Last year, for an article on Vassar’s Vietnam War conference, I interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall. Near the end of our conversation, I asked him what he thought the role of history was. Logevall responded, “I think of it as our collective memory.” A society without history, he said, is like an amnesiac: “You stumble around each day. You have no sense of where you’ve been…[and] therefore, have no sense really where you are or where you might be going.”
Doing good historical research is difficult enough without others silencing or hindering it. Journalism is an essential modern historical source. If history is our collective memory, journalism is our collective diary. It is our most important moments written in real time and, once published, etched forever.
The eminent Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once wrote, “The daily press is perhaps the most basic source for modern political history.” It is, in his words, “irreplaceable.” Good journalism is thus essential to good history.
That is a monumental responsibility. Journalists are, obviously, not perfect. However, many professional journalists working at the most impactful papers act shockingly cavalier about the enormous responsibility they hold by publishing works that will be cited as the truth for generations.
Take The New York Times. The Times is considered the primary U.S. “newspaper of record,” meaning it is a major authority on U.S. and world news. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, The Times repeatedly published articles alleging that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to construct a nuclear weapon, giving the George W. Bush administration free ammunition to justify invading Iraq. On national television, Vice President Dick Cheney directly cited The Times’ reporting as evidence of Iraq’s renewed quest for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). On CNN, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice plagiarized a phrase directly from The Times: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Times reporters repeatedly used untrustworthy sources as primary evidence and ignored experts who questioned this narrative. Sure enough, it was later proven that the paper had published outright falsehoods: Iraq had not been trying to procure WMDs.
The paper’s errors were so egregious that the editors published a long correction in May 2004. The correction detailed how the paper had reported manifestly untrue assertions and how editors up the chain of command had published unqualified claims without checking them. Even after learning that they had published falsehoods, editors buried correction articles deep in the paper, where few would read them. The paper at least partially understood the grave mistakes it had made and was continuing to make but did not want to own up to them on the front page. It may have been to save its reputation or to avoid contradicting the government so publicly. Either way, it was manifestly despicable journalism.
Experts estimate that over 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the Iraq War as of 2013, likely a major undercount. The Times is partially responsible for these atrocities, since its reporting was publicly used as a justification for the invasion. In this light, a correction published after the fact cannot make up for the blood spilled with the paper’s help. The Times not only acted with disregard for its role as a primary source for the future but also irrevocably shaped the future itself. There is no way around it: Innocent Iraqis are dead because The Times, for months, knowingly, did not check its sources.
Those committing atrocities have also recognized that journalists on the ground are essential for future historical research. The most prominent example today is Israel targeting Palestinian journalists and banning the international media throughout its two-year genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 190 Palestinian journalists reporting on its atrocities in the Gaza Strip—more than were killed across the world from 2020 to 2022. Israel has, in two years, killed more journalists than died in the Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1991 to 2001 Yugoslav Wars and the Afghanistan War, combined.
By deliberately killing Palestinian journalists, Israel is preventing the world from learning the full truth of its genocide as it unfolds. It is destroying sections of our collective diary, wiping out pieces of our collective memory that, once burned, can never be retrieved.
The U.S. government is also trying to prevent accurate reporting. On Oct. 15, almost the entire Pentagon press corps left rather than sign new War Department press restrictions. A major restriction was that all information, even if unclassified, must be approved by the government before publication. A press that can only publish state-sanctioned propaganda is not, to put it lightly, a free one.
Journalism also ignores history, to the detriment of modern-day readers. Too often, journalists include too little or no context in important articles. This is its own kind of historical silencing: Newspapers willingly sink us into the fog of historical amnesia by neglecting to include important history.
It is a journalist’s responsibility to inform readers, whenever possible, of relevant history. For example, articles in major papers like The Times, The Washington Post and the Associated Press about the Israeli-imposed famine on the Gaza Strip almost never mention that Israel has been blockading Gaza since 2007—one Times article in May 2025 did mention the blockade, and cited another piece on the siege from Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel began blockading Gaza as collective punishment after Hamas won a large majority in the 2006 parliamentary elections and took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. For almost two decades, Israel calculated the number of calories necessary to keep Gaza’s population just above starvation levels, then only let in that amount of food. Under the blockade, Israel also blocked Palestinians’ access to agricultural land, fishing waters, building materials, medical resources, exportation and more. In 2022, unemployment was at 46.6 percent, one of the world’s highest rates. Over 60 percent of Gazans required food assistance to survive. Israel’s 16 years of engineered near-starvation is essential context to Israel’s current use of starvation as a method of genocide against the Palestinian people, yet journalists almost always ignore it.
Articles in major national papers are frequently severed from the past, leaving the reader with little understanding of how the events in the article came about. As Logevall rightly said, we are all amnesiacs in a fog without good history. Journalism can help to clear that fog, both as a vital historical source and here, in the present. But it can only do either if journalists understand their great responsibilities to the present and the future. We cannot let the fog close in.