CNN’s Nada Bashir on ‘Unimaginable’ Dangers Faced by Journalists in Gaza and How Western Media Covers The Middle East

CNN international correspondent Nada Bashir has spent the last year jetting between her home in London and the most active news zones in the Middle East: Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan. One place she has not reported from is Gaza, the besieged enclave that has been closed off to foreign journalists since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign in response to the Oct. 7 terror attack.

“This is almost unheard of, particularly from a state which claims to be democratic, to completely prevent journalists and international media workers from getting in,” Bashir, who is based out of CNN’s London bureau, told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club.

“That places the burden on Palestinian journalists inside the Gaza Strip,” she said. “[Palestinian journalists] are working while fearing for the lives of their children, or their parents or their siblings. The things that they have seen and witnessed, it’s unimaginable to be able to cope with seeing that.” Likewise, their own safety is at risk– this conflict has been the deadliest for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists started recording in the 1980s.

Bashir first traveled to cover Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria at the age of 23. Now an international correspondent at CNN, her coverage has taken her from the war in Yemen to earthquakes in Turkey and Morocco. The night before her interview with Press Club, Bashir won an Emmy for her coverage in the emerging journalist category.

Bashir said that what she’s witnessed in covering the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s October 7 attacks has been unlike anything else she’s reported on before.

“We’re hearing from mothers who are unable to feed their children, unable to breastfeed as well, because they are now severely malnourished,” she said. “This is an unimaginable situation, with the added challenge of there being a blockade enforced by the Israeli military and no hope of a ceasefire.”

Bashir said the situation is logistically challenging in a way other conflicts she’s covered aren’t. “What we’ve seen in previous conflicts, of course, is the subsequent effects of a refugee crisis. You see civilians being pushed out into neighboring countries or to neighboring areas where they can find safety, although it’s not an ideal situation. That’s not possible in Gaza. For many civilians, they’ve been told to move time and time again for almost a year now. There’s nowhere left to go.”

Nada also spoke about the escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, how she views the debate about death toll statistics, and the challenges of reporting in the Middle East amidst a mistrust of Western media.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: I want to start with the breaking news from the Middle East. The United States is pushing for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Could you tell us, from your perspective, what is going on there?

We’ve been talking for months now about the potential for spillover of the war in Gaza, of the potential for a broader regional war. We’ve been hearing those warnings and those alarm bells being sounded. And there has been real concern, of course, over the escalation that we’ve been seeing on Lebanon’s southern border over the last few months. But there is a real sense of fear and urgency now around what’s happening as we see Israel deepening its attacks on Lebanese territory in Beirut, as we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of civilians essentially being forced out of their homes in the south for their own safety and protection, as there are fears of a potential ground incursion by the Israeli military.

And the real concern here is, of course, we’ve seen what’s happened in Gaza over the last now almost a year. And there has been that repeated call for a cease-fire, a repeated call for a pause in violence in Gaza, and those calls haven’t been heeded. And now, as you mentioned, we’re hearing calls for a temporary ceasefire along Lebanon’s southern border. But whether or not that can be agreed to, whether or not there is any room for diplomacy is a real concern because that simply hasn’t been the case with Gaza. We’ve only seen an escalation, in fact.

It also requires an appetite for diplomacy on either side, which has thus far apparently been absent. You’ve been at the forefront of coverage for CNN of this crisis from Gaza, to Israel, to the West Bank, to Lebanon now. What was your first assignment after October 7th?

My first assignment was to head straight to the UAE to attempt to get on a flight to Gaza’s border with Egypt. At that point, it was perhaps the first week of the war. And so there were hopes that there would be access for journalists to get in via the Rafah border crossing. That obviously wasn’t the case. It still isn’t the case. We can’t get in, unfortunately. And from that point, once we realized we wouldn’t be able to get into Gaza, we moved on to the occupied West Bank and focused there. So from there, we were obviously reporting on what was happening inside Gaza. We also spent some time in Jordan reporting on the huge protests that were taking place, anti-war protests.

