Lost funding and crackdowns on criticisms of Israel

“Progressive on everything but Palestine”

Nicole Froio, Prism, July 23, 2025

In the spring of 2024, Sarah was called into a meeting with a higher-level editor at the Midwestern nonprofit newsroom where she works. The journalist, who had been covering local government meetings where members of the public had been actively advocating for a ceasefire resolution, was told that her reporting about local pro-Palestine activism in December 2023 resulted in a funder pulling a potential $100,000 donation. 

“I still don’t get it,” Sarah, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retribution from management, told Prism. She reviewed the report after the meeting and could not find what the funder had an issue with. Janet, another journalist using a pseudonym who used to work in the same newsroom, told Prism that she heard that the funder who retracted the grant claimed that a particular public comment was “reported on as a fact rather than an opinion.” 

From that moment on, all reporting at the news outlet that mentioned Palestine and Israel went through what Janet and Sarah described as a much more critical editing process. Both journalists say newsroom leadership clamped down on coverage of local grassroots activism to defend Palestinian lives, refused to provide any guidelines for covering the topic, and ultimately told them to stop covering it at all.

“I know that residents have really wanted to understand this issue, and we have made the choice not to explain it to them,” Sarah said. The newsroom was founded on a mission to be “community-centered” in opposition to the mistakes of legacy media, which has eroded public trust in journalism more generally. “[That mission] started to change rapidly,” Sarah said.

Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, some nonprofit newsrooms across the U.S. have faced threats to funding when covering news that features criticism of Israel. Much like in other fields of philanthropic funding, Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians is considered a high-risk topic for nonprofit organizations to engage in. In the case of nonprofit journalism, defunding, lack of funding, and risk-averse funders are getting in the way of community reporting. While few journalists in nonprofit newsrooms agreed to speak on the record about the subject for fear of losing their jobs, Prism can confirm that coverage of the genocide is a contentious topic, particularly when trying to ensure the longevity and efficiency of newsrooms through much-needed funding.  

At The Intercept, CEO Annie Chabel identifies the nonprofit investigative newsroom’s intrepid history of covering Israel and Palestine as a principal reason behind the publication’s inability to secure large donations from philanthropic foundations. 

“What we have seen is a lot of funders who appear to be very aligned with us, progressive on everything but Palestine, who won’t have conversations with us, or who we were emailing back and forth with before the war broke out, and the conversation stopped,”  Chabel told Prism. 

The Intercept has published bold reporting on Israel’s occupation and genocide that seems conspicuously absent from other publications, nonprofit or otherwise. Chabel—who has years of experience working in newsroom fundraising, previously working as a strategic fundraising consultant and as a director of philanthropic partnerships at Reveal—said specific funders have told her that The Intercept is “biased on Israel-Palestine.” Chabel declined to share which funders have objected to the coverage. 

“I understand that [funders] feel that way, but we feel that other outlets pretty much take the Israel party line and that we’re one of the few places that is really focused on doing stories that mainstream outlets don’t cover and that includes covering Israel-Palestine the way that we do,” she said. She added that every other topic The Intercept covers from a unique angle seems to be acceptable to funders, except for this one.

Much like in other fields of philanthropy where pro-Palestine organizations have been defunded by major foundations that are risk-averse rather than openly Zionist, Chabel speculates that some philanthropic foundations are afraid of the blowback they would experience by funding The Intercept’s Palestine-Israel coverage.

Stripping down coverage

For months in the fall of 2023, residents of a city in the Midwest attended weekly city council meetings to demand a ceasefire resolution from their local leaders. Speakers accused Israel of war crimes against Palestinians and drew attention to the apartheid.

But when Janet covered the residents’ comments in November 2023, she said much of her reporting was changed before publication.

“It got completely rewritten,” Janet told Prism. According to her, comments made by residents accusing Israel of war crimes against Palestinians were removed entirely from the final copy, even though those quotes were public record and collected by Janet. References to human rights organizations and international groups were also deleted, which Janet had added and linked to provide the “minimum amount of background that you might need to understand what led to this.”

One quote was “stripped down to its bare minimum,” Janet said, and she felt that the intention behind the edit was to discredit the source and make it seem like apartheid was a matter of personal belief rather than supported by the many references they cited to prove their point.

While Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is miles away from the U.S., the topic was coming up every week as protesters pushed for a ceasefire resolution. Despite pro-Palestine organizing happening at the local level, the newsroom had no established protocol or consensus on what language to use for the war on Gaza. In a staff meeting in November 2023, Janet said one of her colleagues asked newsroom leaders how their coverage should address the war and connect protests to what’s happening at the national scale. 

But leadership was skeptical about the need to define language because the newsroom only covered local news. Janet and her colleagues pushed back, saying that the topic wasn’t a hypothetical field of coverage. 

“The managing editor was not acknowledging that reality,” she told Prism, adding that  another reporter and an editor also brought up that nobody in the newsroom was “an expert” on the subject, with the reporter suggesting an article that platforms “both sides.” 

When the same pro-Palestine grassroots activist group started campaigning during public government meetings to divest from Israeli bonds, a managing editor suggested removing the issue from a news report during edits. “By July 2024, our editor was strong-arming us against leading with anything that had to do with Israel bonds or Palestine for meetings,” Sarah said. The justification was that the issue had been covered too many times.

“The main part of the meeting was the Israel bonds, but our editor-in-chief [was] constantly  telling us that we needed to find something else,” Sarah said. Both Sarah and Janet said they continued to ask for style guidelines throughout this time, but management refused. “We were also told that this issue wasn’t local for a long time,” Sarah added. “I’m pretty sure that at some point we just stopped covering the meetings.”

Mobilized readers

Sarah believes that the lack of coverage of local grassroots activism to defend Palestinian lives has ultimately eroded her newsroom’s relationship with the community.

Conversely, Chabel said that The Intercept’s audience is “so mobilized” by the publication’s coverage of this topic. “Our small-dollar donors are really stepping up for us and are helping us continue that work,” she said. “It’s this strange split where major philanthropy [funders] don’t want to support us, but the public is really engaged and mobilized on this issue.”

In January 2023, The Intercept split from its parent company, First Look Media, which aided in the solidification of the publication’s brand through financial and structural support during the nine years it was a part of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s digital media conglomerate. Chabel credits First Look’s support in the early years for The Intercept’s ability to stand on its own today on small-dollar donations. The parent company’s investment in marketing, brand, and audience development strengthened The Intercept’s credibility and, most importantly, she said, the publication’s relationship with its audience.

“The Intercept has the best audience, full stop,” Chabel said. “The fact that our audience is funding about 60% of our budget with small-dollar donations is amazing.”

More broadly, the lack of large funding gifts to support critical reporting on Israel and Palestine is severely impacting civil society’s ability to fight back against the most powerful echelons of society. “On the activism side, I think that there’s a lot of important issues that are intersectional that are not moving forward,” Chabel said. “It’s impossible to talk about racial justice in the United States without talking about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine.”

Additionally, philanthropic foundations are missing out on funding reporting on an issue that the majority of the public is interested in and would mobilize around, Chabel said. 

“It’s really dangerous to be maintaining a status quo that’s not reflective of a huge portion of the electorate and that is shunning a lot of people,” Chabel said. “The fact that we’re seeing this incredible crackdown on universities shows just how dangerous these people feel it is to just have these ideas out there.”

NICOLE FROIO

Nicole Froio is a writer and researcher currently based in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She has a doctorate in Women’s Studies from the University of York. She writes about gender in pop culture, social movements,… More by Nicole Froio