Thomas Watkins is Washington bureau chief at The National
April 29, 2024
Washington’s media found itself under the spotlight at the weekend, when hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators flipped the cameras on correspondents attending an annual industry gala.
Live-streaming protesters stood outside the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and yelled “Shame on you,” at a who’s who of big-name US journalists, celebrities and their guests as they arrived in tuxedos and gowns.
“Every time the media lies, a journalist in Gaza dies,” they chanted. “Shame on you for breaking bread … 120 journalists dead.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters have hounded President Joe Biden, who headlined Saturday’s dinner, since shortly after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks killed about 1,200 people and started the war in Gaza.
But it was the first time the western media had, en masse, been confronted with charges of helping to enable Israel’s actions in Gaza by playing down the horrors unfolding in the tiny Palestinian territory, where health officials say more than 34,500 people have been killed.
As I arrived at the event, a group of mask-wearing protesters accused me of being complicit, never mind the fact that I work for a Middle East outlet that has devoted itself to covering the war in Gaza from every possible angle within our means.
Several protesters wore fake flak jackets emblazoned with the word “Press”. Others waved red-ink-dyed hands and shouted that the western media is a front for Israel. And some demonstrators played dead and lay on the pavement, representing the journalists killed since October 7.
The CPJ says 97 journalists have been killed since October 7. Reuters
Before the dinner, arguably the main event on DC’s social calendar, a collection of Palestinian journalists had issued a public call for colleagues around the globe to boycott it.
“Western media has played an integral role in manufacturing consent for Israel’s ongoing violence against the Palestinian people, while obfuscating US complicity,” they wrote in a statement.
“For journalists to fraternise at an event with President Biden and Vice President Harris would be to normalise, sanitise and whitewash the administration’s role in genocide.”
The war in Gaza has been brutal for the enclave's entire population, and journalists are no exception.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. The toll marks the deadliest period for journalists since the CPJ started collecting data in 1992.
Journalists in Gaza face almost impossible working conditions as they report from the sites of Israeli bombings and sieges, and many have been killed while in the field.
The Israeli military denies it targets journalists, but news organisations have repeatedly accused it of doing exactly that.
The protesters' blanket assertion that the western press is ignoring what is happening in Gaza is unfair. For instance, US outlets have run a string of effective stories describing how inexact Israel's bombing campaign has been.
But there are of course gaps, and Israel has made it easy to report from Jerusalem but almost impossible to visit Gaza.
The Israeli military has blocked foreign correspondents from getting into the strip, with the exception of a few tightly controlled embeds, and it has fallen entirely on local journalists to describe what is happening.
So how did President Biden and the filet-mignon munching 2,600 guests at the Washington Hilton address the protests happening outside?
They didn't.
A room filled with inquiring minds who had gathered to celebrate press freedom, the First Amendment and the courage of journalists reporting under difficult conditions largely ignored the situation in Gaza.
The only reference in official remarks came as Mr Biden was being introduced, when the WHCA president, Kelly O'Donnell, fleetingly mentioned that about 100 journalists had been killed in Gaza.
But there was nothing from Mr Biden, whose approach to the war in Gaza has infuriated Arab Americans and progressives to an extent that his administration still can't fathom and may well cost him the election in November.
Instead, he focused on skewering his rival Donald Trump with a series of gags, at one point likening the former president to a “six-year-old” and teasing him for falling asleep during his criminal trial in New York, where “Sleepy Don” is accused of falsifying business records in 2016 to pay off an adult film star.
Mr Biden and the WHCA rightly spoke at length about wrongly imprisoned US journalists in Russia and Syria, and Israeli reporter Barak Ravid, the one-man scoop factory for Axios, was given an award for journalistic excellence.
So it was against this backdrop that the near silence on the plight of Gaza journalists seemed all the more jarring.
Instead of tackling the elephant in the room, Mr Biden and the Washington establishment did themselves a disservice that will further fuel critics' claims that we are not fairly and impartially covering the war in Gaza.
US President Joe Biden speaks during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington on Saturday. UPI / Bloomberg
A Bad Moms Christmas
Dir: John Lucas and Scott Moore
Starring: Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Kristen Bell, Susan Sarandon, Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines
Two stars
We are bringing you the inside story from the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, a gathering of hundreds of world leaders, top executives and billionaires.
288,000 – the number of posts reported as hate speech that were deleted by Facebook globally each month in May and June this year
11% – the number of Americans who said they trusted the news they read on Snapchat as of June 2017, according to Statista. Over a quarter stated that they ‘rarely trusted’ the news they read on social media in general
31% - the number of young people in the US aged between 10 and 18 who said they had shared a news story online in the last six months that they later found out was wrong or inaccurate
63% - percentage of Arab nationals who said they get their news from social media every single day.
Hamilton profile
Age 32
Country United Kingdom
Grands Prix entered 198
Pole positions 67
Wins 57
Podiums 110
Points 2,423
World Championships 3
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
