It would be unfair to say that all the employees of Al Jazeera who have thus far been investigated for terrorist ties have turned out to be members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Some are with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, after all.

It’s a big tent. Al Jazeera, you could say, might be the original tentifada.

And the PFLP corner of that big tent has now been nominated for an Emmy award. It’s hard to find a better single example of the complete abdication of media ethics by mainstream Western culture.

Bisan Owda is the nominee. The category in which she is nominated, believe it or not, is “hard news feature story” for Al Jazeera.

For an actual example of news reporting, one should visit Eitan Fischberger’s compilation of Owda’s work with the PFLP—which remains a designated foreign terrorist organization in America. You can see her leading a PFLP anniversary rally; interviewed in full PFLP regalia; defending Hamas’s October 7 slaughter; and the like. It appears Owda came up as an official with the PFLP’s Progressive Youth Union, so she’s a fully groomed true believer.

This kind of nonsense puts actual journalists in profound danger. As does the characterization of Ismail al-Ghoul, an engineer in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, as a mere journalist. Ghoul was killed in an Israeli strike in late July, and news organizations and the Committee to Protect Journalists mourned his death as the wrongful killing of a journalist. They did this despite the fact that Ghoul’s Hamas affiliation was known already, at least since he was arrested in a firefight with IDF troops in March.

There’s a hefty list of terrorists moonlighting for Al Jazeera who have anchored the network’s “coverage” of the conflict. The Qatari propaganda organ figured out quickly that if someone is wearing a vest that says PRESS, the anti-Israel world will happily excuse literally any violent behavior—indeed, Ghoul reportedly took part in the October 7 attacks.

As someone with a two-decade career in journalism, I’ve been surprised at how little regard mainstream American journalists have for their own industry. Watching the public’s plummeting trust in media suggests it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: The audiences for these outlets have noticed the declining standards and reacted accordingly. When I was a newspaper reporter, it was considered an abuse of privilege, perhaps even a breach of ethics, to use your State Police press badge to gain entry to a Knicks game or a rock concert. I can’t imagine what my peers would have thought of using it to commit international terrorism and then claim immunity.

The Owda nomination and the Ghoul gaslighting are part of another problem: The world is seeing the conflict through the eyes of the terrorist groups and their financiers—and calling it journalism. If you ever wonder why reporters parrot the long-debunked and obviously false Hamas casualty figures, in some cases it’s because the reporters are literally members of Hamas. This is an absolutely insane reality and an unsustainable status quo for journalism.

It would be one thing if the problem were contained to Al Jazeera. But the outlet is serving as a recruiting ground for U.S. media. In June, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “At least six members of the [Washington] Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar,” including “the paper’s Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage, who spent more than a decade as an editor at the outlet’s English edition.”

This is not to suggest that Al Jazeera is the entirety of the problem, though it is clearly biggest player in this scandal. It was recently revealed, for example, that CNN senior investigations reporter Tamara Qiblawi was a stenographer for a Hezbollah-affiliated outlet.

Fact is, readers and viewers of major American news organizations are being fed a steady diet of Qatar- and Iran-funded state propaganda not in addition to, but in lieu of, actual journalism. Many of them have yet to experience a drop of objective reporting on the conflict.

It is in that context that the Emmy nomination for Owda is an act of unfortunate consistency. The truth is that Israel’s critics in America have created an impenetrable disinformation bubble in which a not-insignificant portion of the country resides, blissfully ignorant and mad as hell.