But I think what was so crucial for us and for my team in the West Bank was also to shed light on what was happening there, because what we’ve seen over the course of the war in Gaza is a huge, huge escalation in violence targeting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, behind the fog of war almost, a level of impunity that has only been exacerbated and extended over the course of the war. What we’ve seen not only from our own reporting, but according to human rights organizations as well as Israeli human rights organizations, is a real surge in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. We’ve seen an expansion of settlements which are considered by many to be illegal under international law, and there continues to be that concern around that rise in settler violence against Palestinians. So that was a huge portion of the story. And it’s so deeply linked to what is happening in Gaza. And I think people really overlook that and almost forget that the conflict that we’re seeing in Gaza is so connected to what we see in the West Bank. You can’t ignore one or the other.

I want to get to Gaza, but I think some of your most important reporting has been focused on the West Bank. What did you see there?

A lot of our work in the occupied West Bank focused on the expansion of settlements there. We spent a lot of time in the southern Hebron Hills around communities that were essentially being forced out because of the rampant violence that they had been seeing and experiencing. So we’re talking about homes being torched and demolished. We’re talking about violence targeting civilians, people, families and children, people essentially being driven away out of fear. And what we also saw during that time in the early few months of the war was a rise in violence because many settlers had been almost emboldened by support from the Israeli military, by the Israel Defense Forces. So what we’ve seen and according to many human rights organizations who have been tracking this, is settlers carrying out violent attacks with IDF soldiers right behind them, essentially allowing them to do so. So that was one of the key focuses of our reporting there. And we also obviously looked at the IDF raids that were taking place. That has only increased. We’ve seen that in recent weeks, of course, in parts of Jenin and Tulkarm, it’s only getting worse. And that was really important for us to shed light on.

What’s your experience with the Israeli government? Have they been forthcoming?

You have the Israeli government and the Israeli military spokespeople on that level, and you have, of course, the Israeli military on the ground who oftentimes would try to stop us from filming. We were detained temporarily while we were filming, accused of things that we weren’t involved in.

What were you accused of?

We were accused of taking part in a protest that we hadn’t even been at. We had falsified photos taken of us, accusations that weren’t correct, and eventually we were let go. But there are challenges when you’re filming on the ground, when you’re reporting on the ground. And there are parts of the story that maybe the Israeli military, the Israeli government doesn’t want you to see. And it was important for us to shed light on that. And we were doing that alongside Israeli organizations and Israeli human rights organizations who also wanted to shed light on what was happening in the occupied West Bank. But then again, you have the spokespeople as well. We’ve had direct attacks from Israeli military spokespeople on CNN’s air, targeting and attacking our reporting as well. So that’s a challenge that we have to face. And of course, our reporting is always based on fact. It’s always very rigorous. But again, with any country that you’re dealing with, any state, you have to deal with the state narrative as well. And the government won’t always be forthcoming.

You haven’t reported from Gaza. Why is that?

So there is no access independently to the Gaza Strip for journalists or media workers. There have been embeds with the Israeli military. They are very restricted, very limited in terms of who gets to go, how long you spend there, what you get to see. So my colleagues, Jeremy Diamond has been in quite a few times to the Gaza Strip and has taken part in those embeds. Clarissa Ward has also gone independently actually, she managed to get in with an aid group, but again, only for a matter of hours. And there has been this continued push from organizations, including CNN, to get access to Gaza because it’s so crucial for our reporting. But there just hasn’t been any movement from the Israeli military, from the Israeli government in allowing journalists in. And this is almost unheard of, particularly from a state which claims to be democratic, to completely prevent journalists and international media workers from getting in. And, of course, that places the burden on Palestinian journalists inside the Gaza Strip. At least 116 have already been killed overall in the conflict. But the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are still working now, are working with family members who have been killed, struggling through a famine, struggling through the most unimaginable circumstances. And they’re still working to get the story out.

How does a network like CNN, which has an incredibly impressive international reporting operation, get news out of Gaza?

We’re very, very lucky to have incredible colleagues on the ground in Gaza, Palestinian photojournalists who spend every day, morning until night documenting what is happening following the latest strikes, following the latest catastrophes, wherever it might be, following those hotspots. And they are risking their lives and their work is brave and it’s tireless. And we rely so much on their work, on the footage that they bring. And then we spend hours trawling through this often horrifying footage and trying to build a story out of that to paint a picture of what is happening on the ground. And then, of course, we have our colleagues in Jerusalem who spend a lot of time connecting with people inside Gaza, people inside the occupied West Bank as well. So without them, we really wouldn’t be able to do the work that we’re doing. But of course, everyone has access to this footage now on social media as well.

