ONE DAY …
This article was published in the June 28, 2025 edition.
If you’re a journalist, people often cock their heads and ask questions after you say what you do. They’ll tell you how they don’t trust the news anymore. They ask you if you’re one of the “FOX News types,” or a woke liberal trying to brainwash the public.
It’s appropriate; journalism is public-facing, inherently participatory, and drenched in politics. People deserve to know the lens through which the news they consume is being framed. But much to everyone’s dismay, the answer to these questions, for many journalists, is complicated.
When I initially entered this career, I quickly adjusted to defending the media in general. I tell people I still believe in facts. I still trust traditional journalism. I don’t think AI or social media will replace it. I didn’t choose it for the money or the clout (and if I did, I’d be sorely disappointed).
There’s one clear “right” answer to the questions I am inevitably pressed on, and it usually includes the words “objective,” “fair,” and “measured.” With time, I started to develop a polite, practiced answer to pull out at dinner parties, in Ubers, or when someone’s cousin wants to know if I’m “one of the good ones.”
But even as an early-career journalist, I’ve found that every story I report, every edit I make, every quote I cut or keep, nudges me away from the neat, symmetrical AP framework I was taught in school. In practice, objectivity isn’t a fixed point. It’s a moving target.
That’s why I was so struck by “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” a book published in February by journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad. The enclosed writing is angry and unapologetic, yet it never loses its eloquence. It functions as a series of linked essays in response to the Western World’s participation in the war in Gaza.
And it argues that the white whale of “objectivity” is driving a stake between newswriters and the people. Author Omar El Akkad himself is an award-winning journalist born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and is now a US citizen. He has reported from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo.
When asked about the book’s title, Akkad said in an interview, “I was thinking in terms of pattern recognition. It’s very rare to find someone today who will openly say they supported South African apartheid or segregation in this country. Once it’s safe enough, everyone can look back and agree how awful the awful thing was.”
As a thesis, the book critiques journalistic neutrality and, on a broader scale, liberal complacency in the face of conflict. Much of the book unfolds from the tension Akkad has felt as a political and public figure in the West, while also having personal roots in the Middle East.
Akkad calls it a fracture: “a breaking away from the notion that the western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”
The modern western liberal, he argues, will say they support social causes, but not advocate for justice to the point where they could risk their career or social status. Their activism ends at the end of their yard, where the “Black Lives Matter” yard sign or pride flag sits. And then, when all the dust has settled, they can still tell everyone that they were always on the right side of history.
He criticizes common sayings about the conflict in Gaza, such as “it’s just so complicated,” and, as during the 2024 election campaign, the left being the “lesser of two evils,” as part of this framework.
“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living,” he writes. “In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be […] the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”
He recalls the reaction of his fellow writers to a pro-Palestinian protest at the Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto, where a novelist is awarded $100,000. Akkad, despite being a former winner of the prize, elected not to attend but signed a letter calling for the charges against the protesters to be dropped.
What fascinated him the most about the protest, he says, were “all the people in the room, so many of them involved in or so vocally supportive of literature, who keep their heads down, say nothing, wait for it all to be done.”
Here, he questions what the work of a writer is. “In truth,” he writes, “I have no idea what the work really is.”
He deliberates Hemingway’s Iceberg principle, which advises writers to “show, don’t tell,” but then wonders if people presented with the pictures and videos of the killed and mutilated in Gaza would still choose complacency.
“At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways,” he reflects. “One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with a sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing.”
It is true in my eyes that a writer’s job is meant to show facts, despite politics, despite public opinion, despite fear. In high school, I dreamt of being an environmental activist. When I got to college and found journalism, I decided writing might be a better action for change than dragging a sign around.
But even in my first year at my University’s paper, I learned how high the stakes could be.
The newsroom faced legal threats from the University’s Athletic Department after we published a story about a basketball player allegedly sexually assaulting another student.
Under pressure, the Editor-in-Chief pulled the story. The newsroom responded by tightening attribution rules and editorializing. The news editor hosted an emergency training on media law.
Still, the victim’s story didn’t disappear. It became the catalyst for a full-fledged “Me Too” movement on campus. Students protested the administration and began sharing their own stories of sexual assault involving the University and its Athletic Department.
I question now whether we young writers relinquished our moral obligations for the sake of “objectivity.” Sometimes, I wonder if I still do.
I think of this now as the “No Kings” protests broke out across the country this week in response to the Trump administration’s actions; as I once again reached for a camera or a pen, my friends carried signs.
How do you slip between being a mediator and being a human being? Is this expectation of our newswriters a fair one or a disservice to all?
