Calling it “Unmistakable, raw antisemitism,” CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash spoke Sunday night of the harassment she has faced online and in person in the wake of her reporting on the Middle East since October 7.
Bash spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, during Moment’s 2024 benefit and awards dinner where she received the Robert S. Greenberger Journalism Award for her steadfast commitment to principled, independent journalism and to holding public figures accountable.
In accepting the award, Bash pointed out that her coverage, along with that of her State of the Union co-anchor Jake Tapper, hasn’t differed from that of other television anchors, but that both of them have been a target of intimidation and hate. “For some reason,” she said, “I got under the skin of some. So did Jake. Well, not for some reason. We know the reason. We’re Jewish.”
Dana Bash, CNN chief political correspondent and anchor of Inside Politics, and Wolf Blitzer, CNN anchor of The Situation Room, at Moment‘s 2024 benefit and awards dinner.
“I will never forget the morning when the online hate that I wanted to tune out showed up at my doorstep, literally,” Bash continued. “It was early July, not long after Jake and I moderated the Trump-Biden debate. I heard a siren outside, and ran to the door and looked outside.” What she saw was a “group of people with a bull horn holding signs saying pretty horrible things. They called me ‘Zionist trash.’ They called me a war criminal. They called for an intifada against me. Unmistakable, raw antisemitism. I was glad my son was at camp.”
The group came back several times during the summer and even mounted a 14-car caravan that went back and forth between her house and Tapper’s, but that only made her more determined. It didn’t really get to her, Bash emphasized to the audience, until last Thursday when she was giving a talk about the election at a synagogue in the Philadelphia suburbs. She was next to the bimah and a woman approached and started questioning her about her coverage, while a second woman filmed the encounter. “She called me a mouthpiece for genocide,” says Bash. “These women purchased tickets and pretended to be part of the congregation, just to catch a viral moment. I was a few feet away from the ark, the Torah. I was in a heimish setting. It felt like home. I’m still processing this, but it just strengthened my resolve to continue to cover these subjects and report the truth.”
Bash made it clear that she remains determined not to let these intimidating tactics deter her from reporting on crucial issues, including antisemitism. “When the deadliest day since the Holocaust happened on that Shabbat October morning,” she said, “I knew instinctively that the horror expressed by much of the free world would be accompanied by something dark. Something not far below the surface. I wanted to believe that it was ancient history—that that hatred would never rear its head in these modern times—that ancient hate for Jews ingrained in culture and society for millennia.”
Bash was introduced by her mother, Moment Senior Editor Francie Weinman Schwartz, who spoke about Bash’s Jewish upbringing, and by C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist, who spent more than 30 years working alongside Bash at CNN. Feist praised Bash as an intrepid, fearless reporter who “speaks truth to power and goes toe to toe with the most powerful people in the world. She tells the stories that must be told,” he said.
Bash started at CNN at age 22 and worked her way up through the network’s ranks to become the host of the weekday show Inside Politics and co-anchor with Tapper of Sunday morning’s State of the Union. She spoke about the two special reports she did for CNN on antisemitism and about the trip she made along with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer—also in attendance—to Poland and Auschwitz to mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Both her great-grandparents and Blitzer’s grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz. That day, and the experience of standing in a gas chamber there, she said, “is seared in my mind.”
“As I’ve been thinking about tonight and what I would say,” Bash concluded, “I’ve been wondering what made me so determined and it’s really simple.” Though her great-grandparents were victims of the Nazis, her grandparents survived. “It was a twist of fate, it was luck, it was fortitude—but they did it not only so they could survive, but so our family and our people could survive. And here I was with the unbelievable good fortune of having a modest platform to continue to expose Jewish hate, and not lose sight of the hostages…and I was going to use it. Not because of the cause. I am not an activist. I’m a journalist and it is newsworthy. And we cannot become numb and stop covering it. I owe that to my grandparents, all four of them, and to my son. Isn’t the whole point trying to leave the world a better place?”
Top image: Dana Bash accepts the Robert S. Greenberger Journalism Award (Photos by Betty Adler).