Everything about this film felt very lukewarm. First, it was unnecessarily long — the story it told could have been told in half the time, especially without the romance plot that served absolutely no purpose and was purely fictional. Second, the highly dramatized portrayal of the trial — in combination with the real graphic footage from the Holocaust, combined with copious amounts of moralizing by Justice Jackson — felt unnecessarily kitsch.
It was interesting, though, to give a face to the history I’ve encountered mostly in a textual format. Since I’m writing about the Nuremberg Trials for my JP, I’d read through the trial transcripts and knew most of the defendants’ names before watching the movie. It was difficult to visualize how exactly the trials played out in my head while sorting through pages of legal documents and statements. The movie was convenient in that way — it provided one dramatized interpretation of an event that was difficult to imagine in a textual medium. But in terms of its historical accuracy or value, I’m a bit more skeptical.
While historical fiction is objectively a different field from feature journalism, the degree of dramatization in the movie made me think more critically about my role as a journalist retelling stories of trauma and pain in others. It’s very easy, I think, to turn a portrayal of a graphic or traumatic event into an almost pornographic spectacle. The line between spectacle and entertainment is frequently blurred, and I think many journalists who cover traumatized migrants are guilty of turning their subjects into just that. Of course, it’s a difficult endeavor that can’t be fulfilled formulaically — I myself am not sure how to write as honestly and with the most integrity possible about traumas that I have never experienced nor understood. But I think it’s a question more than worth asking and thinking very critically about. I also had a question on the point of spectacle: Are there moments where a more dramatized narrative form can be justified to convey the sheer weight of the story being told? Or is it a strict responsibility for a journalist to adhere only to the chronology and facts of the evidence, even if it means sacrificing the story’s narrative gravitas?
This question of spectacle also reminded me of something else I’d been thinking about: the relationship between journalistic integrity and anonymity. In what cases is anonymity (un)justified? Do journalists have a responsibility to quote non-anonymous sources over anonymous ones, even if the anonymous source provides marginally better information? What are some of the potential consequences of overextending anonymity to those who may not need it? How do the standards for anonymous authorship vs. Anonymous sourcing differ?
Author: Siyeon Lee (Page 2 of 2)
Tentative Title: “TK QUOTE”: The Twice-Expelled Syrian Palestinians of Germany
I plan to write my final on the Palestinian refugees in Berlin, specifically the Palestinian refugees who arrived in Berlin after living in Syrian Palestinian refugee camps. I hope to tell a story about their changing relationship to their national and cultural identity in light of their displacement, first from their homeland, then from Syria. I hope to interview specifically those who were displaced from the Yarmouk camp and have relocated to Germany. I will contextualize my writing with the current war crime tribunal being processed by the German Federal Prosecutors Office, where five men “suspected of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Palestinian refugee camp of Damascus” will be tried for their alleged complicity in the Siege of Yarmouk, where pro-Assad soldiers and allied militias cracked down on peaceful anti-government protests and violently suppressed them. Food, medicine, and humanitarian aid were also cut off completely during July 2013, resulting in 200 civilians dying of starvation and typhus. The camp was almost destroyed in 2015 via barrel bombs.
My article will give a sufficient historical overview of the siege and wider trends of displacement itself, and also cover the personal histories (profile/feature style) of the Palestinians who faced the displacement firsthand. I hope to be able to interview Palestinians who have been impacted by their displacements at different generational levels — from second-generation Palestinians whose parents were expelled via the Nakba and have lived in Germany for a long time, vs. those who more recently immigrated to Germany after the Siege of Yarmouk in 2011, for example. I was given a few Palestinian contacts by the Syrian journalist I interviewed for my previous piece on the TPS status lift — some of whom are in Germany, others who have relocated elsewhere. I can start with those contacts, then hopefully expand. My Alawite friend who attends Princeton also knows of a few friends who could help me contextualize the significance of Syria’s Palestinian refugee camps that I can speak to over the phone. I also hope to interview the press contacts for the ECCHR on the status of the war crimes case, who have been quite responsive in my previous attempts to contact them via email.
