Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a major journalism group covering its tracks after making a blunder.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the world’s largest advocacy group for reporters, quietly removed, with no public acknowledgment, eight confirmed terrorists from its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza. The expurgations, revealed for the first time by the Washington Free Beacon, are raising fresh questions about the influential organization’s credibility and repeated claims that “the Israeli army has deliberately targeted journalists.”
Like the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists—a high-profile organization packed with anti-Israel personalities that’s been consumed by infighting over its inclusion of active Palestinian militants on its own list of slain “journalists”—the IFJ’s Gaza journalists list has been repeatedly used by major news organizations to discredit Israel’s war operations.
The Brussels-based IFJ—the self-styled “global voice of journalists” claiming to represent “600,000 media professionals from 187 trade unions and associations in more than 140 countries”—administers a running tally of “journalists” killed in Gaza since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree. The organization claims to have “evidence” that Israel intentionally murders journalists. But at least eight names on its much-touted list disappeared between June 21 and July 9, according to new research from the media watchdog group HonestReporting, which noted that IFJ “has not issued a statement regarding this removal of names.” CPJ engaged in a similar, secretive removal process, the Free Beacon first reported in May, prompting the embattled organization to announce shortly after that it is conducting a wholesale review of its list.
The latest findings are certain to raise questions about the lesser-known IFJ as its more prominent peer, CPJ, faces a torrent of criticism over its own list, which in some cases relied on IFJ’s disputed findings. Both organizations have been widely cited in American and international media outlets, though virtually all of those publishers have been tight-lipped when faced with Free Beacon inquiries about their reliance on both groups.
