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Comment by Lendal | Hacker News Reader

Is there any news source in the world that isn't in some way connected to one of the parties of this war? It has to be a news source that has significant presence in the region so that they have some topical credibility, but also is not located in a country that does any business with either the Arab world or Israel. I'll wait.

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There aren't any that would have access to Gaza. If you are reporting from the Palestinian side, much of your data/facts are going to come straight from Hamas spokespeople. If you report from the Israeli side, its going to be IDF spokespeople. The fog of war prevents anything but propaganda from coming out of this conflict.

Note that it is Israel which prohibits international press from accessing Gaza - they monitor the Rafah crossing and have prohibited any journalists from contacting Palestinians via any means available or releasing reporting without going through Israeli censors first. And that there are civilian journalists on the ground who are certainly not “all hamas”

Here is an article with a bit more detail on the subject:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/12/hugely-frustra...

It seems like Israel has closed some border crossings to journalists, and Egypt has done the same on their side.

63 of them have been killed:

https://cpj.org/2023/12/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/

In this summary it shows Al Jazeera as left center bias in general, but with heavily biased reporting against Israel. For this specific topic it is clearly one of the most biased news sources that are still given credibility.

Qatar is an authoritarian monarchy. Journalists based there can't just publish what they want.

The US is connected to the Middle East, but journalists there do have freedom.

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