As of Saturday (October 14), 12 journalists had been killed covering Israel's response to the Hamas terrorist attacks on that country.

That is according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which investigates all reports of journalists killed, injured, kidnapped, or detained/imprisoned.

In addition to the deaths, CPJ said that two were missing and eight were injured.

The State Department said Friday (October 13) that it is looking into the reports of journalist deaths and injuries. A spokesperson told Reuters, “Today and every day, we stand with journalists around the world who do critical work that we all rely on every single day, sometimes in dangerous conditions.”

“CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said in a statement posted online. 

CPJ called on all parties to take measures to better protect journalists, calling them civilians doing important work.

The following list of the slain journalists, which will almost certainly grow in the coming days, was supplied by CPJ and is based on both media reports and CPJ's own sources in the region: 

• Husam Mubarak, a journalist with Al Aqsa Radio;
• Issam Abdallah, a videographer working for Reuters, who was killed in southern Lebanon; 
• Ahmed Shehab, a journalist working for Sowt Al-Asra Radio, along with his wife and three children, were killed in an airstrike; 
• Mohamed Fayez Abu Matar, a freelance photojournalist, killed in an airstrike; 
• Saeed al-Taweel, editor-in-chief of the AlKhamsa website, killed in an airstrike; 
• Mohammed Sobh, a photographer with the Khabar News Agency, killed in an airstrike; 
• Hisham Alnwajha, a journalist with Khabar, killed in the same airstrike; 
• Assaas Shamlakh, feelance journalist and nine members of his family, killed in an airstrike; 
• Yaniv Zohar, an Israeli photographer, killed in an attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz; 
• Mohammad Al-Salhi, photojournalist, shot; 
• Mohammad Jarghoun, journalist with Smart Media, shot while reporting from the Gaza Strip; 
• Ibraham Mohammad Lafi, a photographer for Ain Media, shot at the Gaza Strip Erez Crossing.

The known injured are Ibrahim Qanan, a correspondent for Al-Ghad channel, who was hit by shrapnel; Firas Lutfi, a Sky News correspondent, who was reportedly attacked by police; Reuters journalists Thaer Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh; staffers from Al Jazeera TV Elie Brakhya and Carmen Joukhadar; and Agence France-Press journalists Christina Assi and Dylan Collins.

The known missing are Haitham Abdelwahid, a Palestinian photographer from Ain Media, and Roee Idan, an Israeli photographer who may be among the hostages along with his 3-year-old daughter.

AT&T needs to “immediately sever ties” with One America News Network, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of media watchdog Media Matters for America, after an exhaustive Reuters report detailing AT&T's inextricable and foundational role in building the controversial far-right media company. 

According to Reuters, which obtained deposition testimony from OAN executives, AT&T has contributed as much as 90% of OAN's revenue.  

Testifying in 2019 as part of a wrongful termination complaint filed by a former OAN producer, OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr. described a symbiotic relationship with AT&T, which he said helped will the media company into existence in 2013. 

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring testified. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [left-wing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

According to other testimony provided by an OAN accountant during the same trial, 90% of OAN's revenue came from carriage agreements with AT&T‘s pay TV platforms, DirecTV and U-verse TV, Reuters reported. 

The accountant estimated that OAN received as much as $57 million from AT&T at that point, although an AT&T rep disputed that figure to Reuters. 

With Herring having testified that he was offered $250 million for OAN at one point, the accountant was asked how much the media company would be worth without those pay TV carriage agreements. 

”Zero,” he responded. 

Reuters‘ reporting of close ties to OAN comes as the media company is taking heat for backing former President Donald Trump‘s bogus accusations of fraud in the 2020 election, as well as OAN's sustained reporting of misinformation tied to COVID-19 and the vaccines made to stop it. 

For example, if you are one of the 8 million people who, on average, visit OAN's webpage each month, and you happened to do that on Wednesday, you saw a lead item that includes video from the “Health and Freedom Conference,” with speakers including disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, a noted propagator of COVID-19-associated conspiracies, providing additional misinformation about vaccines. 

Meanwhile, OAN‘s San Diego-based parent, Herring Networks, is being sued by Dominion Voting for $1.6 billion for allegedly slandering the company’s voting technology amid its bogus election fraud reports. 

As described by Reuters, AT&T’s symbiotic relationship with Herring Networks, for which OAN is a subsidiary, dates back to the aughts, when Herring struggled to find carriage for opulent-lifestyle-themed cable network WealthTV, even complaining to the FCC about allegedly unfair business practices by pay TV operators. 

AT&T ultimately agreed to carry WealthTV on its U-verse platform, and later put OAN on the pay TV service, as well. In 2014, when AT&T agreed to pay $49 billion to acquire the much larger DirecTV, Herring helped salve issues with regulators, hiring his own D.C. lobbyist, meeting with FCC officials and signing proponent petitions ghostwritten by AT&T.

