PRO-ISRAEL FELLOWSHIP RECRUITS NYT, CNN STAFF AMID GLOBAL BACKLASH OVER GAZA GENOCIDE

Sat 11 October 2025:

As international public support for Israel continues to collapse amid the genocide in Gaza, a new journalism fellowship has emerged with a mission to “shift the narrative” in Israel’s favour. The initiative is backed by prominent journalists from mainstream outlets including The New York Times and CNN, according to details revealed by Drop Site News.

The Jacki and Jeff Karsh Journalism Fellowship, founded in 2025 and backed by pro-Israel donors, bills itself as “the world’s only journalism fellowship solely dedicated to Jewish topics.” While the programme claims to be nonpartisan, its founder has made clear that its purpose is political.

Karsh, a Los Angeles-based journalist and longtime board member of the Jewish Federation, conceived the fellowship in direct response to what she called a “war of information” following the events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas breached Israel’s perimeter.

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In response, Israel launched a widescale military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, killing over 67,000 Palestinians as of late 2025—many of them women and children—while displacing over 90 per cent of the population and levelling nearly all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

International condemnation has been swift and sustained. Multiple UN agencies, genocide scholars, and leading human rights organisations have described Israel’s conduct as a genocide, pointing to mass civilian killings, famine, the use of siege warfare, and attacks on schools, hospitals, mosques and churches. South Africa has initiated legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice.

In the face of this global backlash, Karsh argues that Israel is losing the narrative, not the war. “October 7th happened and everything changed for me,” Karsh said in an interview, adding that she believed the battlefield would be “law, business, media, and every other front we can think of.”

“This is my front. Journalism is my front,” she said.

Karsh has repeatedly dismissed independent reports of mass civilian deaths in Gaza, questioned UN casualty figures, and insisted Israel is the moral actor in the war. “The IDF is the most moral army in the world,” she said in a March 2025 interview with the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs. She has also compared Hamas to Nazis, accused student journalists of inciting anti-Semitism, and claimed that the media is biased in favour of terrorists.

Karsh’s project is thought to be part of a wider campaign by pro-Israel interests to reassert dominance over global discourse. This strategy spans from lobbying Western governments to criminalise the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, to hiring influencers for curated pro-Israel content, and even leveraging billionaires like Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who has close ties to Israel—to acquire powerful media platforms like TikTok.

The next frontier, it seems, is mainstream journalism.

To that end, the Karsh Fellowship has recruited high-profile figures from establishment newsrooms to train a new generation of pro-Israel reporters. Despite branding itself as “nonpartisan,” the programme includes mentors who currently or recently held editorial roles at some of the world’s most influential outlets.

Among them:

Jodi Rudoren, former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, now head of The Times’ flagship newsletters including The Morning and DealBook; Sharon Otterman, a New York Times reporter covering education, health, and religion—most recently the wave of campus protests in solidarity with Palestine; Van Jones, CNN commentator, who apologised after minimising the impact of images showing dead Palestinian children on Real Time with Bill Maher

Michael Powell, The Atlantic staff writer and former New York Times journalist, who has accused Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders of being “stridently critical” of Israel is also on the list.

The fellowship’s affiliations have raised questions about journalistic independence, particularly given its explicit mission to advance pro-Israel messaging. The New York Times’ own guidelines warn that reporters should avoid any engagement that may “undermine public trust in The Times’s independence.”

Asked whether mentoring for a programme founded to help Israel in an “information war” violates that policy, a Times spokesperson responded: “It’s ridiculous to suggest participation as a mentor in this fellowship is anything other than helping to build the reporting skills necessary for the next generation of independent journalists.”

The Karsh Fellowship is supported by the Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, a group that describes support for “a secure State of Israel” as part of its core mission. Fellowship materials indicate sessions will cover topics like “Middle East Misinformation” and “How to Cover Antisemitism”—framing choices that, in other contexts, have been used to discredit criticism of Israeli policies or advocacy for Palestinian rights.

The programme’s emergence comes at a time when support for Israel has plummeted globally, including across much of the Global South and younger demographics in the West. In the wake of the genocide in Gaza, Israel has faced mass protests, legal challenges at the International Court of Justice, and calls for arms embargoes and sanctions.

-MEMO

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