It’s a different landscape than it used to be. When you speak to these photojournalists that you work with, what’s their experience been like? Is that hard to cope with the fact that they’re under extraordinary, I’d say almost unprecedented circumstances?

It is. It’s hard to put into words what they’re seeing and experiencing on a daily basis. They’re working while fearing for the lives of their children, or their parents or their siblings. They are living in very difficult circumstances. Many of them, of course, living in tents, in temporary shelters, struggling with the technical issues of actually trying to get the footage to us as well. That’s a huge challenge. But the things that they’ve seen, not just our colleagues at CNN, but other journalists that you hear from inside Gaza, the things that they have seen and witnessed, it’s unimaginable to be able to cope with seeing that. I look at some of the footage that comes in and it’s difficult for me to see. I still think about specific bits of footage that I’ve seen that really stay with me and are awful. And to have to witness that in real life every single day for a year, the toll that it takes on a person, it’s unimaginable.

This has been the deadliest conflict for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists started recording in the 1990s. Iraq, I think, was the deadliest conflict for journalists since World War II, so that gives you a sense of how deadly this has been. There are different arguments, motivated arguments on either side for why that is. Defenders of Israel would say it’s because Hamas hides in civilian centers and Israel has to bomb them. What’s your sense of why this conflict has been so deadly for journalists, as someone who has reported on the ground there?

This is a very small strip of land, completely blockaded. There’s no way out for civilians in Gaza. And what we keep hearing from the Israeli military is these evacuation orders for civilians to move to so-called safe zones. These safe zones aren’t safe. They’re not humanitarian zones. We’ve seen them struck multiple times. They are very small. And for many civilians in Gaza, they’ve been told to move time and time again for almost a year now. There’s nowhere left to go. We’ve been hearing that from the UN repeatedly now. So when we hear these claims of targeted attacks or targeted strikes on Hamas infrastructure or terror targets, as the Israeli military terms it, it’s almost impossible to avoid civilian casualties, especially when you’re using 2,000-pound bombs. In any conflict, that would be obvious, but particularly in a tiny strip of land like Gaza, where there’s simply no way out. And what we’ve seen in previous conflicts, of course, is the subsequent effects of a refugee crisis. You see civilians being pushed out into neighboring countries or to neighboring areas where they can find safety, although it’s not an ideal situation. That’s not possible in Gaza. And we also keep hearing this notion from the Israeli government and from the Israeli military and others as well: Why doesn’t Egypt take them? Why doesn’t Jordan take them? When you speak to Palestinians on the ground, they don’t want to leave. This is their home.

They’re not Egyptian, first of all. And they, understandably due to historical reasons, are very averse to leaving their land because they know what happens when they do.

Absolutely. And so many of the civilians living in Gaza are themselves refugees who were forced out in 1948 from their homes in other parts of what is now Israel. And when we look at what’s happening in the West Bank as well, we’ve heard from the U.N., we found out from Amnesty International describing the situation there as akin to apartheid. It’s unimaginable, the experience, but also what is the alternative? So yes, the death toll is extremely, extremely high. At this point, I think the latest figures are just over 41,000. But again, there are tens of thousands still unaccounted for, missing.

What did you make of that argument that the death toll could not be relied upon because it was from the health ministry in Gaza, which is ostensibly run by Hamas. The Israelis have long denied it. They say that they’ve killed, I don’t know what the number is, 18,000 Hamas terrorists, something like that, but they will not give a figure for how many have died total or how many civilians they’ve killed. When you are approaching this as a CNN journalist, obviously CNN is a major outlet, it comes under of a lot of scrutiny, how do you approach reporting on the death toll and what do you make of claims that the death toll is somehow inflated?

There’s been a lot of debate around the phrasing of how we report on the death toll. A lot of media organizations initially began with reporting it as “the death toll, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.” And there was a lot of discussion around that, a lot of debate around that, internally, externally, a lot of discussion, which you need to have on any story. And we’ve moved away from that now. And I think that’s important because the initial phrasing really casts doubt on the death toll in just the way you say it. What we know from speaking to humanitarian organizations, including U.N. agencies, is that they have worked with the health ministry in Gaza for years now, and that the figures that they have provided in previous conflicts, the figures that they have provided in any instance, has always been reliable. So if the U.N. is willing to accept these figures as facts, if other humanitarian organizations, reputable humanitarian organizations are willing to accept this as fact, then there really isn’t a reason for us to doubt this.