“Herring’s support of AT&T ran deep,” the Herrings’ lawyers wrote in court papers tied to the employment case. “Herring invited AT&T to utilize OAN’s news programs to cast a positive light on the acquisition and advocated for other issues affecting AT&T’s business.”

Speaking to Reuters, AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer responded, “We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

The recently spun off AT&T pay TV platforms, which are now 70% owned by the telecom in a joint venture with private equity firm TPG, represent OAN’s biggest carriage relationships. 

OAN is also carried by Verizon Fios and CenturyLink Prism, as well as cable operator GCI and virtual pay TV service Vidgo. 

Reuters is reporting that two of its journalists jailed in Myanmar have been pardoned after more than 500 days behind bars of a seven-year sentence. 

The reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were released as part of a general presidential amnesty. 

At the time of their arrest and then conviction for breaking the Official Secrets Act--Reuters said they had done nothing wrong--the pair were working on a story about the killing of Muslim men and boys by security forces and Buddhist civilians. 

"May their release herald a new era of press freedom in Myanmar, where reporters no longer fear reprisal merely for doing their jobs," said Committee to Protect Journalists Southeast Asia Representative Shawn Crispin.  

Sen. Marco Rubio (D-Fla.), among those who had advocated for their release, was understandably pleased.  

“On the heels of World Press Freedom Day [May 3], I am very happy to see Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo finally walk free out of a Burmese prison," he said. "Both journalists were unjustly jailed for their work reporting the truth about the atrocities against the Rohingya in Burma. Their cases serve as a reminder of the critical role a free press plays in bringing accountability and transparency to governments, and we must do all we can to protect and advance those principles.” 

The infographic (pictured) from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is intuitive and simplistic. You can easily see that older people prefer TV news, while young audiences go for online and social media. No surprise there.

But it's misleading!

True, the "Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017" (unveiled this week) confirms that the screens-of-preference for younger audiences are mobile and dynamic. But identifying the platform does not necessarily tell you the source of the news. Consumers may look at an online or social media site to find reporting from established journalism sources (e.g., CNN, The New York Times, Fox News Channel) or just as easily from ersatz self-proclaimed bloggers or alt-news sources. The 136-page report delves more deeply into the distinction between the reception platforms and the actual content of the news.

The Reuters Institute, which conducted the global research (30 countries on five continents) with the University of Oxford, acknowledges that the findings are "a reminder that the digital revolution is full of contradictions and exceptions."

The results are also a roadmap (however ephemeral) toward future news consumption patterns, quantifying current usage patterns and offering eye-opening ideas for media providers about where to focus for future news packaging. The findings raise questions, such as whether today's 18-to-24 year-olds (only 24% of whom now consider TV as a primary news source) will migrate to TV sets by the time they are 55+ years old. (Doubtful.)

And the study's structure forces us to consider whether "online" and "social media" platforms are truly distinct from one another. An argument can be made pro or con about their congruence. Again the big blur quickly arises, given the propensity of established media companies to put their scoops on their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts — often before they go on the air.

Dozens of other fascinating factoids emerge from Reuters' study. For example, despite the popularity of social media, only 24% of respondents think it does "a good job in separating fact from fiction." Actually that's not too far different from the 40% who question whether traditional news media performs that task very well.

Nonetheless, 51% of U.S. respondents said that they now get news via social media, up 4% from last year and twice as many as in 2013, according to the study. (If you click the above link into the full report, the U.S. data starts on page 102.)

Avoiding News
Among the most threatening findings in the Reuters analysis was that 29% of people say they sometimes or often avoid news altogether because it can have a negative effect on their moods. Those are serious concerns not only for building an informed electorate but for the news networks that have enjoyed, as Reuters calls it, "a very substantial Trump bump" during the past year -- a boomlet that could quickly evaporate.

Of similar concern for traditional platforms is the finding that smartphones are now as important for news access inside the home as outside, suggesting that media consumers don't need to turn on a TV set. The study even caught a glimmer of the role of voice-activated digital assistants (such as Amazon Echo) as a new platform for access to on-demand news. Again, this suggests that legacy news sources must explore ways to become apparent via this emerging platform.

One encouraging aspect of the Reuters' study is that more Americans "than ever before (16%)" are willing to pay for online news, a 7% increase from last year. It also cited last year's Pew Center study that technology platforms now "command nearly two-third of all digital advertising revenues." In its roster of top U.S. news brands, local TV stations, Fox News, CNN and NBC/MSNBC took most of the top spots, with more than 25% of viewers indicating that they go to those channels every week. Online, CNN (22%) and Fox News (20%) attracted more weekly visitors than The New York Times, local TV news online and the websites of local newspapers.

In its evaluation of brand attributes, Reuters found that 49% of Fox News viewers say it is best for "accurate and reliable news" compared with 32% who say the same of CNN. Similar comparisons of FNC and CNN viewers generated similar preferences among each network's audiences for "understanding complex issues," "strong viewpoints" and "amusing and entertaining."

Although the Reuters analysis is merely another snapshot of the flux in the digital news era, its findings offer significant direction for networks and information purveyors about what audiences expect.