For years, The UCSD Guardian has provided a platform for dogmatic reporting and ideological hostility. When it comes to Israel, the paper has been willing to discard journalistic standards in order to influence students into ideological conformity.
The goal is anti-normalization: rejecting discussion, dismissing nuance, and promoting an exclusionary attitude.
I first noticed this pattern during The Guardian’s coverage of the 2024 “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” where nearly 20 students were interviewed without a single opposing perspective being presented. The result was reporting that uncritically presented emotionally charged language to present a specific political posture as the campus moral consensus.
This bias has become more prominent since the beginning of the most recent Israel-Hamas war.
Since October 2023, The Guardian has published more than 170 articles on the conflict, most centering pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices while marginalizing everyone else. While it is true that they have published a few opinion pieces that do not align with this sentiment, namely those from guest editors like me, most, if not all, of The Guardian’s biased reporting was written by its own staff.
This is unfortunately common in student newspapers across the state and country, where anti-Israel ideologies have dominated campus culture. Newspapers such as The Harvard Crimson, Florida State University’s FSView, and Northwestern University’s Daily (along with many others) have exhibited similar bias, misrepresentation, and censorship of Jewish and Israeli voices.
But the problem isn’t just bias. In the past two and a half years, Guardian editors have exhibited discriminatory treatment and outright censorship toward Jewish staff and guest writers on more than one occasion.
An interview with one of the only Jewish writers on staff during the 2024-2025 school year, who wished to remain anonymous and will be referred to as “JS,” revealed that the paper’s censorship was so restrictive that they had to leave. Sound familiar?
After months of ignoring the words “Free Palestine” written in bold on the whiteboard of the Guardian office, the tipping point came after JS pitched an article about UCSD Hillel’s expanded offerings, and the support they give to Jewish students facing antisemitism.
According to JS, the feature editor insisted that the piece be escalated to higher-up editors for approval because it referenced rising antisemitism in the United States.
Allegedly, those editors rejected the article outright, stating that the paper did not want to “publish anything Zionist” and asserting that “the definition of what qualifies as antisemitism has changed a lot lately,” implying that JS was describing speech and behavior they did not personally believe should be treated as bigotry.
JS was then allegedly instructed to interview anti-Zionist students before the article could move forward, a standard that has never applied to pro-Palestinian articles.
The episode ultimately ended with editors declaring that Jewish students at UCSD had not faced discrimination in the same way Palestinian students had. Rather than continue through the process, JS chose to withdraw the piece entirely.
I experienced similar issues when submitting op-eds as a guest writer. The communication with staffers leading up to the two articles that The Guardian ultimately published was riddled with editorial overreach and ideologically informed changes that were requested of me. At multiple points throughout both processes, I found myself fighting to retain my core arguments and voice.
The job of an opinion editor is to fact-check claims, ensure that submissions are relevant to their readers, and proofread. However, at The Guardian, I experienced attempts by a former opinion editor to pressure me into fundamentally changing my article.
He claimed my argument was difficult to understand, not because it was unclear or insufficiently sourced, but because he disagreed with my statement that there was an observable connection between normalizing support for Hamas within campus activism and a growing frequency of antisemitic incidents targeting Jewish community members. Eventually, a much shorter and hollower version of my draft was accepted.
I do appreciate — and think it’s important — that the paper ran my article. And I want to note that positive here as well. My goal isn’t to bash the paper — but to bring about an open dialogue about what happens when authors want to publish articles that staff members don’t agree with.
And to the editor-in-chief’s credit, after a subsequent Reddit thread was created about one of my pieces, which had multiple expressions of anti-Zionist bigotry and Holocaust Inversion, they defended publishing my writing, stating that they “will publish letters from our readers, regardless of whether or not [The Guardian] endorse[s] their opinion.”
Student newspapers shape the next generation of journalists. When ideological conformity replaces open inquiry at the undergraduate level, students do not learn how to challenge power or evaluate competing claims fairly. They learn how to enforce consensus.
If ethical standards of practice towards objective reporting and editing are not encouraged at the undergraduate level, nobody should be surprised by the number of professionals in mainstream media who have discarded that responsibility entirely.
This article was originally published in The Algemeiner. The views mentioned in this article are those of the author, and are not endorsed by CAMERA.
