Eco-Roundup: Why is a Pro-Israel Propagandist at an Investigative Journalists Conference?
Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep up my independent reporting.
I was in a windowless conference ballroom filled wall to wall with investigative journalists — or that’s who I thought they were, anyway. It was the kickoff event for the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, and waiters were passing around toasts topped with beef as we used up our drink tickets. I was chatting away with some journalist I’d never met from Texas, when this woman walked to the edge of our conversation and looked at me expectantly, like we knew each other. We must have met before, and I’m not remembering, I thought. But as I said hello, it became clear that we had not.
“Your name tag says you’re an independent journalist — what do you write about?” she asked.
“Mostly environmental stuff,” I replied. She began to tell me about the great environmental work that Israel is doing.
Oh Christ, I thought. “Honestly, when I think of Israel and the environment, I think of the Israeli bombs that have destroyed Gaza,” I told her.
She hardly skipped a beat. She told me she was hopeful that the war would be over soon, and that the country could refocus on its environmental work. She began describing to me all the environmental aid that Israel had attempted to give to Gaza that Palestinians rejected, and how the Gazans had destroyed greenhouses in 2005. This woman was laying it on thick. I shot back that Israel’s blockade since 2007 had prevented Palestinians in Gaza from building proper water sanitation infrastructure and that Forensic Architecture had carefully documented Israelis’ destruction of greenhouses throughout the genocide that ramped up in 2023.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” I told her. “Who do you work for?”
And then it all made sense. “The American Middle East Press Association,” AMEPA, she told me. I knew that name. AMEPA is an organization founded in 2023 that arranges trips to Israel for journalists. This woman had apparently attended IRE to target U.S. press with pro-Israel propaganda — and I was having terrible déjà vu.
Eco Files readers may remember that something like this happened to me a little over two years ago, at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I got a little ping in my conference app notifying me that a woman named Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi was inviting me to an event. It turned out, Laszlo Mizrahi was promoting free trips to Israel for climate journalists, offered by the Jerusalem Press Club, a different press-aimed Israeli propaganda org.
The AMEPA lady — whose name I didn’t catch, because this encounter took me so off guard — offered to send me information about the organization and connect me to their programming. I gave her my email address, but never heard anything. Maybe she looked me up.
In an era of journalism austerity, where more and more of us are freelancers who barely make ends meet, this type of propaganda is especially a problem. I can imagine a reporter who is less engaged on the question of Israel attending a trip like this simply because it’s funded in an era where nothing is. Environmental journalists in particular can easily become agents of greenwashing — and, just to be super clear, a genocide is not something we should be greenwashing.
I'm sending an email to IRE asking why AMEPA would be invited to an investigative journalists conference, and I'll update when I hear back.
Other stories I’m following:
“Is it going to be our AI boss — or our AI replacement?”
The biggest headline coming out of the IRE conference was the preponderance of AI-centered sessions and workshops – mostly focused on how to use AI. Veteran investigative researcher baddies Margot Williams and Barbara Gray had the best one, and Margot summarized some of it in her newsletter Desk Set Research. She maintains this incredible list of (non-AI!) research tools journalists can use for investigations. She asked Claude to tell her which of the databases could and couldn’t be searched using AI. A large proportion of the databases could not. And that’s one of the reason why I think it’s worth spending some time learning how to use AI — because we need to be able to explain why it can’t actually replace us. For now, AI can be used for some specific research tasks, and it makes a great excuse for eliminating journalists’ jobs, but my biggest takeaway from all those AI sessions is that it cannot actually do what we do.
Rebecca Nagle, who made This Land, has a new podcast out called First America that re-tells U.S. history, with Indigenous people put back into the narrative. It starts in my hometown of Minneapolis, at Fort Snelling, a place I used to visit on field trips in elementary school to watch people in period costumes churning butter and lighting off cannons. It also happens to be a Dakota sacred site — and the site of a concentration camp where the U.S. military held Dakota people in the 1800s. Today it’s home to the Whipple building, the local ICE field office, court, and detention center. History is a circle, so right as Nagle visits Fort Snelling with historian Nick Estes, they learn that Renee Good has been shot and killed by an ICE agent. The podcast is a worthy way to process the 250th birthday of this country.
“They didn’t like my book club.”
For the Guardian, Lex McMenamin has a piece out examining the devastating case of Elizabeth and Ines Soto, and the other Prairieland defendants. The couple participated in a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Texas. After the duo had already left, one of the participants shot a police officer. The Sotos, along with six others, ended up charged with providing material support to terrorists. Among the key evidence: the couple was part of a book club, called the Emma Goldman book club, and they owned two printers, a paper cutter, and a book binder used for making zines. The lawyers showed the jury stickers that said ACAB (which stands for All Cops are Bastards), and a feminist zine called “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.” Having recently covered a jury trial, I can only imagine what kind of justice that produced. Elizabeth was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison, and Ines is awaiting sentencing Wednesday. This case is genuinely chilling, and it’s not isolated. It’s an extension of Trump’s strategy laid out in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. As of last week, for example, 15 Minnesotans are facing federal conspiracy charges for participating in anti-ICE protests.
Palate Cleansers
I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.
Something Delicious: Nuoc chom every day
At this time of year, all I want is lettuce wraps with nuoc chom. A pile of herbs, some white rice or rice noodles, peanuts, some kind of protein. Cool and lovely. I like to make the ones in Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day. A version of her recipe is here, but you can make it with tofu, or tempeh, or anything really. She also has a newsletter, Pass the Fish Sauce, which I love.
Garden Update: It bloomed on its own
There haven’t been long hours to dedicate to gardening. I’ve purchased seedlings in the middle of some other errand and put them in pots as the sun rose or set. How could a garden grow when there’s so little time? But it did. This weekend I ate my first raspberry from our bush; I cooked with garden herbs; I sat in the garden, surrounding by incidental abundance.
Community Updates: Support ProPublica Guild
One actually nice thing that I got to do at the IRE conference was hand out flyers educating people on the ProPublica Guild’s uphill battle to force one of the most prestigious investigative journalism outlets in the U.S. to include protections against AI job replacement in its union contract. You can find info here about how to support them, including by signing their petition and donating to a strike fund.
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