teen vogue: Palestinian Students Covering University Protests Are Underpaid and Undervalued

The Washington Post/Getty Images

This reported op-ed discusses the challenges experienced by Palestinian student journalists.

In the early hours of May 1, I returned home after an exhausting night of covering the police raid at Columbia University and got a text that devastated me.

At 2:49 a.m., one of my colleagues at the Graduate School of Journalism, who had been trapped in Pulitzer Hall all night, sent an image of four police officers sitting under the memorial wall of images we had set up to honor our fallen colleagues. We created these posters to remember all of the brave journalists, most of whom were Palestinian, who had been killed trying to cover the war in Gaza.

Seemingly unaware of the significance of this memorial, officers rested their batons and helmets on the benches below it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how, after a long night of arresting students at Hamilton Hall, these officers had walked into our campus building, which was otherwise closed, to rest their legs and check their phones. That picture, and all it represents, is what finally broke me.

Though my Columbia Journalism School professors have offered unwavering support — some have even slept in their offices to make sure we have food and other resources necessary to do nonstop reporting — there’s little they could have done to prepare us for the emotional toll of reporting on these encampments.

It seems to me that the Columbia administration, outside of the journalism school, does not care about its Palestinian students. This is part of why we Arab journalists at the school decided, in October, to put all our other reporting on hold and focus solely on this issue. We wanted the students to get the coverage they deserve. But as we approach the end of the school year, this reporting has broken us down in more ways than one…

Read the full article on Teen Vogue.