Key Takeaways:
- After nearly three years of accusing Israel of targeting journalists, the CPJ has acknowledged that it included in its casualty list journalists who were affiliated with terrorist organizations – something HonestReporting has been closely tracking.
- Board member Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of Drop Site News, was removed from the CPJ board. Other CPJ board members have made false accusations against Israel, raising the question of whether the organization’s failure was institutional bias rather than a few bad actors.
- The CPJ’s allegation that Israel is targeting journalists has been covered consistently by the international media, which now must answer whether the record will be corrected.
After nearly three years of accusing Israel of targeting journalists – an accusation the international media repeated uncritically – the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has finally acknowledged what HonestReporting has been actively documenting: many of the 207 Gazan “journalists” it counted as casualties were affiliated with terrorist organizations.
Against this backdrop, board member Nika Soon-Shiong has been removed from her position. As the publisher of Drop Site News, Soon-Shiong has been extremely active in proliferating her anti-Israel views among a wider audience.
In an X post acknowledging her removal from the board, Soon-Shiong referenced a Washington Free Beacon article that noted her vocal accusations of genocide and apartheid against Israel, which she continues to defend.
Soon-Shiong went further, claiming it’s impossible to say with certainty that “Hamas wants to kill all Jews.” Hamas disagrees. The terror group has said exactly that, repeatedly, including in a recent manifesto justifying October 7. This manifesto was promoted by Drop Site itself.
Despite Soon-Shiong’s clear disappointment at being called out for her own behavior, what the Free Beacon piece really did was draw greater attention to the subtle removal of terrorists who were listed as journalists by the CPJ.
HonestReporting has been tracking and documenting the double lives of such terrorists since the beginning of the war. As of June 23, 2026, 112 of the 207 journalists listed by the CPJ as having been killed during the war had direct affiliations with terrorist organizations. While some of these names have been removed by the CPJ, the vast majority have not.
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— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 30, 2026
For nearly 3 years, CPJ's Gaza list was treated as gospel by the @NYT, @AP, and @WashingtonPost.
That halo was always a fiction.
We did the work CPJ and the legacy media should have, finding that 112 of the 212 names on CPJ's list (54%) were either members or affiliates of…
In response to Soon-Shiong’s X post announcing her removal from the board, the Free Beacon has followed up, again referencing the work that HonestReporting has been doing over the past few years to bring attention to the CPJ’s willingness to blur the lines between terrorist and journalist.
That work includes HonestReporting board member Salo Aizenberg’s months of research tracing how journalists on the CPJ’s list were claimed by terrorist groups in their own obituaries – the kind of documentation the CPJ apparently needed almost three years to catch up on.
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— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 30, 2026
Here's the obvious question:
If HonestReporting – a watchdog using only open-source, publicly available information – could identify dozens of terror-linked "journalists," why couldn't the world's biggest news organizations?
Did they never bother checking? Or did the facts…
As Aizenberg has further noted, Soon-Shiong’s statement marking her departure itself is filled with inaccuracies. She suggested that journalists affiliated with terrorist organizations, but who are not actively engaged in combat, are protected by international law. Aizenberg argued that enlisted terrorists were legal combatants, and that their participation in hostilities at the time of their neutralization was not a legal criteria. People like Anas al-Sharif have been defended by CPJ board members, despite the IDF presenting Hamas rosters that included him.
Soon-Shiong is only one part of a much larger problem at the CPJ. Other CPJ board members have similarly accused Israel of genocide or unabatedly killing journalists, without engaging in the same objectivity and investigative rigor demanded of the profession they profess to protect.
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— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 30, 2026
The answer may lie with CPJ itself.
Its board includes figures who have accused Israel of "genocide," "apartheid," and even compared it to Nazi Germany, with virtually no ideological balance.@nikasoonshiong, who publishes @dropsitenews, may have been one of the loudest…
The Committee to Protect Journalists’ vendetta against Israel has turned it into yet another activist organization with an agenda masquerading as genuine concern for journalists, and in doing so, it has failed the principle espoused in its own name.
The CPJ has acted as a shield for terrorists for the past two and a half years, creating some of the most prominent anti-Israel accusations. These accusations do not only stay within the realm of the media. They misinform public opinion and lead to international condemnations of the IDF’s conduct in Gaza.
The CPJ has finally taken the first step to correct this wrongdoing. Will every major outlet that blindly repeated its claims be next to correct the record? Or will this too get silently dismissed?
Whatever will come next, HonestReporting will be watching closely.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