I also think it would be great if I could contextualize the Palestinians’ evolving cultural identity in relation to the rise of the AfD party in Germany and their open support for Israel — maybe I can get a quote or two via the AfD speaker event we will have in class and incorporate them into my piece (or just have a brief graf on the history of Germany and Israel-Palestine relations in general.) I want to be careful not to make this piece too much of a political overview of national conflicts and focus more specifically on the stories of the migrants I’m profiling, but I also think this could provide important context to their experiences.
Some questions, then, that I have for the AfD:
1. Israel-Palestine’s been a hot-button topic for German citizens and politicians alike. How do members of the AfD generally approach the topic? In general, is there a unified party consensus on the issue?
2. Anti-immigration is at the heart of AfD’s political mission. What kind of social, material, or cultural benefits do you think German nationals have to gain from anti-immigration policies? Do you think there’s a possibility of detriment? Why?
3. Why specifically does the AfD party have a focus on anti-Muslim immigration? Why not anti-Asian, anti-American, or just anti-immigration in general?
4. Outside of changes to immigration policy, what would you say is a tangible goal that the AfD aims to accomplish within the next 5 years?
I acquainted myself with many of the OSINT techniques mentioned in this week’s readings in my investigative journalism class last semester. I combed through lobbying databases, social media accounts, and donation records of wealthy businessmen to identify potential conflicts of interest with members of the Trump cabinet. While I’d known that the internet could make visible to journalists so much of what we see as personal or private — revealing hidden financial, political, and social ties between individuals that appear completely unrelated — it was striking to see how OSINT could go much further than that: identifying war crimes committed and concealed by entire governments, solely with evidence from the internet, accomplished thousands of miles away in the comfort of one’s home.
The HRW piece on Russian war crimes against Syrian civilians was striking in the diversity of sources that were used. From scrolling through the archives of the ‘flight spotter’ channels to analyzing the Russian Ministry of Defense’s social media posts to identify military officials who were rewarded for their service, no single source stood alone to support the authors’ claims — each new piece of evidence substantiated the other. I felt similarly about the sources of the Kramatorsk train station piece, which used a combination of civilian anecdotes, standards of international law, and Telegram messages/social media accounts to establish evidence of Russian war crimes. The Bellingcat documentary was a favorite: I was especially impressed by how they correlated the MH17 flight crash with Russian involvement through dashcam footage of the Buk convoy carrying the Russian missile that downed the plane, using fuel prices and shadows from the truck to correlate the footage to a date and time.
I was also intrigued by the Russian response to Bellingcat’s findings. Russia framed the Bellingcat investigators as secluded and uncredentialed, who knew far too little about journalism or the military to make any substantial claim against them. Yet the documentary showed how even media organizations we deem as reliable could fall short in their fact-checking efforts: take, for instance, the auto bomb incident in Baghdad that was reported on by both Reuters and the NYTimes, which was revealed to be staged even after Reuters journalists were there to report and speak to locals in person afterwards. I was also reminded of a conversation I had with my Syrian friend, who told me that for most of her life, the most reliable source of news had been Facebook, due to both the lack of trustworthy mainstream media outlets and the widespread availability of social media platforms that weren’t directly controlled by the Assad regime. It brought to my attention the question of whether our standards of journalistic credibility will change — or need to change — dramatically in the next decade. I’m concerned by both the rise of mis/disinformation through AI and the limitations of mainstream media falling short under political pressure, an issue that, perhaps, independent journalists and nonprofit journalistic organizations are better equipped to handle.
WASHINGTON — On Friday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will be terminated for Syrian nationals enrolled in the program, effective Nov. 21, 2025.
Syrians have been enrolled in the TPS program — part of the Immigration Act of 1990 passed by Congress — since 2012, during the Obama administration. More than 6,000 Syrian nationals are currently enrolled.
The Secretary of Homeland Security has the power to designate a foreign country as TPS eligible if “conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately”, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. The decision also follows the Trump administration’s revocation of TPS status for Venezuelan nationals, which was terminated last April.
“This is what restoring sanity to America’s immigration system looks like,” Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, said. “Conditions in Syria no longer prevent [Syrians] from returning home. Syria has been a hotbed of terrorism and extremism for nearly two decades, and it is contrary to our national interest to allow Syrians to remain in our country. TPS is meant to be temporary.”
