The Palestinians telling their own stories

Sara Yasin (0:01)

We no longer have a premium on truth, no longer have a premium on what is on the record, right? Even for example, calling like what's happening in a war or a conflict, it presupposes like a sort of equal power that's not there, right? And I think that we have pressure, like because we have been taught that this is what fairness is.

Brittany Luse (0:20)

Sara Yassin is the Editor-in-Chief of The Key, an online publication that focuses on quote, analysis, interviews, essays, reviews, and reportage about Palestine. Before launching The Key, she worked in audience development at Buzzfeed News, and was the managing editor at the Los Angeles Times. Throughout her time at these outlets, she got a firsthand look at what digitally savvy audiences have in their media diet. In her inaugural essay for The Key, It's Not Complicated, Sara points out that quote, Most teens in the US mistrust the veracity of mainstream news coverage, and 43 percent of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok, unquote. And as more young people are exposed to the destruction in Gaza outside of traditional news media outlets, Sara wanted to provide a space where Palestinians can speak freely about what's going on around them.

Today on the show, Sara joins me to talk about The Key, what fairness looks like for mainstream media in this moment, and how power informs framing. Sara, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Sara Yasin (1:18)

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Hello, hello.

Brittany Luse (1:25)

I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

In your inaugural essay for The Key, you touch on something that you call, quote-unquote, it's complicated journalism when it comes to reporting about Palestinians. You've spoken to a lot of journalists across American newsrooms, with many of them telling you that they received pushback from their organizations for attempting to apply, quote, conventional journalistic standards to stories about Israel's attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission's investigation has called what's happening in Gaza a genocide. The International Court of Justice also found that acts of genocide were plausible, although Israel strongly denies that charge. Talk to me about your conversations with American journalists and what those have been like, and what you're aiming to do differently with The Key.

Sara Yasin (2:29)

I mean, I think the thing of like having to caveat the word genocide, right? Like I think that was kind of one of the main sort of things that was kind of a breaking point for a lot of people. I mean, including myself, I've been in the room when we've made decisions around, you know, using certain language, right? And I think that like, it was very strange to suddenly find that like, all the international like mechanisms that are used to call things what they are, are suddenly things that we have to sort of caveat or be careful about, right? I've like interviewed almost like 50 journalists. It's in mostly the US., some in Canada and the UK. And I think that like, in a legacy institution, there's a real reluctance to stray from doing things differently from how it's always been done, right?

Brittany Luse (3:22)

Right. Squeeze on resources, squeeze on time, all of the sorts of, you know, possibly layers of management. I mean, a lot of people, I mean, speaking for experience, a lot of people are doing their best, but it's not easy.

Sara Yasin (3:34)

Yeah, totally. I think for managers, sometimes a lot of the decision-making is centered around, I can't deal with this right now. Basically being like, look, this is the way we've always done this. We don't have time to question this. We don't have time to think about this differently. So there's sort of like this kind of structural way of doing things and a way of presenting balance and fairness that in fact is not balanced or fair, particularly to Palestinians because what is viewed as sort of a political position is to be like, hey, maybe you should include a Palestinian or maybe you should include like this perspective.

I found in my reporting so far, the thing that was most fascinating to me is that this sort of like unequal way of covering Palestinians is systemic. And there was this one phenomenon that like I have experienced myself. I don't know if you've also experienced it. I was like talking to people who were trying to articulate this weird tip for tap thing. We're like, publish this one really good story.

Brittany Luse (4:46)

So we now have to publish this really bad story because we don't want a sort of like tallying way of thinking about what constitutes fair coverage.