There's nothing else to write about

I’ve been on a tear for the last couple of weeks. I’ve cleaned the house top to bottom. Been through every drawer and cupboard. Thrown out anything that was taking up space. The garden’s never looked this good. I made a list of tasks to achieve over the holiday break and for once I’ve done nearly all of them. Mostly just to have something to do with my hands.

I’m freelancing again, so now that editors are back at their desks I need to sit down and come up with pitches. One of the tabs I never close is a spreadsheet with ideas that can hopefully become articles. At the moment there’s stuff in there about landlords. Being a mostly stay-at-home dad. Banks bringing ATM fees back.

I don’t want to write any of it. That’s not really true. I want to but I can’t focus. There’s only one story at the moment but I signed a couple of open letters about Gaza so I can’t write about it for most places.

I don’t know what I’d write anyway. There’s nothing more to say about Gaza really. If someone’s somehow able to ignore what their phone is showing them every day they’re not going to be convinced by anything I say.

It’s a weird time to be a journalist. I’ve always had a very earnest conception of journalism as something that’s supposed to move the world in the right direction. I assumed that most people who do this work more or less felt the same. Every day I see twenty different things that prove me wrong but still. It’s a feeling that’s hard to shake.

The ease of it is what’s troubling me. How seamlessly nearly every major media outlet in the Western world took on the role of genocide stenographer. How little open opposition there was. There were some resignations, mostly of Arab and Muslim writers, and plenty of open letters and ad hoc protests. I’m sure there were lots of tense all-staff Zoom meetings. But it felt like there was barely a ripple, from the outside looking in.

I know how naive it is. The fact that I was surprised. Hundreds of people in Australia who call themselves journalists are okay with writing phrases like “apparent Israeli airstrike”. Thousands maybe.

But each new example still gives me a whiplash feeling. Everyone knows that feeling now. Scrolling through your feed and seeing a video of a kid with half her face burned away in between Golden Globes updates and ads for bitcoin scams. Seeing some outrage bait about a Qantas flight attendant wearing a Palestine flag pin alongside footage of Wael Al-Dahdouh filing a report a couple of hours after Israel killed his son.

For a long time it’s been standard practice among a certain kind of Australian journalist to “privately” say the opposite of whatever they’re putting their name to. It’s how a lot of people manage to go to Mardi Gras kickons while they work at the Daily Telegraph or wherever.

I assume there’s been a fair bit of that in the groupchats lately — important people, senior people, complaining about how awful their work’s coverage of Gaza is while writing that coverage themselves. Plenty of people have stuck their neck out but it’s overwhelmingly the Black and Brown writers or the more junior people who’ll be first out the door when the next cuts happen. Almost anyone who gets a column or their headshot next to their name or is on more than $100k a year is used to self-censoring in the name of getting on Q+A one day so what’s one more time.

There’s probably a parallel to be drawn between that dynamic and how a country with the most deadly weaponry imaginable feels “threatened” by a group of people it’s been alternately starving and bombing into oblivion for 18 years but I’m too tired to tease it out.

Every time I see another story about a journalist in Gaza being bombed or sniped I think of this quote. Once I thought I had something in common with these people but I don’t.

What I’m reading

• The Al-Jazeera liveblog

• hoodbookworm’s back catalogue

• The Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards 2023