The news release, which was published on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website on Sept. 19, noted that Syrians who choose to deport voluntarily within 60 days would be given a “complimentary plane ticket, a $1,000 exit bonus, and potential future opportunities for legal immigration.”
The move follows a comprehensive lifting of U.S. economic sanctions against Syria via executive order last June, following the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad after 24 years in power.
The announcement quickly garnered the attention of major U.S. and international media outlets.
Responses in Syria have varied. According to Anagha Subash Nair, a multimedia journalist based in Damascus, Syria who covers Syrian and Lebanese politics, both gratitude and resentment have been cornerstone to Syrians’ relationship to the U.S. and the West.“There’s a group of them who feel betrayed because the West interfered during the Assad regime, but didn’t do much … to militarily intervene,” she said. She also mentioned that the U.S. financial and military support for Israel has contributed to negative images of the West.
“[Others] feel very grateful to the West and Trump because he lifted the sanctions, at least on paper,” she added.
Nair said that while this complex sentiment remains, emigration to the West is still desirable for most Syrians.
“There’s a lot of nuance there,” she said. “Ultimately, life in the West is of better quality, [and] naturalizing into a Western country does give you more mobility. There are [many] factors to take into consideration,” she added.
Rose Habib, a Syrian undergraduate on an F1 visa attending Princeton University, echoed Nair’s assessment that the topic remains complex for many Syrians. Habib personally knew of two friends who were enrolled in the TPS program.
“Growing up, if anyone could go to the U.S., they definitely would do it,” she said. “At the same time, [if they can’t,] they just lived with that. There are definitely more things that are on people’s minds [than] American policy,” she said.
Habib, also a member of the Alawite ethnoreligious minority from Latakia, Syria, emphasized that Syrian sentiments on immigration are difficult to generalize precisely because of the nation’s volatile political history and diverse ethnic composition.
“When you say ‘Syrians’, there are many different ethnicities: Arabs, Kurds, whatever,” she said. “Before the fall of the Assad regime, everyone wanted to leave … now, [it’s more so] the minorities who are trying to leave.”
Habib mentioned the series of massacres against Alawite civilians that occurred last March, where armed remnants of the former Assad regime and Syrian National Army (SNA) militia killed more than 1,000 civilians in Western Syria. While Habib acknowledged that there is a group of Syrians who feel enthusiastic about settling back home, she says there still remains a large demand for emigrating to the West, especially from those who have experienced a threat of violence.
“Everyone I know who is part of a community that’s in danger, or was in danger for the past few months, [still] wants to leave [Syria],” she said. “They don’t want anything to do with the [new] government.”
This week’s readings and viewings were a difficult set to work through. Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing Stolen Women of Iraq was a favorite. The book described the pain and suffering endured by the Yazidis with the kind of poetic prowess that makes readers, including myself, to physically reel and ache in their seats. The story of Reem and Zuhour was especially poignant — even while being the daughter of a committed Daresh fighter, Reem allows Zuhour and her children to stay in a hidden part of her home alongside her sewing equipment, and through the weeks helps devise a method for Zuhour and her children to escape.
The stories themselves were powerful on their own, of course, but I was also duly impressed by Mikhail’s narrative decisions and construction of the stories as a whole. The book begins by an anecdotal illustration of Mikhail’s time as an Arabic teacher in the U.S.. She’s struck by a sense of disillusionment as the Arabic letters she teaches her students — meaning nothing more than the sound and shape they are to the students themselves — are the letters that Mikhail knows signified incoming suffering and death for the women she wrote about.
I’ve encountered in my past journalism classes the notion of ‘fly on the wall journalism’ — where journalists remove themselves entirely from the narrative scope of their writing, effectively erasing the role that they played in conversing with and constructing the story of their subject. Mikhail effectively does the opposite of that. Her own story and perspective as a writer is an imperative that anchors the story of the women. We begin with Mikhail in Chapter 1 and end with her, too, in Chapter 7. From the harrowing stories of all the women in between, it isn’t immediately clear in Chatper 7 whether Mikhail is speaking as herself or immersing the reader into another tale of a Yazidi’s escape — the changes in narrative point of view throughout the book adds to the confusion (Mikhail switches from the third, to second, to first person in different instances).