And it’s important to remember, of course, that just as we have accusations that Hamas will have an agenda for perhaps inflating the figures, the Israeli military would also have an agenda, a reason to not recognize those figures. But what’s also important to remember is that, yes, Hamas has an armed wing. And we have seen horrific attacks carried out by Hamas, including, of course, the October 7th attack. We’ve seen rocket attacks as well. But Hamas has also been the main governing authority in Gaza now since 2006. It has functioned as a government in Gaza. So it has run the health ministry, the education ministry, all the ministries alongside U.N. agencies now for over two decades. So to cast doubt on that really fails to recognize the role that Hamas plays in Gaza, whether you like it or not.

Which is an administrative role, really.

Exactly.

Not to mention, there’s reporting that Israeli intelligence has privately confirmed the death toll. Now, you’ve done all this incredible and oftentimes harrowing reporting on this conflict. You’ve covered unthinkable stories of child malnutrition, you’ve witnessed people dealing with losing their children. You’ve covered other conflicts before in your career. Does this one feel different in that regard?

Absolutely. And when I speak to my colleagues who have done this job for decades longer than I have and covered many, many wars, none of them have seen anything like this. And just to go back to the work that our colleagues are doing in Gaza, we’re seeing it second-hand. We’re not there. And when I watch this footage, it feels like it’s getting worse and worse. And I remember the siege on Al-Shifa Hospital, I think it was 14 days that there was a siege around the area surrounding the hospital. And once that siege was lifted, once people were able to get back and journalists were able to get in, the footage that we received was horrifying. I can still picture it and I still think about it. And to see something that awful and for there to be no resolution at this point, for there to be no action, is hard to think about.

And what we’ve seen since then is a deterioration in terms of the humanitarian situation, particularly when it comes to malnutrition and famine spreading across Gaza. We’re hearing from mothers who are unable to feed their children, unable to breastfeed as well, because they are now severely malnourished. Newborns being born severely malnourished. And also, of course, the difficulties in getting aid in, speaking to aid workers who are saying, we have these trucks lined up, we have so much aid that we want to bring into Gaza and we can’t do it. And then the challenges they face in trying to actually distribute aid within Gaza, the security concerns, we’re seeing aid workers being killed inside Gaza trying to provide support to those in need. This is an unimaginable situation, with the added challenge of there being a blockade enforced by the Israeli military and the Israeli government, and no hope of a cease-fire. It feels unimaginable. It feels hopeless. And reporting on this for now almost a year, it’s difficult to think that we’ve been talking about the deteriorating humanitarian situation for this long. For there to be no action is difficult.

I want to go back to the beginning of how you got into covering this. You were born and raised in England. What made you want to be a journalist? What made you want to do international reporting?

I think it was definitely the Arab Spring. I was 16 when the Arab Spring kicked off and instantly, my family’s originally from Libya, so there was definite personal connection there, we were glued to the news watching what was happening there. And I was just like, that’s what I want to do. And it was about that time that everyone was getting on Twitter, X now. There was a whole new frontier to journalism as well. So that really attracted me to the profession. But international news has always been my focus and something I’ve wanted to do, particularly as someone who comes from the Middle East. Growing up, the news felt like it was almost always about the Middle East, wars in the Middle East, political dramas in the Middle East. And watching the news, particularly growing up in the U.K., watching British and even American news, hearing reports about the Middle East being told in a way that I felt didn’t necessarily reflect the reality on the ground, or didn’t fully understand or appreciate the cultural dynamics, or the historical context of the Middle East. And that drove me to want to be part of it.

The Western media gets a lot of criticism, particularly for how they cover Israel and Palestine. And in the wake of the October 7th attack, there was a lot of criticism that there was an overt bias towards Israel. And there was also criticism on the other side that there’s a bias against Israel. CNN is not immune to those criticisms. No major news network is. But sometimes CNN has been a central focus of it. Do you think that those criticisms are sometimes valid and do you think the media is doing a better job now a year into this conflict than they were at the beginning?

With any story, it’s impossible to cover it perfectly. And I think it’s important to be able to have these open discussions and debates, and we’ve certainly had them at CNN, discussions around how we can improve our reporting, whether it’s on the smaller details of day-to-day coverage or the broader picture of where we’re going with the story.

