Don’t feel bad for CNN journalists in the West Bank.

CNN helped build an anti-Israel narrative of which it now faces the consequences. When the press picks a side, it stops being journalism.

An IDF soldier and CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond in the northern West Bank village of Tayasir (screen capture: CNN)

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A few days ago in Tayasir, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank, IDF soldiers detained and allegedly assaulted a CNN crew covering settler violence. Footage captured showed soldiers making inflammatory remarks and citing revenge for the killing of 18-year-old Yehuda Sherman, who was reportedly hit by a vehicle driven by a Palestinian near Nablus last week.

According to CNN’s Jeremy Diamond, a cameraman was placed in a chokehold as troops tried to block filming at an illegal outpost. The incident, widely condemned by IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir as a serious breach of military ethics, has already led to expected dismissals and the unprecedented removal of the entire battalion from operational duty in the West Bank.

Let’s begin with the obvious: What those IDF soldiers allegedly did to a CNN crew in Tayasir was wrong. It was unprofessional, it was unethical, and it violated the very standards the Israeli military claims to uphold. The response from the IDF — swift condemnation, removal of the battalion, and expected dismissals — reflects that reality. Most Israelis, myself included, look at that footage and do not condone the behavior.

But if you think this story begins and ends with a few rogue soldiers lashing out at innocent journalists, you’re missing the bigger picture.

Because the truth is far less convenient: CNN is not some neutral, dispassionate observer caught in the crossfire. It has spent years inserting itself into the conflict — not as a journalist, but as a participant. And when you step into a conflict and consistently portray one side as villainous, brutal, and morally illegitimate, you cannot then act shocked when members of that society stop seeing you as an objective press corps and start seeing you as something else entirely.

This doesn’t justify what happened. But it does explain it.

For years, CNN has drifted from reporting on Israel to prosecuting it. It has repeatedly amplified unverified claims, rushed emotionally charged narratives to air, and too often treated accusations against Israel as fact before evidence is established. Stories that later unravel rarely receive the same prominence as the original headlines. The damage, by then, is already done.

This is not journalism. It’s narrative-building.

Even more troubling is CNN’s insistence on moral equivalence — the reflexive “both-sides” framing since October 7th that has placed Israel, a democratic state governed by law, on the same plane as Hamas, a jihadist terrorist organization that openly targets civilians and uses its own population as human shields. When you flatten that distinction, you don’t create balance. You create distortion.

And Israelis see it. IDF soldiers see it.

They see themselves accused, day after day, of war crimes, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonialism — often in sweeping, uncontextualized terms that erase the reality they live in: a constant state of threat, where terrorism is immediate. They see networks like CNN platform narratives that often ignore or minimize the violence that Israelis endure, while magnifying every Israeli misstep into a global scandal.

Again, none of this excuses misconduct. But it does challenge the naive idea that these incidents occur in a vacuum.

CNN has not just reported on the conflict; it has shaped it.

Consider its operations beyond Israel. CNN proudly highlights its access to authoritarian regimes like Iran, presenting it as a journalistic achievement. But access in such environments is never neutral; it is granted, controlled, and curated. When Frederik Pleitgen reports from inside Iran, he is doing so under conditions dictated by a regime that brutally suppresses dissent and tightly controls information.

This is a country where journalists are jailed, where protests are crushed, and where the government ranks among the worst in the world for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders. And yet, when CNN gains access, the result often feels less like hard-hitting journalism and more like carefully managed exposure.

Interviews with regime officials proceed without meaningful confrontation. Government narratives are aired with minimal disruption. Meanwhile, the very conditions that make such reporting possible — censorship, intimidation, repression — are too often backgrounded or ignored.

This is not transparency. It is choreography.

There are, of course, the standard explanations for flawed media coverage. Reporters are under pressure to keep pace with the 24-hour news cycle. Deadlines are tight. Information is incomplete. In fast-moving, often dangerous environments, mistakes happen — a misleading headline here, an omission there. Some argue that these distortions are the byproduct of an honest attempt to report under difficult conditions.

But those explanations fall apart when the same distortions appear again and again — not as isolated errors, but as patterns. When the same inflations and omissions cut across multiple outlets telling nearly identical stories, it becomes harder to chalk it up to circumstance. And when the version of Israel presented in international media feels almost unrecognizable to those familiar with its history and regional context, something deeper is at play.

To understand much of the reporting coming out of Israel, you have to start with a simple premise: The news often reveals less about the place being covered and more about the people doing the coverage.

Reporting is shaped within a tight-knit social ecosystem. Journalists operate within shared circles; they know each other, meet regularly, exchange ideas, and closely monitor one another’s work. The result is a kind of informal consensus. Stories produced by entirely separate outlets often converge into the same narrative, not by coordination, but by cultural alignment.

This is not corruption in the crude sense of bribery. It is something more systemic. The media, like government, can become misaligned with its purpose — failing to do what it claims, what it should, and what the public expects. Over time, a feedback loop emerges: Journalists need crises to tell compelling stories, while governments need crises to justify action. The line between reality and narrative begins to blur.