But the kind of poetic ambiguity that blurs subject and object is perhaps an intended one by Mikhail. It reminds the reader that they, like the author, are intertwined in our humanity to the women of the story in ways beyond our comprehension. The mode of Mikhail’s narrative construction, then, is effectively fundamental to her journalistic storytelling. As I thought about how I’m going to write my migrant profile, the book made me reflect on the conventions of profile and feature journalism that I too have internalized and might benefit more from reworking or abandoning entirely.
As I read Azmat Khan’s brilliantly executed investigative pieces in the Times, I was repeatedly reminded of one of my favorite works of investigative audio journalism: Season 3 of the New Yorker’s podcast In The Dark by Madeleine Baran, which covered the Haditha Massacres of Iraq in 2005. Baran describes, through years of intensive investigative reporting in line with that of Khan’s, how U.S. Marines knowingly executed 25 unarmed Iraqi civilians in their homes and evaded responsibility after an inconceivably lazy accountability process employed by the American military courts. In some ways, I found Khan’s story even more insidious than Baran’s: the gamification of the loss of civilian lives through physical distance — airstrikes coordinated by those far removed from the reality of its aftermath and chat histories that resemble video game colloquialisms, for example — enabled a moral distance from the horrific realities of the civilians they brutalized as well. (I was especially disturbed by the term ‘squirters’, which referenced fleeing children in the aftermath of an airstrike.)
That theme of moral and physical distance from the horrors of war is a recurring one in all of this week’s readings. For the Afghans who flee state violence only to be met with the violence of a different kind in a new country or the children of Mosul like Mustafa Hakeem Abdullah, their suffering is reduced to statistics and concealed behind the bureaucratic veils of the West’s political and military world (I thought Valerio articulated these ideas on the declining trust against Western institutions very well in his blog post.) Since when did the West, a section of the world that lauds itself as the bastion of liberalism and democracy, start treating the lives of men (and children!) as collateral investments secondary to tactical advantage or political righteousness? Since when were American soldiers able to get away with deploying larger, more powerful bombs in civilian-occupied areas for the sake of convenience? Is better accountability in situations like these even possible?
It’s clear the U.S. has a responsibility to engage in warfare ‘better’. It’s also clear that they need a better system of checks and balances — one that involves third-party investigations into accusations of war crimes or military negligence (the conflicts of interest in the current military judicial system are quite appalling.) But I wonder if the U.S., too, has a responsibility to embrace tactical disadvantage for the sake of preserving civilian lives — or redefine the term ‘tactical advantage’ altogether. Does America truly advance a mission of peace, justice, and democracy in any efficacious way when it kills 1 ISIS recruiter in exchange for the lives of 20 civilians? I doubt it. When we read the term ‘military tactics’ as an action or strategy that advances a particular mission, perhaps good ‘military tactics’ come in decisions that put America’s democratic and liberal aims as an actual priority — even if it means deploying more soldiers on the ground or investing in technologies that enable more precise strikes.
I was intrigued by both Deb’s article and the Reuters podcast that highlighted the use of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War. I found the normalization of the guerrilla-ification of modern warfare, introduced by the necessity of civilian interception in responding to drone strikes, to be especially interesting: when $400 drones hold the kind of firepower that can neutralize 400-million-dollar tanks, the nature of conflict is centered on a competition for the powers of mass-production (of both the number of drone interceptors and the drones themselves.) If you fire tons and tons of cheap drones, the opponent will eventually run out of interceptors to neutralize them, or vice versa.
But I think drones are much easier to mass-produce than warfare-savvy civilians, compensated mostly by their own patriotism and a small check from the government in exchange for putting their lives on the line. I then wonder whether this is, for one, a sustainable method of warfare: the Ukrainian government is effectively hiring non-military, non-trained mercenaries to support its defenses. Can that method be sustained, financially or politically, in the long run? I also wonder whether the increasing tendency for war to become a game of production globally will render secondary the importance of patriotic conformism and nationalism as a feature of its fighting constituents, which for centuries have been at the crux of many militaries’ absolutist traditions. Although I would believe that many of these non-military Ukrainian civilians are fighting for the love of their country and people, they also operate outside of the bureaucratic structure of the military and its rigid culture.
