🚨For 18 Straight Years, The Committee to Protect Journalists Has Ranked the Deadliest Nations for Journalists. This Year Israel Was Supposed to Be #1. So They Canceled the List Altogether.

It's cowardly and completely despicable.

If you’ve been wondering why it feels like the world is going quiet while journalists are being killed in record numbers, I want you to read this carefully. A new report says one of the most important organizations meant to protect journalists literally chose to stop counting at the exact moment the truth would have been impossible to ignore.

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According to Ali Abunimah’s reporting at The Electronic Intifada—whistleblowers say the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) scrapped its annual Impunity Index because the math showed Israel was set to rank number one for the single deadliest nation in the world for their harm against journalists.

CPJ’s Impunity Index wasn’t some random blog post. It was a widely cited, concrete measure of accountability—published annually since 2008, referenced in UN reports, trusted by human rights monitors and journalists around the world. The index was designed to expose countries where journalists are deliberately killed and the killers get away with it—year after year, with no consequences.

And what the whistleblowers are essentially saying is this:

Israel’s killing of journalists has gotten so extreme, so undeniable, so mathematically impossible to spin, that the organization DESIGNED TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS chose to delete the scoreboard instead of reporting the score.

Let’s slow down and make sure everyone understands what this means.

The Impunity Index is calculated over a rolling ten-year period, adjusted to population. That matters because it means Israel wouldn’t just have topped the list for one year and then moved on. If Israel surged to number one because of record killings of journalists in Gaza, it would likely remain near the top—for years—because that’s how the math works. You don’t wash that kind of blood off a ten-year index with a press release.

And that’s where this gets grotesque.

Because Gaza has been under an ongoing phase of genocide for over two years now, and the targeting of Palestinian journalists has been one of the clearest through-lines of the entire horror. Not “collateral damage.” Not “accidents.” Not “fog of war.” A pattern. A method. A message.

Journalists are supposed to have protection under international law. In plain language: the Geneva Conventions treat journalists as civilians in conflict zones unless they directly participate in hostilities. That means deliberately targeting them is not just immoral—it can be a war crime.

So when whistleblowers say CPJ scrapped a globally recognized index because Israel was about to rank number one, they are saying something even darker:

They are saying the institution built to protect journalists allegedly chose donor comfort and boardroom peace over the lives of the people it claims to defend.

Ali’s reporting says the whistleblowers claim CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg “decided to cancel [CPJ’s] Impunity Index simply because the math showed Israel is number one,” and that she “couldn’t afford the heat she would get every year from the board, the pro-Israel donors and from Israel itself and its allies.”

Again—these are the whistleblowers’ claims, but if you’ve watched how elite institutions behave around Israel for the past two and a half years, you know why this allegation lands like a punch to the gut: it fits a pattern we’ve seen too many times.

We’ve watched organizations soften language.
We’ve watched them avoid the word “genocide.”
We’ve watched them pretend “both sides” are equally culpable in wildly unequal realities.
We’ve watched them publish “balanced” statements that function like anesthesia.
We’ve watched them treat Palestinian death like a weather event.

And we’ve watched them do it while journalists in Gaza die at a rate that has shocked even seasoned war correspondents.

This is why the Impunity Index mattered. Because it did something very few institutions are willing to do anymore: it produced a ranking that the powerful could not easily talk their way around. A list is not perfect, but it is blunt. It is legible. It is hard to spin.

And that bluntness is exactly what the whistleblowers say CPJ wanted to avoid.

According to The Electronic Intifada, CPJ ended up issuing a “lighter lift” statement in December instead—highlighting five emblematic cases from different countries. That kind of statement might be fine as a supplement. But as a replacement for a ranking system that would have put Israel’s record in unmistakable context? It’s not just weak. It’s strategic.

Because when you take a situation that is grossly unequal—Israel’s alleged record killing of journalists in Gaza—and you put it in a neat package with four other cases around the world, you achieve something very useful for the powerful:

You make outrage diffuse.
You make accountability optional.
You make the exceptional feel ordinary.

And you also do something else: you deny the dead their clarity.

There is a particular cruelty in erasing the numbers while the funerals continue. It’s like telling grieving families, “We’re sorry,” while quietly removing the mechanism that would have forced the world to look at who is responsible.

If you’ve ever wondered why impunity is so durable, here’s one answer: impunity doesn’t only live in the hands of the killer. It lives in the institutions that refuse to name the killer.

And I want to zoom out for a moment, because this isn’t only about CPJ.

This is about the entire ecosystem of “respectable” institutions that are addicted to credibility but terrified of consequences. They want to be cited by the UN and invited to conferences and respected by donors and praised by mainstream media—and they also want to avoid the heat that comes with telling the truth about Israel.

So they compromise. They massage. They soften. They replace hard measurement with soft statements. They trade clarity for access.

And then they act surprised when the killing continues.

Here is the moral reality: the murder of journalists is not a side story. It is often the story of how genocide and mass atrocity get carried out. You kill the witnesses. You intimidate the press. You make documentation dangerous. You make truth costly. And then, when the world tries to understand what happened, there is less footage, fewer records, fewer names, fewer voices left to testify.

That’s why this allegation matters so much. Because if the institutions built to defend journalists can be pressured into deleting the mechanisms that expose impunity, then what do you think happens to the people on the ground who are risking their lives to tell the truth?

And I want to say this directly to anyone who supports CPJ, who donates to CPJ, who cites CPJ, who respects CPJ: the correct response here is not denial, not defensiveness, not PR.

The correct response is accountability.

If the Impunity Index had flaws, fix them. Expand it. Improve the methodology. Publish the data. Add more categories. Include all journalists killed, not only those CPJ can definitively classify as intentional murders. Make the index stronger, not weaker.

But don’t scrap it.

Because if your solution to an embarrassing ranking is to delete the ranking, you are no longer fighting impunity. You are managing it.

And if CPJ is telling the truth—if donor considerations truly played no role—then the organization should have no problem doing what moral leadership looks like in a crisis:

Release the internal communications.
Release the methodology discussion.
Release the decision-making chain.
Release the details about why the index was dropped and what replaced it.
Tell the public exactly what changed and why.

Transparency is what organizations demand of governments. It is what we should demand of them too.

Journalists have been killed in Gaza at a scale that should shake every newsroom, every boardroom, every human rights office on earth. The world has watched the bodies, the funerals, the press vests, the shattered cameras, the final posts.

And if the reporting in The Electronic Intifada is true, then one of the institutions tasked with protecting journalists allegedly responded not by publishing the harsh truth—but by hiding the sharpest tool it had.

That is not a procedural decision. That is a moral choice.

And it is exactly how impunity survives.

If you want to read the reporting that sparked this, start with Ali Abunimah’s piece at The Electronic Intifada right here: CPJ scrapped “Impunity Index” to shield Israel, whistleblowers say.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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