NEW YORK: Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime.
When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday morning, the board — made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school — shut down the law review’s website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain “is under maintenance.”
The episode at one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical, which is run by students at Columbia Law School. The board of directors oversees the nonprofit’s finances but has historically played no role in selecting pieces.
In a letter sent to student editors Tuesday and shared with The Associated Press, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence.”
“In order to preserve the status quo and provide student editors some window of opportunity to review the piece, as well as provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we temporarily suspended the website,” the letter continued.
Those involved in soliciting and editing the piece said they had followed a rigorous review process, even as they acknowledged taking steps to forestall expected blowback by limiting the number of students aware of the article.
In the piece, Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, accuses Israel of a litany of “crimes against humanity,” arguing for a new legal framework to “encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition.”
Eghbariah said in a text message that the suspension of the law journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across US campuses.”
Editors said they voted overwhelmingly in December to commission a piece on Palestinian legal issues, then formed a smaller committee — open to all of the publication’s editorial leadership — that ultimately accepted Eghbariah’s article. He had submitted an earlier version of the article to the Harvard Law Review, which the publication later elected not to publish amid internal backlash, according to a report in The Intercept.
Anticipating similar controversy and worried about a leak of the draft, the committee of editors working on the article did not upload it to a server that is visible to the broader membership of the law journal and to some administrators. The piece was not shared until Sunday with the full staff of the Columbia Law Review — something that editorial staffers said was not uncommon.
“We’ve never circulated a particular article in advance,” said Sohum Pal, an articles editor at the publication. “So the idea that this is all over a process concern is a total lie. It’s very transparently content based.”
In their letter to students, the board of directors said student editors who didn’t work on the piece should have been given an opportunity to read it and raise concerns.
“Whatever your views of this piece, it will clearly be controversial and potentially have an impact on all associated with the Review,” they wrote.
Those involved in the publishing of the article said they heard from a small group of students over the weekend who expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published.
Some alluded to trucks that circled Columbia and other campuses following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, labeling students as antisemites for their past or current affiliation with groups seen as hostile to Israel.
The letter from the board also suggested that a statement be appended to the piece stating the article had not been subject to a standard review process or made available for all student editors to read ahead of time.
Erika Lopez, an editor who worked on the piece, said many students were adamantly opposed to the idea, calling it “completely false to imply that we didn’t follow the standard process.”
She said student editors had spoken regularly since they began receiving pushback from the board on Sunday and remained firmly in support of the piece.
When they learned the website had been shuttered Monday morning, they quickly uploaded Eghbariah’s article to a publicly accessible website. It has since spread widely across social media.
“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally published,” Lopez added, “even after they nuked the website.”
After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board
After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board
A matter of trust: Media leaders look to rebuild credibility in age of AI
- ‘Don’t do what pleases platforms, do what is right,’ journalism professor says
- ‘General journalism is going to be very difficult,’ media boss says
ABU DHABI: Media organizations are facing unprecedented disruption to their industry, as traditional business models come under strain from rapid technological shifts, the rise of independent creators and a growing public distrust in news.
This fragmented landscape has transformed the essence of journalism and content creation in the 21st century.
Amid the upset, journalists, creators and industry executives were in Abu Dhabi on Monday for the opening day of the inaugural Bridge Media summit, where they hoped to map a path forward in a rapidly evolving industry.
Jeff Zucker, CEO and operating partner at RedBird IMI and RedBird Capital Partners, said that while storytelling remained at the core of the media, artificial intelligence was fundamentally reshaping how stories were created, delivered and consumed.
“General journalism, by and large, is going to be very difficult in a world of AI,” he told the conference.
Having been at the helm of some of the biggest media businesses in the world, including CNN and NBC Universal, Zucker emphasized the value of deep, niche journalism, arguing that the viability of future news models will hinge on offering something readers cannot get elsewhere.
“Economic models may broaden, so I think that niche journalism that goes deep and gives the consumer an edge and a reason to subscribe to that journalistic outlet — that’s what will work and that’s what will succeed.”
It is an idea that featured across the first day of the summit, with media practitioners from all disciplines pushing colleagues to focus on elevating the quality and originality of their content, rather than being dismayed at the fall in advertising revenue and chokehold of algorithms.
