PRESS ADVISORY
After Tainted Tally, CAMERA Tells Media:
It’s Time to Critically Cover the Committee to Protect Journalists, Help Protect Journalism from CPJ
JERUSALEM, July 2, 2026 – The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) is calling on major news outlets to revisit past reporting of claims by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), after mourning notices by Hamas and Islamic Jihad confirmed that CPJ misrepresented terror operatives as innocent journalists. Following intense public criticism and investigative reports exposing these ties, CPJ announced on June 25 that it is conducting a full review of its database of media workers killed in the Gaza Strip.
Multiple leading media outlets had featured, often without qualification or challenge, CPJ’s now-discredited data on 2025 fatalities, which described terrorists as journalists killed on assignment.
Among the media outlets that devoted space last February to CPJ’s tainted tally are CBS, which further inflated CPJ’s inaccurate figures; the BBC, which CAMERA has repeatedly called on to amend outdated CPJ-sourced tallies; Reuters, which gave CPJ a platform to accuse those citing links between supposed journalists and Hamas of “deadly smears”; and The Washington Post.
Since then, media outlets have repeatedly relied on the organization’s dubious allegations and blatant libels. In April, MS Now’s Antonio Hylton failed to challenge CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg when she insisted on “The Weekend Primetime” that “Israel has deliberately targeted journalists” and that “hundreds of journalists have been killed by Israel since the genocide in Gaza.” The same month, PBS’ Nick Shifrin likewise neglected to challenge CPJ regional director Sara Qudah, who alleged that Israel targets journalists.
CPJ is a favorite in The New York Times’ proverbial rolodex. It loomed large, for example, in an August 2025 article that alleged “the deadly risks of reporting in Gaza could further stifle the amount of information coming out of the war,” but that entirely ignored Hamas’ total control of Gaza’s media landscape —including its successful casting of its terror operatives as journalists.
The list goes on. CNN uncritically cited CPJ data on individuals it claims are journalists imprisoned in Israeli jails and the Associated Press regularly parrots the organization’s data.
In February 2024, more than 100 media leaders (including senior figures from ABC News, Associated Press, CNN, The Guardian, Financial Times, Washington Post, Agence France Presse, Haaretz and The New Yorker) signed a CPJ letter charging Israel with “attacks on journalists” while uncritically accepting the group’s figures.
“It is the CPJ that has long put journalists at personal risk by enabling terrorists to masquerade as journalists,” said Tamar Sternthal, director of CAMERA’s Research and Analysis Media Department. “More than a dozen years ago, CAMERA raised the red flag on CPJ extending credence to operatives of terror groups operating under the guise of the holy work of journalism. In November 2023, we suggested for CPJ the name ‘Committee for the Protection of the Murderers of Journalists’ for its refusal to describe Israelis massacred in their homes as having been ‘murdered,’ a term it freely uses elsewhere.
“Notably, CPJ’s board is composed of a veritable who’s-who of leading journalists including Julie Pace (Associated Press), Sally Buzbee (Reuters), Lydia Polgreen (New York Times), Rebecca Blumenstein (NBC News), Phil Chetwynd (Agence France Presse), and David Remnick (New Yorker), among others. Perhaps media outlets that have withheld scrutiny from CPJ are incapable of overcoming the inherent conflict of interest created by their affiliation with the group,” Sternthal noted.
“If so, these media giants should step down from journalism. Journalists have no business forsaking their profession by failing to critically report about an organization that has effectively covered for terrorists in press vests who endanger actual journalists,” Sternthal added. “Will the leadership of the Western press corps belatedly stand on the right side of this issue?”
For the Hebrew version of this press release, please see CAMERA Hebrew.