About 70 pro-Palestinian demonstrators targeted local media organizations The Blade and WTOL-TV, Channel 11, on Friday afternoon, taking issue with coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
They started on the sidewalk across from The Blade chanting, “How many journalists need to die, before you call it genocide.”
Variations on this theme were used as they made their way to WTOL, near the Martin Luther King, Jr., Bridge, then on to U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s office, near the Maritime Academy, and finishing back in front of The Blade promptly at 5 p.m.
Protesters were marked wearing “PRESS” and holding pictures of journalists killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel since Oct. 7, an especially bloody two months for journalists, 63 in all killed according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Overall dissatisfaction with American media on the local and international level was expressed.
“A lot of news articles have been very one sided,” Youseff Baddar, the founder of Toledo4Palestine and an organizer of the event, said.
“It’s not about fake news,” he said. “It’s about misrepresentation.”
“It’s the way Israelis are butchered or murdered, while Palestinians just ‘die.’”
Words like “conflict” and “war” were off-base to the protesters to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza, because they said it gave the illusion of two equal powers fighting.
“So many different sources are calling [Israel’s campaign in Gaza] genocide,” Jasmin Abu-Hummos, an organizer of the event, said. “United Nations is calling it genocide. Human Rights Watch is calling it a genocide. Why isn’t the media calling it genocide?”
First Published December 9, 2023, 12:43 a.m.