Former journalist Peter Vanderwicken described this as a “symbiotic web,” where media and power structures become so intertwined that both struggle to distinguish truth from the stories they help construct.

Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, where a dense network of international NGOs, United Nations agencies, foreign diplomats, and activists forms an influential ecosystem. These actors don’t just operate in the region; they shape it. They provide access, sources, social circles, and, increasingly, career pathways for journalists navigating a shrinking industry.

The relationships between reporters and these institutions are often less adversarial than journalistic ideals would suggest. NGOs and international bodies are not consistently scrutinized; they are relied upon, sometimes even socially integrated into the same expatriate milieu. In places like East Jerusalem and Ramallah, these overlapping networks create a kind of closed loop, where information, perspective, and narrative reinforce one another.

Within that environment, certain assumptions take hold. A critical stance toward Israeli policy can gradually harden into something broader — a default framing in which Israel is cast less as a complex nation-state and more as a symbol of larger global grievances: nationalism, militarism, colonialism, racism.

On the other hand, the darker realities of Palestinian politics and society are treated as off-limits, not because they are irrelevant, but because they complicate the preferred narrative. That narrative, too often, is a simplified “Israel story,” one centered on Jewish moral failure. Anything that disrupts it is softened, sidelined, or ignored.

Criticism of Israel is not only fair; it is necessary. No democracy should be above scrutiny. But credibility demands consistency. If journalists are willing to rigorously interrogate Israeli policies and leaders, they must be equally willing to examine Palestinian leadership, factions, and behavior with the same level of seriousness and skepticism.

Take groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. When Islamic jihadist movements operate in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, they are rightly framed as dangerous, destabilizing forces. Yet in Gaza, similar ideologies and actions are often downplayed, reframed, or buried beneath softer language. That’s not nuance; it’s a double standard.

Or consider Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and has, at various times, imposed its own restrictions. If Gaza’s ruling factions — including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — were simply misunderstood political actors, why would a fellow Arab state take such measures? It’s a question that rarely receives serious attention.

CNN coverage of the Israel–Hamas war following October 7, 2023, depicting Israel as the warmonger (photo: screen capture, cnn.com)

There are other uncomfortable realities that struggle to break through the editorial filter: the documented use of civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals for military purposes; the strategic embedding of fighters within densely populated areas; the optics of leaders surrounding themselves with children in public settings, blurring the line between symbolism and exploitation. These are not marginal details; they are central to understanding the nature of the conflict.

Then there is the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose role in supporting and financing certain Palestinian factions is well-established. For the Iranian regime, backing these groups offers a way to pressure Israel indirectly, avoiding the risks of direct confrontation. Yet this broader regional strategy is often underemphasized in mainstream coverage, leaving audiences with an incomplete picture of the forces at play.

The cumulative effect is a narrative that assigns overwhelming responsibility to Israel while treating Palestinian actors, and the wider Middle Eastern context, with far less scrutiny. It is not that criticism of Israel is misplaced; it’s that it is disproportionately applied.

As one former Associated Press editor once reflected, the shift within the international press corps left him feeling less like a journalist and more like “the Jew-boy with his finger in the dike” — struggling, often futilely, against a narrative current that had already decided where blame belongs.

This mindset doesn’t stay confined to private conversations. It translates directly into editorial judgment — what gets covered, how it’s framed, which voices are amplified, and which are ignored. And because these journalists write for major international outlets, those perspectives don’t just circulate; they scale.

The result is a self-reinforcing narrative ecosystem, one that replicates itself across headlines, broadcasts, and platforms, shaping how millions of people understand a conflict they may never directly experience.

So when CNN claims the mantle of fearless truth-teller in the West Bank, it’s fair to ask: Where is that same rigor elsewhere? Where is that same skepticism when dealing with regimes that jail and torture journalists? Why does the moral intensity seem so selectively applied?

This double standard does not go unnoticed — not by Israelis, and certainly not by Israeli soldiers.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Soldiers are not robots. They are 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds carrying weapons in one of the most scrutinized, criticized environments on earth. They go home, they scroll their phones, they watch the news. They see how they are portrayed. They absorb the accusations, the headlines, the imagery.

To expect them to endure a relentless stream of biased, hostile coverage — and to remain completely unaffected by it — is unrealistic.

Again, that does not excuse losing control. It does not justify aggression toward civilians. But it does remind us that these are human beings operating under extraordinary psychological pressure, not abstract symbols in a morality play.

So no, you don’t have to feel bad for CNN journalists in the West Bank.

You can acknowledge that what happened to them was wrong — and still recognize that they are not innocent bystanders in this story. They are actors in a media ecosystem that has, for years, eroded its own credibility in the eyes of many Israelis. They have helped shape the narrative battlefield, and now they find themselves inside it.

That is not victimhood. It is consequence.

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