 One thing that enables the continuation of Israeli occupation and apartheid is an unwillingness on the part of most Western media to call it out for what it is. That's why some people for Israel's bombing of the Associated Press offices could have been such a mistake. Could a news organization which had its offices destroyed really go on to cover for the Israeli government and to present the occupation of Palestine as an even fight between two sides? Or would they grow some balls? Would the fact that their offices have literally been bombed by the aggressor, by the occupying force mean that they start to cover this occupation? Not just as a passive voice, something was bombed, passive voice, someone was shot, passive voice, deaths were caused without ever really naming what's going on. Well, the evidence is in and it turns out that Israel can do pretty much whatever they want and still have the Western press defend them. That's because one of the first actions AP has taken since that bombing of their own offices is to fire a journalist for past comments criticising Israel. This is Emily Wilder. She is Jewish and was hired by Associated Press on the 3rd of May. 16 days later, she had her job terminated after being told she had violated AP's social media policy. And according to the Washington Post, who spoke to Wilder, she has still not been told why. So the Washington Post report, Wilder was not told which of her social media posts had violated the company policy, she said. Just that, quote, I had showed clear bias, unquote. A spokesperson for the wire service confirmed that, quote, she was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP. So what had Wilder tweeted during her time at AP to get her fired? Now remember, she'd only been there for 16 days, so it's quite easy to look. You don't have to trawl through much Twitter history. And I did that today. None of it struck me as particularly controversial. In fact, it's mainly retweets. Some of it is criticising the media coverage of Israel's war on Palestine. We can look at some of those retweets now. You can see which of those you think got this journalist fired from Associated Press. So one of the retweets showing you how a New York Times abstract was edited over the course of about 24 hours. And you can see from this the original headline, police entered the compound and fired rubber tipped bullets. Anger was already building in response to looming expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in the city. Becomes over the course of 24 hours, guards and militants fired rockets towards Jerusalem and the Israeli police fought with Palestinian protesters in an escalation of violence after a week of increasing tension. So you can see you've got an original headline, which is showing that Israel is the aggressor. And then suddenly it changes to the Palestinians are the aggressor. I do recommend following that Twitter account because it is always very interesting to see how those abstracts change. Another retweet was from an Al Jazeera producer. This said, if you're reporting on Israel, Palestine looks like a ping pong game. This happened on the Israeli side. Then this happened on the Palestinian side with zero context analysis history or bigger picture than its bad journalism. And you were doing your audience a disservice. That was another retweet, which was criticizing the media's coverage of Israel and Palestine. Now the spiciest tweet that she wrote herself, which I presume is what lost her the job with AP, was the following. Objectivity feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim using Israel, but never Palestine or war, but not siege and occupation are political choices. Yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased. Now that tweet was sent on May the 17th two days before she lost her job. Now in case you wonder, how could a tweet that anodyne get you fired from a job at the Associated Press? Well, the background here is it seems that the firing was a result of a right wing campaign. So a right wing online campaign who took issue with the fact that when a student at Stanford University, Wilder had been an active member of the group's Jewish voice for peace and students for justice in Palestine. We can go back to the Washington Post again. So they write, on May 18th, the Stanford College Republicans flagged a post that Wilder made in college, characterizing her as an anti-Israel agitator and criticizing the Associated Press for hiring her. In the old post, Wilder described Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas businessman and staunch Israel supporter as a naked mole rat looking billionaire. In subsequent days, conservative outlets, including the Federalist Washington Free Beacon and the website of Fox News, published stories calling out the wire service for Wilder's hiring and attempting to tie it to the Israel Army's recent destruction of the Associated Press's Gaza Bureau. Wilder believed the Associated Press acted in response to those high profile pieces of criticism. She was told she said that a review of her social media activity was initiated by the Associated Press after her old post had been publicized. Ash, I want your thoughts on this. So in the past week, Associated Press have literally had their offices bombed by Israel and also fired someone for what to me looks like, I mean a correct tweet actually to talk about how the mainstream media covers Israel and Palestine can have political implications. She's lost her job. I think this demonstrates everything which is cowardly, craven and self-serving in our industry and I really cannot over egg my criticism of the Associated Press in this matter. Firstly, it is a terrible, terrible precedent to set that somebody cannot enter journalism if they have ever been politically active. That is a terrible precedent to set because then what you're asking of people is to not cultivate an active interest in the world around them and to only go into journalism, not if they're interested in social matters, politics, the economy, but because they want to become famous and because they want to make lots of money by climbing to the top of the tree. So that is a terrible model to set in journalism. Secondly, it is not an expectation which is evenly applied and Astead Herndon who works for The New York Times said this very well, which is there is an entire subgroup of journalists who have entered the industry because they started out as right-wing hyper-partisan hacks and opinion writers and then they've made the journey into the establishment media. Whether that's the NYT or something more like the Associated Press or the Washington Post, precisely because their presence indicates diversity of opinion. So this is one of the things that the free speech wars and the council culture moral panic has done. It has forced establishment media outlets into having to make these quite high profile hires of right-wing firebrands in order to prove that they're not biased, except that doesn't go the other way and I'll tell you a little story about this. Michael, I was supposed to do a column for an international news magazine which shall remain nameless but it does publish both in Britain and America and I was tapped up. They were in the middle of sorting out my contract and then a new more right-wing opinion editor came in and gutted me, got rid of me, said two left-wing, two biased, couldn't possibly, but at the same time I looked and they were snapping up every single right-wing firebrand they could. So that demonstrated diversity of opinion, that demonstrated not being pressured by the kind of moral outrage on Twitter and council culture, but me I was a step too far. So we know that there are differences in terms of how being perceived on the left is treated in terms of bias and