From the Guardian

Julian Borger
Senior international correspondent, the Guardian

Dear supporter,

On Wednesday 3 August 1938, a short advertisement appeared in the pages of the Manchester Guardian: “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.”

The small ad was placed by my grandparents, desperately worried about the threat posed by the Nazis to Jewish families – including themselves and their son, my father, Robert. All three eventually escaped to Britain. The ad turned out to be the key to their survival.

It is hardly surprising in retrospect that the Guardian (it dropped Manchester from its title in 1959), was an object of reverence in my family home as I was growing up. Once I had decided to become a journalist, there was no question where I wanted to work, so here I am, nearly 87 years after that little ad in the same paper that saved my father’s life.

I came across the advert only recently, at the end of 2020, and set about looking into my family’s past and their escape from the Nazis. In the course of my research, I could not help but feel the echoes of Europe in the 1930s in the fearful, uneasy period we are living through now: the rise of demagogues, the retreat of democracy and the targeting of the free press.

In March 1938, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Vienna, Marcel “Mike” Fodor, had to flee the Nazis as they annexed Austria, crossing the Czechoslovak border in the middle of the night. We have not reached that point yet, but press freedom is moving in the direction.

I have now been a reporter at the Guardian for 34 years. I have covered some brutal wars and reported on the devastating impact on people caught in the violence, but I have never known reporters targeted as they are today. In increasingly difficult circumstances we bring the news for free to readers across the globe, and rely on some of you stepping up to fund our work. Thank you for supporting us previously. Could you support us again today?

In my career, I have lost colleagues to wars in the Balkans, west Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, and I’ve seen the grave risks reporters take to bring us the news, but the most dangerous time to be a journalist in the modern era is right now.

Over the course of 2024, 124 reporters and other media workers were killed, the worst toll since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping records three decades ago. About 70% of that total were killed by the Israeli military, and 82 of them were Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.

While trying to survive under a ferocious siege, the Guardian’s correspondent in Gaza, Malak A Tantesh, has been reporting daily on the carnage around her, bearing witness and giving voice to the ordinary people of Gaza, despite losing her own friends and relatives to the bombings. Her dogged reporting recently threw light on the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers at the hands of Israeli forces in southern Gaza on 23 March, helping ensure the facts could not be covered up.

On the West Bank, meanwhile, there is no doubt that journalists risk being singled out. While the primary target is always the local people, the radical Israeli settlers view journalists as an enemy for reporting on the campaign of violence, and when driving across the occupied territory, we routinely remove the press sign from our windshield.

In Ukraine, too, my colleagues like Shaun Walker, Luke Harding, Dan Sabbagh have had to change the way they cover the conflict because of Moscow’s targeting of the press. They no longer stay in hotels where reporters have congregated in the past because they have been repeatedly struck by Russian missiles and drones. Instead they have sought out less conspicuous accommodation.

And then there’s the US, where I was based for eight years until last July. This month I returned to Washington, and found it a changed city under the second Trump presidency.

I was careful to edit what was visible on my phone before going through US immigration, and there was a prevailing climate of fear among journalist friends and colleagues, with some insisting on encrypted communication and uncharacteristic discretion.

Those working for big media organisations are now in constant fear that their owners will fall into line and insist on self-censorship, and the firing of journalists viewed by the administration as troublemakers. One colleague had been preparing a documentary about Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, but all interest from the big US networks has evaporated in the past few months. It is seen as too risky a subject. The legal teams in American news organisations have been holding up reporting on anything likely to rile the Trump White House.

The trip was a reminder of how important the Guardian has become as a bastion of journalistic freedom, with no wealthy owner to be cowed or co-opted by the authoritarian regimes of the world, but instead a global presence with a deep historical perspective.

The direct financial support of our readers allows us to safeguard our independence and keep our journalists as safe as possible as they report in a world where freedom and democracy are on the back foot. Your past support was so helpful. If you are able to, please support us again today.

Thank you
Julian

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