Because the words you use in a headline and the framing of a story can cause outrage on either side.

And rightly so. Our stories have impact, have consequences. So it is important to have those discussions with any story, not just this story. And it’s healthy to be able to have these discussions within a newsroom. So that’s great that we can have these debates and try to improve our reporting. And I think over the course of the year, many media outlets have faced criticism, including CNN. I think if anyone were to watch our coverage, overall as a whole, it’s very clear that there has been a lot of effort to be balanced and to show both sides, show the broader picture. And I think that was one of the main challenges I faced coming into this story in October. I felt that there was such a need to get more context into this. And I think that’s still a challenge that many media organizations face because, of course, we were so focused on dealing with the immediacy of breaking news that sometimes we forget that there was a whole lot of historical context that goes into a story that’s so important to understanding the story.

And I feel that a lot as someone from the Middle East, because you speak to anyone from the Middle East, you grow up talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict with your family. It’s a huge topic. Everyone knows about it. And it’s very important to the Arab community. It’s a very important issue. So you grow up with that historical context and knowledge. And it’s something that I focused a lot on in university as well. So for me coming into the story, it felt like, okay, this is the breaking news situation, but this didn’t happen out of the blue. We need to talk about what led to this. And it’s been a challenge. We’re a 24-hour news network. We’re always dealing with breaking news. But I think, at least I hope a lot of the work that we’ve been doing has given that context and given both sides.

Have those feelings about the way the Western media covers this conflict, made your job hard on the ground sometimes? Was it hard to get people to trust you?

Yeah, absolutely. We faced real challenges in Jordan, for example, where trust in Western media was at an all-time low and people didn’t want to speak to us because we were from CNN. And I found that really difficult. My team was myself, my producer is Palestinian. And we both speak Arabic and were speaking to people in Amman in Arabic, and they were like, oh, CNN, no. And that’s changed now, thankfully. In fact, we get people stopping us on the street and saying, you guys are doing a great job. But trust in media overall is at a low regardless of the story, in mainstream media rather.

Social media is a big part of that.

Absolutely. Especially when you’re seeing things on social media, and you’re like, okay, why am I not seeing this on the news? Why is it not on the news as soon as I’ve seen it on social media? But again, it’s both sides. And I find it difficult as well, as somebody who is Arab and visibly Muslim, there’s also, on the other side, an assumption that you can’t be objective or that you have an inherent bias towards one side of the conflict. And you don’t necessarily have that with your, let’s say, white male colleagues reporting at the White House.

Of course.

That’s never really a question. But as soon as you put me in the Middle East, it’s like oh —

What do you think the world doesn’t appreciate or understand about this war, based on your coverage of it? Forgive me for the broad question.

To go back to what we were talking about earlier, I think it is all about the context and the history. And I think without an understanding of what came before this, what led to this, it’s very difficult to understand the dynamics of what is happening, of why this is such a contentious conflict, of why this is a hugely important issue for Palestinians across the globe, not just in Gaza, not just in the occupied West Bank, and why this is going to have such huge, huge implications for the dynamics in the region in the years to come as well. Anyone who’s been following what’s been happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and more broadly the Israel-Palestine conflict over the last few decades, knows this did not happen in a vacuum. And we’ve been hearing from human rights organizations repeatedly now for years prior to this war around the persecution of Palestinians, around fears of an apartheid system being enforced in the West Bank, around the situation in the West Bank when it comes to the occupation and when it comes to the expansion of settlements. Those warning signs have been there, and that is in no way to justify the actions of Hamas on October 7th, of course. But again, to assume that happened in a vacuum is very short-sighted. You need to understand the context. And I think that’s a huge challenge for media organizations as well, to be able to bring in that history and that context in our reporting. And it’s difficult to do that in a breaking news situation. And when we’re talking about Lebanon now as well, to bring in the history of the country and the challenges Lebanon has faced over the last few decades. In the last few years even, the economic crisis, the port blast, these are all issues which are so inherently important to the Lebanese people, and then to be going through yet another war. So I think in terms of the broader conflict, without that context, you don’t have a full understanding of what is happening.

Right. And I think, unfortunately, that context is why people will often say, oh, this issue is very complicated. Which is often used as a way to not discuss it. Is that something that you try to overcome in your reporting? By explaining to people this may have a complicated history or a long history with a lot of different aspects to it, but it’s actually not that complicated as a story.