not being objective and not being impartial enough and how people on the right are treated in the media that's endemic. And then you've got the specific issues to do with Israel and Palestine. So one, she was completely right. Emily Wilder was completely right that more often than not you don't even hear the word Palestine and that is an active political choice. You know you think about where the discourse is here in the UK in America because of those close geopolitical ties between America and Israel it is even worse, it is even worse the lack of recognition, the lack of reality in American media about the nature of the occupation and the nature of the ethnic cleansing I think is to an extent that we can't even imagine. So for you know Emily Wilder to say something which is so completely anodyne it does actually stick out in that context because it is so much worse. And I think that that's the thing that we need to recognize is that this absolutely is not an anti-Semitic conspiratorial ooh there's the Israel lobby it's not that. What there is is a geopolitical closeness between America and Israel and actually if you want to talk about outsized influence and politics you can talk about America's outsized influence on Israeli politics but what that means is a particular cowardice and a particular bias running through establishment media outlets which makes them particularly vulnerable to right-wing attacks on the basis of not being sufficiently pro-Israel or on the basis of being suspiciously progressive or suspiciously left-wing. One more element of this story which I do find is so chilling I've mentioned it already but I want to you know really emphasize this which is that AP Associated Press will not tell the person they've just fired what tweet they're firing her for it's really really remarkable so Emily Wilder we've read to you before the Washington Post you also spoke to SF Gate after the firing and said they told me that I violated their social media policy and would be terminated immediately but they never said which tweet or post violated the policy I asked them please tell me what violated the policy and they said no this is extraordinary because one I mean I don't know how you justify it and I don't know how you justify not telling her what the post was right you know if you believe in the professional development you know you can say a you know the most sympathetic explanation we can possibly have of this is that Associated Press you know they're not they're not politically motivated they just say look because we're the Associated Press a bit like the BBC we have to hold ourselves to a standard of impartiality which is higher than anyone else at all and this junior journalist remember she was entry-level essentially she'd only been there for 16 days they could have said look we're sorry this tweet was was kind of fell foul of that you know you should take a lesson here which is that if you want to work for something like AP or Reuters or BBC you're gonna have to be super super careful now that would require them to tell her what rule she broke and how they've done the precise opposite which is to say we're firing you but you're gonna have to guess why now that's the the sympathetic explanation it falls apart because if they were doing this to say you know you might be a good journalist but just hasn't worked out we're gonna help you grow it doesn't work because they haven't told her the explanation of this which is more sinister is that they got rid of her without really any objective justification for political reasons and they don't want to tell her precisely what tweet it is because they don't want to have to justify their decision because obviously if they say this is the tweet we fired you for then they have got to stand up and say yes we think this tweet is a fireable offense because xyz they're not telling her why they fired her so they don't have to explain it so it is it's basically them saying we are making this decision but we have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that we can back it up which is terrible it's also worth noting this journalist has been made unemployed she doesn't have a job now let's go back to the sf gate for another quote from her she says it's devastating of course i love journalism and part of what i think makes me such a capable powerful journalist is how much i care about the people i write about particularly the marginalised that's why i joined the associated press and they saw me as capable this is of course a really hard situation and i'm not sure what's going to happen next you know the real danger here is that anyone who works for a company like the associated price is going to be terrified of saying even very very tepid things about global conflicts also the implication here is in much of the write-ups is that one of the reasons she is being kicked out from this job is because of her past political commitment so we might have lots of people absolutely self-censoring at fear of of ending up the subject of a right-wing mob and then getting getting fired how how big a worry do you think it is that people are just going to bite their tongue when it comes to issues like this i think when it comes to self-censorship in this matter that is of course a huge issue because what we've seen here is the success of right-wing cancel culture because once you have it essentially as a precedent that you can get a journalist fired because of them retweeting material which essentially acknowledges Palestinians as human and that's about it well how many other journalists are going to be in the firing line you're going to end up with an incredibly homogenous and also a you know homogenously pro-Israel journalistic culture that is not something which is good for the industry at all i think also the second thing and this is also something to worry about a bit is what this is going to do overall in terms of making people feel that there aren't trusted shared sources of information because it's not just this one journalist who's affected by her being fired although of course she's you know the worst affected by it it's also all those people who would think that you know well there are problems with the establishment media you know problems with the guardian there are problems with the nyt or there's problems with ap but ultimately i rely on them because they're a trustworthy accredited source of information the more you get this kind of pandering to a right wing outrage mob the more you break down that shared space where we come together we consume information we make sense of it and that is part of what drives politics the idea of shared conversational space and i think that this kind of panicky action by a media outlet which has just had its offices bombed right a war crime by the idf is is awful it's unjustifiable oh sorry and there's one last thing that i want to say michael and that is the irony that there is no one in the industry of journalism who is more venerated more worshiped than george orwell right you've got the statue of george orwell outside the bbc all of these free speech you know evangelists and anti-cancel culture types would profess to you know lionize george orwell and within that george orwell being this almost secular saint for the industry of journalism what's erased is that he was a active part in political movements during the spanish civil war and even when he came back to this country he was shopping communists to mi5 which i would not recommend but he was an active political player and yet he's been stripped out of all of that to be turned into this almost completely bloodless symbol of elite journalistic interests and i just think there's a certain irony there george orwell would be rolling in his grave if he could see what happened to emily wilder