Jeremy Loffredo (left) and Danica Mason (right) during the discussion.
SARAH ROLKA / THE QUADRANGLE
Sarah Rolka, Asst. Features Editor
On Sept. 22, the departments of religious studies, communication, sound and media arts, and history, political science and international relations came together to host a discussion with independent journalist Jeremy Loffredo ’19 on journalism, censorship and Middle Eastern politics.
The conversation centered on an arrest that has come to define much of Loffredo’s recent career. In 2024, he was shackled and imprisoned by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on charges of “endangering national security and aiding the enemy during wartime,” according to TRT World.
The arrest followed his reporting that Oct. in the northern occupied West Bank. After seeing a video posted to Twitter (X) by PBS NewsHour Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent Nick Schifrin about an Iranian missile landing near the Mossad (Israel’s national intelligence agency) headquarters, a strike not reported by other Western or Israeli media, Loffredo went to neighborhoods around the headquarters to document how Arab-Israeli citizens were hiding from the strikes under underpasses while Jewish-Israeli citizens sheltered in reinforced, military-provided bomb shelters.
After publishing the story, he was stopped at a routine checkpoint outside Nablus and imprisoned. He recounted his solitary confinement, eventual release and trial during the event. Since then, he has returned to Lebanon every couple of months but has been denied a visa to return to the occupied West Bank after four tries.
That reporting and arrest were part of what drew Danica Mason, a senior political science major, to organize the event. Mason reached out to Loffredo directly to invite him to speak about his work regarding the Middle East.
“I felt inviting Loffredo would give him a platform to speak about his experiences and his work, which focuses on giving a voice to people whose voices might have been suppressed by their government or by the media,” Mason said.
Margaret Groarke, Ph.D., professor and chair of the history, political science and international studies department, shared with The Quadrangle her thoughts on the event.
“I thought it was really eye-opening,” Groarke said. “It was interesting to hear from somebody who’s been in Israel and Palestine. I think the fact that he was arrested for committing the crime of journalism is concerning.”
Loffredo also reflected on his own time as an MU student, saying the event gave him a chance for the kind of open dialogue he didn’t have while enrolled.
“I feel when I was here, I only learned about … contemporary politics of the Middle East when I would ask,” Loffredo said. “I was never assigned any particular books on the subject other than in history classes, which is not contemporary. So when I was invited to come here, I thought it’d be so great to have conversations about those subjects back at MU.”
Before the event, Loffredo spoke with The Quadrangle about his imprisonment and what he called the “courage threshold” journalists face in the Middle East, a threshold he described as its own form of censorship.
“It just puts things into perspective,” Loffredo said. “As an American journalist, they’ve made the courage threshold so high that you need to be willing to go to jail if you want to go to Israel and report on what they’re doing. For Palestinians, the courage threshold is so high that you need to be willing to die if you want to keep reporting … They have censorship enforced by ground-to-air missiles, they’ve killed 250 journalists in Gaza.”
During the discussion, Loffredo offered a different framing of censorship, drawing on Julian Assange’s writing.
“Julian Assange wrote in a book [‘When Google Met WikiLeaks’] that he sees censorship as a cause for celebration, because it shows that the power structure is so weak [for a government] that they need to care what people think,” Loffredo said. “They’re just trying to make sure that they don’t lose control of the narrative.”
Groarke connected that idea to press restrictions closer to home, pointing to a recently reversed press ban at the White House.
“This week we watched Trump ban some journalists from the White House and then the courts forced him to allow them back in,” Groarke said. “We see a lot of news organizations closing or consolidating, and a free press is really important to a democracy because people can’t decide where they stand on issues if they don’t know what’s going on. I think it’s really concerning that we see all these different ways around the world that freedom of the press is being challenged.”
Groake described the ban as a First Amendment violation rooted in “viewpoint discrimination.”
“I think it’s a fairly clear violation of the First Amendment … because the president was denying them access based on what we would call viewpoint discrimination,” Groarke said. “He doesn’t like their reporting, so they can’t come to the White House. That subverts the main purpose of the First Amendment … I think they just report facts that he doesn’t like.”
Loffredo argued that the language used to describe the occupied West Bank and the war in Iran shouldn’t be as contested as it often is, saying journalists are bound to use the terms international law provides.
“My view on these things in the Middle East is, I try to stay as close to international law and whatever those bodies are saying,” Loffredo said. “Palestinians in the West Bank are living under a military occupation. It’s not as controversial as people speak about it … saying what they say is really just a journalistic duty, it’s not really an opinion; it’s just taking the bodies who are the authority on these things and using that as the language.”
When asked why a country might censor its own history, Loffredo pointed to self-interest.
“A country would want to censor its own history because they have incentive that the country supports its own policies in different places,” Loffredo said. “So, if you subject everybody to the truth about a certain conflict, then they might not support the next one. It’s just a matter of propaganda.”
Loffredo also described what drives him to keep reporting despite the risks.
“I feel the least I could do is – if my profession is journalism, I can try to educate people,” Loffredo said. “I think adding as much information as possible to the ‘humanities encyclopedia,’ so we have accurate information there and it’s not only filled with war propaganda. I think it’s good for the future that we have things to look back on, ‘what was right? what was wrong?’”
Mason closed the discussion by asking Loffredo how journalism can offer a message of peace and hope.
“A message of hope is if people could be lied into supporting these wars and these occupations, people can [also] be ‘truthed’ into opposing them,” Loffredo said. “If people can be lied into a war, that’s really sad, but this also means that people don’t like wars … I feel like the goal of journalists is to give people the facts on the ground. The hopeful message is that it doesn’t have to be like this. And all journalists can report as much as they can, that’s truthful.”