Yeah, absolutely. And to have all the facts and to have all the information about what the reality is on the ground. That’s the challenge that we face. And we’ve been talking about, within CNN, how we can better reflect what life is like for a Palestinian living in the occupied West Bank, what life is like for Palestinians living within Israel as well, and the dynamics there between Israelis and Palestinians. And this assumption also that it’s all bad. I was in Israel speaking to activists who don’t want to see a war, who want to see a cease-fire, who don’t want to see Palestinians being persecuted, who don’t want to see an expansion of settlements. There are a huge variety of different dynamics and layers to not only this conflict, but also to life in Israel-Palestine. And I think there’s almost a fear around the discussion of the realities on the ground. People don’t want to talk about the realities of what it means for a people to be occupied. No one wants to talk about that. People don’t want to talk about the realities of a potential apartheid system. And there’s a feeling of this is too complicated, it’s too sensitive. You don’t want to offend the wrong people. You don’t want to get into this huge debate. We need to have those debates. We need to have those discussions. And we need to be able to have those discussions openly and without fear, not only within news organizations where it’s crucial, but also just with your colleagues, your friends, your family, to be able to have that discussion.

I think that’s why we had an enormous amount of hand-wringing about the college campus protests here in the United States when obviously much worse things are happening overseas.

Yeah, absolutely.

What did you make of the college campus protests?

We’ve seen college campus protests for many different causes.

We have. It’s not a new thing.

It’s definitely not a new thing. And the vast majority of these protests, of these encampments were peaceful, were sending out an anti-war message calling for a cease-fire. We saw a huge amount of diversity at these college campus protests from different communities, different walks of life, including Arabs, Muslims, Jews and a whole array of other demographics. And there was this instant assumption that these were bad and violent and a failure to listen to what these protesters were calling for. And I find it very difficult to watch and hear coverage around these protests and to think about generations before us protesting Apartheid in South Africa, the student movement around that was huge.

And there were people at the time who said that they were extremists.

Yeah, exactly. And what we saw firsthand, our teams were on the ground speaking to students on the ground, as well in their own reporting, saying, look, these are peaceful protests. These students want an end to the war. They want to see a ceasefire. And sure, universities have to deal with this on their own terms, but as someone who was a student not too long ago, it’s an essential part of student life.

It’s what you’re supposed to do, right. Now when you’re going on one of these reporting trips, what’s the process to prepare for that? What are you packing?

Usually they are very last-minute deployments. So it’s a mad dash.

You get the word and within a couple of hours, you have to be on a flight.

Yes. So it’s just quickly throwing everything into a backpack. And nowadays, especially with the Middle East, all the body armor, medical kit, laptop, and then whatever else I can squeeze in.

Given it’s been so dangerous, are you taking extra precautions? Does that worry you more than it would covering something else?

You have to take extra precautions, but it doesn’t worry me. And especially working with CNN, you’re working with colleagues who’ve been doing this for years. I’m very lucky to get to work with such experienced producers and photojournalists and others. And that’s great. But the dangers come with the job. I don’t think there’s anyone in the newsroom who would be like, oh, can’t go to Lebanon, it’s a bit scary.

Yeah. And I think one of the good things about CNN is obviously you have this big international footprint. Does it worry you that forces like social media, the economic challenges that big media organizations are facing, do you think that poses a threat to the ability of big, authoritative news networks to deliver reporting on the ground from these places? Is that something that you’re concerned about?

I think we need to definitely shift the way we’re covering these big stories. I think we are shifting the way we cover these big stories, particularly because of social media. There’s a huge shift towards that and focusing more on how we can deliver our reporting in a different way that people might actually appreciate more than linear TV coverage. We’ve definitely found that with our Israel-Gaza coverage, my reporting I feel like can reach more people on Instagram, on X, on TikTok, whatever it is. And that’s where people are getting their news. That’s where people are seeing these raw videos first-hand.

I can also imagine CNN has to integrate those videos into its coverage in a way that has never been done before.

Absolutely, and it’s shifting quite quickly. I think everyone’s really on board with that. It’s the way I consume news, it’s the way other people consume news. So for CNN not to want to be a part of it would be weird.

Where are you up to next, do you know?

I do not know, but it most likely will be somewhere in the Middle East, and it will most likely be short notice.