the people’ in an objective manner. It is quite a conundrum. We have also launched what we call Newsroom CPR, which is about Covering Populism Right.
What should countries where journalists can still write freely put in place today?
“We need to prepare in advance, because things can change very fast. We are seeing it now in the US. A few years ago, if I talked to people about journalism in the US, it was considered free. Now people are being thrown out of their jobs because they said the wrong word. There are literally lists of words you cannot say.
One recent example from Israel gives me hope. Journalists at a critical television channel managed to block a takeover attempt by a billionaire close to Benjamin Netanyahu. They were able to do so because they had a strong union, internal solidarity and support from other media outlets that reported on the case.
That would not have been possible without networks and collaboration already in place before the crisis hit.
Can foundations and civil society help build that solidarity?
“For many years, we have seen the populist right and the far right organising, building networks, working together, building foundations and organisations to run their project, which is to eliminate journalism.
If people care about their society and want to live in a free and democratic country, they should invest in this.
There is a role for publics, regardless of their political views, for civil society and for people with money or other resources. This is the idea of putting your privilege to work.
If people care about their society and want to live in a free and democratic country, they should invest in this. That can mean supporting journalism, making sure news organisations have the money, time and legal backing they need, creating funds for journalists who are sued for doing their job, or going after those who intentionally pollute the information environment.
There is a lot for businesspeople to do. They can join this fight on many fronts.
If one of your students interviewed you in ten years, what would you hope had changed?
“I hope the public image of journalism will change. I hope we understand the value of journalism better. In ten years, I want my students, when I ask them, ‘What is the difference between journalism and content?’, to know the answer. Everything is content now: content creators, influencers.
Content can be informative too. But journalism has a few very unique roles. Informing is one of them – informing about relevant issues, current affairs. But also holding those in power accountable and bringing us together as a society to have a conversation about how we want to run our lives and futures.
If you don’t know what journalism is, and you can’t define it, then it is really hard to evaluate it. It will be much easier to make people realise that journalism is important work, that it should be well paid and that we should all care about it if we understand more publicly what journalism does for us and why we should care about it.”
