AP News Writer Fired for Pro-Palestine Activism
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The contract of a young Arizona-based news associate who was accused of anti-Israel bias because of her college activism has been terminated by the Associated Press (AP).
Previously, the department had been accused of sharing a Gaza office with Hamas.
Emily Wilder was fired from AP just over two weeks after starting to write news for Maricopa County, Arizona. She was fired for reportedly violating the company's social media policies, which stipulate that workers must remain publicly quiet "on contentious public issues" and refrain from taking organized action in favor of causes, RT reported.
The news service launched a probe into Wilder’s social media footprint after her college-era pro-Palestinian activism was highlighted by right-wing outlets. She is Jewish and was an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine at Stanford, from which she graduated in 2020.
Her participation in the pro-Palestinian groups was highlighted on Tuesday by a Republican students’ organization at the university. It said the groups were pro-Hamas and notorious for “acts of intimidation and violence against pro-Israel students.” The criticism was picked up by the likes of the Washington Free Beacon and Fox News, and boosted by a number of prominent conservative public figures, including Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
As a student activist, Wilder was a fierce and sometimes rudely outspoken critic of Israeli policies. At one point, she described the Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as a “far-right, pro-Trump, naked mole rat-looking billionaire”. Adelson, who was Jewish and died in January, drew her ire for funding the Taglit-Birthright Israel program. It sponsors free heritage trips to Israel for young Jewish adults, but Wilder viewed its activities as “nothing more than ethnic nationalist propaganda.”
The journalist said AP was fully aware of her past activism when it hired her. When her old posts resurfaced, her editor assured her she was “not going to get in any trouble, because everyone had opinions in college,” she told San Francisco news outlet SFGate.
Days later, she was informed about the immediate termination of her contract, but says AP failed to pinpoint specific messages posted during her tenure that violated its social media policy. One of her recent tweets lamented the media’s use of language in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that she believed indicated its bias in Israel’s favor.
Wilder is of the view that she has fallen victim to cancel culture. Her termination letter from AP said that it had been pressured by the online harassment campaign against her into conducting a review of her conduct. However, she believes it then selectively enforced vaguely defined corporate rules to justify her subsequent firing.
“That’s an admission this was prompted by the campaign against me,” she said.
“It’s really unfortunate the Associated Press is abdicating their responsibility to not only me, but to all journalists, just because a group of college students wanted to engage in a witch hunt.”
Conservative critics of Wilder linked her hiring by AP to the controversy about the agency’s alleged sharing of an office building in Gaza with the military intelligence wing of Hamas.
Last week, a tower that hosted the offices of several international media outlets, including AP and Al Jazeera, was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike amid the latest upsurge in violence.
