The fact that this propaganda is only thinly veiled as journalism is less surprising once you take a deeper look at Bisan’s background. Bisan appears to be a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that has American blood on its hands and openly gloated about its participation in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. In 2018, the PFLP confirmed Bisan’s membership in the organization when it referred to her as part of the Progressive Youth Union, which the PFLP explicitly acknowledges is its “youth framework.” Two years prior, Bisan hosted a PFLP event honoring Palestinian terrorists injured or killed in confrontations with Israeli soldiers, which included Sami Shawqi Madi, who was the head of the PFLP’s media committee at the time of his death. In 2015, Bisan was one of the speakers at a rally celebrating the 48th anniversary of the founding of the PFLP, where she addressed the crowd while wearing a full PFLP military uniform and stated that “the people of Gaza, the people in the West Bank, and in Jerusalem … will not back down at all from their cause and their revolution.” Bisan also served as the “master of ceremonies” the following year at the 49th-anniversary rally. In a since-deleted article published in Al-Hadaf, the PFLP’s official newspaper, Bisan is lauded as “a symbol of resistance journalism.”

Despite Bisan’s open affiliation with a terrorist organization, and reporting that violates every norm of ethical journalism, NATAS has defended the nomination. Bizarrely, NATAS President & CEO Adam Sharp stated that “NATAS has been unable to corroborate these reports, nor has it been able, to date, to surface any evidence of more contemporary or active involvement by Owda with the PFLP” and that the “content submitted for award consideration was consistent with competition rules and NATAS policies.” Sharp’s response completely ignores the ample evidence of Bisan’s terror ties (including her own confirmation that she participated in the PFLP rallies) and her propensity for spreading antisemitism and openly lying in the service of terrorist propaganda campaigns. In reality, multiple Gazan journalists working for Al Jazeera (which owns AJ+) have been linked to terror groups, while the PFLP and Hamas have been openly training journalists in the Strip for over a decade—some of whom participated in the Oct. 7 terror attack as combatants and even held Israeli hostages in their homes.

Sharp, NATAS, and the other journalistic institutions who honored Bisan are virtue-signaling, yes, But they are also displaying complete ignorance as to the nature of journalism in the Gaza Strip and a callous indifference to the lives of Jews and Americans who have been murdered by Hamas and by the PFLP. Moreover, Bisan’s manipulation of journalistic standards, and journalistic cover, mirrors the practices of her broadcaster AJ+, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Al Jazeera, which is funded by the government of Qatar, a longtime Hamas funder that provides safe haven for its leaders. In 2019, the media platform released a video questioning the Holocaust, and more recently, has repeatedly justified the Oct. 7 massacre.

AJ+’s content and ties to Qatar spurred the Department of Justice to mandate that it register as a foreign agent of the Gulf monarchy in September 2020. Nearly four years later, it has refused to do so, yet has faced no repercussions from the Biden DOJ. Does the academy not find Bisan and AJ+’s propaganda and terror support objectionable?

One of the more outrageous consequences of Oct. 7 in the journalistic universe is the refusal to reevaluate commonly held shibboleths like the idea that Israel was being too paranoid about Hamas, when in fact it wasn’t being nearly cautious enough about the intentions of the foe on its border—whose statements about slaughtering Jews should in fact have been taken quite literally. What has happened instead is the widespread embrace of the terrorists’ own reality, which is then used to “fact-check” all Israelis, whether women and men who were raped, or parents whose children were stabbed, shot or set on fire.

Because Jews are such villains, Oct. 7 has apparently canceled normal journalistic requirements to even bother matching up quotes with transcripts of what the speaker actually said—a courtesy that is especially applicable to heads of state, unless they are Israeli. In a recent cover story for Time magazine, correspondent Eric Cortellessa quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as stating that “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” Yet while Netanyahu is one of the most quoted and aggressively fact-checked political leaders in the world, it is impossible to find a single quote in any public transcript or record, including Cortellessa’s interview, in which Netanyahu ever said anything remotely to that effect. In reality, Netanyahu led large-scale military operations against Hamas in 2012, 2014 and 2021. While one might criticize Netanyahu for not killing enough Hamas members in those prior campaigns, that hardly seemed to be the thrust of the Time correspondent’s conspiratorial criticism, whose point instead seemed to be that Israel had somehow sponsored the Hamas attack.

Time’s own “fact-check” of Netanyahu’s statement that Israeli security agencies agreed before Oct. 7 that Hamas was deterred is also demonstrably false. Right up to Oct. 7, no Israeli security agency ever assessed that Hamas was seeking war—an assessment that was enthusiastically backed by Israel’s supposed Western allies, including the United States, who repeatedly pressed Israel to allow more Gazan workers into the country, to relax controls at the border, and to accommodate the terrorist group’s demands for more heavy construction materials. Time’s accusation that Netanyahu has prolonged the Gaza war in order to avoid legal proceedings for personal corruption is also obviously false, as Netanyahu’s trials are continuing, and political leaders in Israel have no immunity from prosecution or legal procedures while in office.

What NATAS, the sponsors of the Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, and the editors of Time magazine have apparently agreed on is that there should be two sets of journalistic standards: one for them, and one for Jews. It’s hard to think of a more shameful development in the annals of modern journalism.