The internal chaos roiling the Committee to Protect Journalists deepened late Wednesday, when the embattled advocacy group’s board of directors—under fire for the anti-Israel bias of several members, including the vice chair—voted to affirm that "organizations affiliated with militant groups" meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet "provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect."
The CPJ’s board voted 17 to 1 in favor of keeping this contentious definition, according to one person familiar with the situation, with Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote. The CPJ’s influential list of "Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War," which has been used by news organizations to discredit Israel’s war effort, contains dozens of names of military operatives for Hamas and other terror groups.
In recent weeks, a drumbeat of revelations—often from Hamas itself—that slain "journalists" on the list were active combatants, has thrown the New York-based CPJ into turmoil and infighting. This week the board expelled anti-Israel heiress Nika Soon-Shiong after a heated meeting centered on a Washington Free Beacon article on the group’s woes, according to Soon-Shiong’s public tweets.
The CPJ declined to comment on the board’s vote or provide any information on which members opposed altering the organization’s criteria, only telling the Free Beacon that it "cannot comment on board deliberations and [has] no further comment" beyond a Wednesday evening statement. None of the major media outlets that sit on the CPJ’s board—including the New York Times, Fox News, Reuters, NBC News, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times—responded to Free Beacon questions about their position on the vote or whether they, too, consider "organizations affiliated with militant groups" to be legitimate journalistic actors.
The CPJ was founded in 1981 to defend press freedom worldwide, but in the last few years, it has evolved into a group focused narrowly on the war in Gaza, with many board members having evinced strong, anti-Israel or even antisemitic views and with its list being used as a key source for a hotly contested May Times article that made outlandish claims about Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog.
Wednesday evening’s board vote marked a decisive win for a large cohort of CPJ board members who are vocal anti-Israel activists and who pressured the organization to stand firm against a torrent of criticism over its Gaza list, which has included dozens of confirmed military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups. Those who celebrated the decision included Soon-Shiong, daughter of the pharmaceutical billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and board vice chair Lydia Polgreen, the anti-Israel Times polemicist. But as major media outlets who sit on the CPJ’s board remain mum following the vote, it appears the ongoing controversy has fomented more chaos than the advocacy group is letting on publicly.
The internal feud first spilled into public view on Monday evening, when Soon-Shiong, the publisher of the far-left outlet Drop Site News, revealed that she was booted from the CPJ’s board in the wake of the Free Beacon report on her anti-Israel activism. A few days prior, the CPJ announced that it is conducting a "full review of its database" after Hamas and other terrorist groups publicly claimed many of the slain "journalists" as their own, though the status of that review remains unclear given the board’s Wednesday vote. The board’s public statement after the vote did not mention its previously announced "full review."
Though the CPJ has acknowledged deleting at least 20 names from its list following confirmation that those individuals were armed terrorist operatives, others remain. Mohammed Samir Washah, a correspondent for Qatar-controlled Al Jazeera, is still touted as a working reporter on the CPJ’s website, even though he was killed in April by Israel for acting as "a key terrorist in Hamas' rocket and weapons production headquarters," according to the Israel Defense Forces. Washah’s brother, fellow Al Jazeera photojournalist Ahmed Samir Muhammad Washah, was killed late last month in a similar strike for planning "advanced sniper attack plans and additional terrorist activities against IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip."
The CPJ’s decision to stay the course earned a defiant statement from Polgreen, who declared Wednesday evening on X that the organization’s "mission and the work remain unchanged."
"There has been a great deal of false and speculative information about @pressfreedom in the past few days," Polgreen, an opinion columnist and former Times associate managing editor, wrote. "Today, the board voted to affirm our definition of who is a journalist. The mission and the work remain unchanged: protecting journalists everywhere." Associate managing editors, known as "masthead," are the most senior editorial officials at the Times.
Soon-Shiong also celebrated the decision online.
"This is fantastic news," she wrote on X. Soon-Shiong also retweeted a post from veteran anti-Israel activist and former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who claimed, "It is a dangerous business to exclude journalists because they work for a designated ‘terrorist’ organization."
The Wednesday evening statement posted on the CPJ’s website made clear that the board voted to "affirm the organization’s existing definition of who is a journalist and rejected claims it planned to change its definition to exclude particular groups."
The organization added: "CPJ’s longstanding policy has been to include journalists working for state-backed media and those working with media organizations affiliated with militant groups provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect. This approach is anchored in international humanitarian law. CPJ has never included, and removes from its lists, anyone found to be engaging in combat or inciting imminent violence." Watchdog groups like HonestReporting, however, have cited dozens of examples in which the CPJ included confirmed terrorists on its list and, in some cases, quietly removed those names without contemporaneous acknowledgment.
CPJ board chair Jacob Weisberg, the husband of former Times style editor Deborah Needleman, said the organization never even considered altering its definition, though former board member Soon-Shiong suggested on Monday that this was the case in light of the Free Beacon’s previous reporting.
"It is not true that CPJ planned to change our definition of who is a journalist to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press killed in the Israel-Gaza war," Weisberg said in a statement. "Such unsubstantiated allegations undermine the rigorous documentation of our Middle East and North Africa program over many years, while endangering Palestinian and Lebanese journalists documenting events on the ground today."
Weisberg added that the board "stands fully with the staff of CPJ, whose difficult daily work of documenting attacks on journalists is today more important than ever, and with all journalists wrongly smeared and maligned for doing their jobs." The CPJ would not explain when asked if this statement referred to the dozens of Gaza journalists who are now known to be active members of Hamas and other allied terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
HonestReporting, a media watchdog group that has documented the CPJ’s inclusion of confirmed terrorists on its slain journalists list, said the organization is employing a definition "so broad as to include almost anyone."
"What do professional journalists think of the notion that anyone who comments anywhere, on anything, in any medium, is a journalist? In CPJ’s estimation, someone who writes a terrorist manifesto on the back of a napkin and posts a picture to their 6 followers on social media is as much a journalist as someone who has spent 20 years honing their craft, breaking stories and informing their readers," HonestReporting said in a statement to the Free Beacon. "CPJ may believe that saying journalists and terrorists are one and the same will protect everyone, whether a legitimate civilian or a terrorist operative. In reality, it does the opposite. It takes a situation where only terrorists are in danger and places all journalists in harm’s way."
