photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
Chalk art in Old Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa, drawn at a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on October 29th, 2023.

Drive past Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa on a Sunday afternoon and you’re likely to see and hear demonstrators calling for an end to hostilities and a peaceful resolution to the current Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Early on in the conflict, one local journalist wrote about the weekly gathering, and found himself at odds with his publisher.

KRCB News spoke with Peter Byrne, who recently broke with one of his longtime outlets, the alternative weekly publication the North Bay Bohemian, over alleged censorship of his reporting about the local response to the war in Gaza.

Listen to that conversation in the audio player to the left.

Following Byrne’s split with the paper, North Bay Bohemian owner Dan Pulcrano, in an article in the publication, said Byrne’s writing was not “spiked” as accused, rather it was turned in too close to publishing time, and lacked a balance of Israeli perspective on the conflict. Byrne disputes both claims.

Pulcrano wrote that the Bohemian's management takes "full responsibility for the decision to not rush an article to print without reflection, and we believe that that call was prudent."

In an email to KRCB News, Pulcrano said Byrne opted to  “publish elsewhere rather than provide context.”

Byrne’s article was published as written on CounterPunch.org.