Moataz Fattah, a journalism professor and presenter at Al-Mashhad TV, decried media organizations’ constant focus on algorithms, saying they would be better served by honing their craft.
“Don’t do what pleases platforms, do what is right and go to where the audience is,” he said.
“How to be authentic is to be true to what you believe in.”
Fattah argued that while it was true that younger generations gravitated toward short form content, it was still possible to engage them to take deeper dives on subjects.
What mattered most, he said, was ensuring that the right format was used for the subject matter, applying creativity and flair to keep audiences challenged and informed so that they might get the full context.
This idea of challenging audiences, rather than caving to what may seem trendy was echoed by Branko Brkic, leader at Project Kontinuum, an initiative that aims to reaffirm news media’s positive role in the global community.
“If we are giving readers and audiences (only) what they want, why do we exist? Why do they need us?” he said.
“We have to be half a step ahead, we need to satisfy the needs that they know they have but also fill the needs they didn’t know they wanted.”
Sulemana Braimah, executive director at the Media Foundation for West Africa, said transparency, credibility and, ultimately, the impact on society were what should drive storytelling, rather than just views and likes.
“In the newsroom, we always have to ask why we are doing this story, what is the story in the story, who is it for?” she said, urging media outlets to choose depth over superficial recognition of content.
“Stories that get views don’t necessarily mean they hold value. We need to keep asking why, what’s the value, what are we helping by making this story.”
Individuals over institutions
Another theme that dominated discussions at the conference was the idea that trust was increasingly being driven by individuals rather than brands and institutions. The argument, put forward by Zucker, is that unlike in the past, when legacy outlets conferred trust upon journalists, audiences now place their trust in individual voices within a media institution, making personal reputation a critical currency in modern journalism.
“People are looking much more to individuals in this new creator economy, this new AI world,” he said.
Jim Bankoff, co-founder and CEO of Vox Media, echoed that sentiment and predicted that more news content would be led by trustworthy and notable personalities.
Speaking on the strategy of his own media company, he said the future would likely see lower headcounts within institutions, due to AI and automation, but more emphasis on talented individuals.
“Work on something that makes you essential to your core audience,” he said.
Consolidation, AI and finances in flux
One of the big talking points of the opening day was Netflix’s attempt to acquire Warner Bros., a move seen by some as evidence of a rapidly consolidating industry challenged by shrinking profit margins.
AI seemingly only seeks to further challenge these margins. With many more people using AI summaries and overviews to get news and information, chatbots are becoming the new face of the internet, reducing traffic flow to news websites and destroying the ad-based revenue model.
Pooja Bagga, chief information officer at Guardian Media Group, said audiences defined the rules of the internet and delivery of news content and that the onus lay with media companies to reinvent themselves.
“It’s all about what our audience want, what they want to see, how they want to see it, which formats they want to interact with and when they want to consume the news,” she said.
Many media outlets have signed licensing deals with AI companies to include the use of their content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT while ensuring attribution back to their websites.
These agreements also allow tech firms to access publishers’ content — including material held behind paywalls — to train large language models and power AI-driven services in exchange for media organizations’ use of the tech to build their own products or for revenue sharing.
In October last year, the Financial Times, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst and USA Today Network signed an agreement with Microsoft allowing it to republish their content in exchange for a share of the advertising revenue.
Bagga said that such agreements were essential to safeguarding news content and ensuring tech companies upheld their responsibility to handle journalistic material with integrity and accountability.
She also stressed the need for greater transparency from tech companies in how they use journalistic content to train large language models, emphasizing the importance of ensuring accuracy in AI-generated overviews.
An alternative route, she said, was collaborating with other publishing companies under rules and regulations that ensure intellectual property was protected.
In newsrooms, amid the fast-evolving world of tech and artificial intelligence, there must be a trusted supervisory body to safeguard editorial integrity, she said.
Elizabeth Linder, founder and chief diplomatic officer at Brooch Associates, stressed the need for transparency and broad understanding on how decisions are made by media and tech companies to ensure “a productive social contract.”
She called for conversations between governments, tech platforms and individuals, citing Australia's Communications Minister Anika Wells, who introduced a bill to ban social media use for children under the age of 16.
“Especially with the development of AI technology coming in, we need to take a really big step back and reframe this entire conversation.”