That question of the in/decreasing importance of ideology in war also made me think critically about “A Faith Under Siege.” The American evangelicals who decide to fly to Ukraine are effectively there for purely ideological reasons: to protect Christians from their persecutors, to fight against a war they see as a greater fight against ‘good and evil’ (an exhausted trope in the absolutist traditions of many militaries.) I found myself rolling my eyes at what I saw as a selective and not-so-Christian inclination to fight a foreign war for the sake of defending a religious ideology (and not to protect and preserve the lives of all civilians in general, which I see as the more obviously Christian aim). I also don’t hear about Americans flying to Sudan or Nigeria to fight against extremist militants that have persecuted and killed Christians in the area.
But, in tandem with the idea of war’s changing nature as a mass-production competition, this made me very intrigued by the idea that an individual’s decision to partake in a war (in their own or another’s country) on a purely ideological basis might become a privilege. Which is to say, if our modern methods of warfare are putting increasing pressure on the general public to partake in fighting regardless of their ideological inclinations, those who can afford that pure commitment to ideology may belong to a privileged class (whether that might be because war is not a tangible concern to the individual or their nation’s productive capabilities — of both people and weapons — are more than abundant.)
Each of the articles from this week depicts methods through which Donald Trump and his administration have used political slippery slopes to prosecute or pressure their dissidents. Many of these articles specify that this pressure is achieved through indirect methods, but is nonetheless an insidious attack on press freedom: through forcing all journalists to use a Trump-supporting billionaire crony’s social media platform to obtain their information, or defunding public channels of information under the guise of creating more ‘unbiased media’, for example. As Hamilton puts it in the Just Security article, “none of these decisions reflect government censorship, but direct censorship is not the only way to undermine a free press. Instead, creating an environment in which news media start to self-censor in deference to the views of those with State power is a less costly way to achieve the same outcome.”
One thing that piqued my interest was the concept of ‘explanatory journalism’ that Hughes referred to in her article for the Harvard Kennedy School, where she mentions that “investigative reporting is often about accountability and therefore often focuses on failure” while ‘explanatory journalism’, on the other hand, “is looking at where we are and how things work.” She proposes explanatory journalism as a kind of solution to the stark ideological divide that the nation faces, as the increasing scarcity of ‘shared facts’ makes collective national discourse on contentious topics difficult.
I was skeptical of this idea for two reasons: one, because Trump already has a history of litigating against journalists for what many would already consider ‘explanatory’ (like when he sued 60 Minutes for Harris’ edited interview), and two, because I think that it does little to provide journalists working for the public interest with any additional self-agency. When even the explanatory is construed as political, I’m unsure if altering the font through which journalism is delivered would do much to empower a free press (and I am also convinced that it would prove somewhat beneficial to Trump and his administration, benefitting from a media landscape shifted towards explanatory neutrality.)
This skepticism tied well to my second point of interest: the fact that Trump, as Nancy Gibbs puts it in the HKS article, has a distinctly “uncanny understanding about attention, how to capture it, hold it, divert it.” Gibbs’ words reminded me of a book I read last semester for a History class that was dedicated entirely to the history of attention: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, a book that explored the history of the advertising industry and its distinctive commodification of the human experience previously deemed outside the realm of profit. Wu argues that this signals a kind of moral crisis that’s a direct byproduct of late-stage capitalism.
Trump has, I think, a very strong understanding of how this commodification can benefit him and hurt his opponents. There’s much to say about the president’s ability to commodify, for example, the field of journalism itself. The White House executive order makes a direct reference to this: “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” it reads. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” Journalism, a field historically dedicated to informing the public with public interest at the heart of its philosophy, remains a viable entity according to the federal government, despite being privatized. Access to free and unbiased media, then, is becoming increasingly and forcibly compatible with private benefit; Trump has effectively put a price tag on journalistic freedom.
