REVIEWER 2 - CRITICAL REVIEW
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**Overall Assessment: Weak Reject (2/5)**

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### 1. Overall Impression
**Immediate Reaction:** The manuscript addresses a timely and tragic subject with clear humanitarian significance. However, it suffers from profound methodological and conceptual flaws that undermine its scientific contribution. The core argument—that trust is established through "relational reciprocity" and "embodied persistence"—feels more like a philosophical assertion than an empirically demonstrated finding. The paper reads as an overhyped weak study that attempts to leverage the gravity of its subject matter to compensate for a lack of academic rigor. The integration of quantitative and qualitative methods is superficial, and the leap from descriptive statistics to grand theoretical claims is not justified by the evidence presented.

**First Impression Strengths:**
*   **Timely and Important Topic:** The scale of journalist fatalities in Gaza is a critical issue for media studies, ethics, and international law.
*   **Interdisciplinary Ambition:** Attempts to bridge quantitative data analysis with qualitative thematic analysis and high-level theory (epistemic trust, moral witnessing) are commendable in intent.
*   **Clear Structure:** The paper is logically organized and follows a standard IMRaD format.

**First Impression Concerns:**
*   **Lack of Causal or Correlational Rigor:** The quantitative analysis is purely descriptive. It establishes *what* happened but does not test *why* or how these patterns relate to the core concept of "trust."
*   **Unsubstantiated Theoretical Leap:** The central claim that statistical patterns of death "align" with qualitative themes to form "relational reciprocity" is an interpretive leap, not a finding derived from the integrated methodology.
*   **Missing Comparative Framework:** The analysis is entirely insular to the Gaza case, with no systematic comparison to other conflicts to test the uniqueness or generalizability of the proposed trust mechanism.

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### 2. Technical & Scientific Assessment

**A. Problem Definition: Score 4/5**
The research question is clearly motivated and non-trivial. The authors effectively argue why understanding trust mechanisms in this extreme context matters for journalism studies and ethics. The problem is significant and well-articulated.

**B. Methodological Soundness: Score 1/5**
This is the paper's primary weakness.
*   **Study Design:** The concurrent mixed-methods design is appropriate in theory but fails in execution. The quantitative and qualitative strands run in parallel but are not effectively integrated to answer the research questions. The quantitative data describes the context of death, while the qualitative data describes the content of communication; the link to "trust" is presumed, not measured.
*   **Hidden Assumptions:** The entire analysis rests on the unverified assumption that audience perception of trust is directly and accurately inferred from the journalists' final communications and the circumstances of their death. There is **no primary data on audience perception**.
*   **Statistical Flaws:** The analysis is limited to descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages). There is no inferential statistics, no tests for significance, no control for confounding variables, and no demonstration that the observed patterns are non-random.

**C. Results & Evidence: Score 2/5**
*   **Results:** The results are descriptive and reproducible in a narrow sense (the tables are clear), but they are not compelling evidence for the paper's central thesis. The evidence shows journalists died and what they said; it does not show how this created trust.
*   **Baselines/Comparison:** There is a critical lack of comparative baselines. How do trust dynamics differ for journalists who were *not* killed? How does this case compare to Syria, Ukraine, or other conflicts with high journalist fatalities? Without this, claims of uniqueness or specific trust mechanisms are unsubstantiated.
*   **Exaggeration:** Claims like "trust operates as relational reciprocity" and "embodied persistence... validates testimony credibility" are profound exaggerations of what the data can support. The data documents a correlation (journalists died while reporting), not the causal mechanism of trust formation.

**D. Contribution to the Field: Score 2/5**
The contribution is currently weak. It documents a tragic case study but does not meaningfully advance theoretical knowledge. The application of Fricker and Margalit is superficial. The proposed concept of "relational reciprocity" is not developed with sufficient empirical or theoretical novelty to be widely cited or built upon. It repackages existing ideas in the context of a new, severe case.

**E. Writing & Presentation: Score 4/5**
The paper is generally well-written, organized, and accessible. The tables are clear. The language is sometimes overly abstract and jargony ("epistemic trust," "moral witnessing," "relational reciprocity"), which masks the methodological simplicity.

**F. Ethical & Transparency Standards: Score 3/5**
*   The use of posthumous data likely raises complex ethical issues, but the authors mention anonymization and aggregation, which is a minimum standard.
*   A major flaw is the **lack of data/code availability**. The analysis relies on a custom dataset (`press_killed_in_gaza.csv`), which is not provided. This makes full reproducibility impossible.
*   No evidence of misconduct is apparent, but the lack of transparency is a significant concern.

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### 3. Strengths
*   Focus on a critically important and under-documented humanitarian and journalistic crisis.
*   Attempt to bring a rigorous, mixed-methods framework to a highly charged and emotional subject.
*   Clear presentation of descriptive data that starkly outlines the scale and patterns of the tragedy.

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### 4. Weaknesses
**Major Flaws:**
1.  **The Missing Link: No Audience Data:** The entire argument about "trust" and "audience perception" is built on a foundation of proxy data (journalist actions/words) rather than direct evidence (audience surveys, reception studies, social media analytics).
2.  **Methodological Disconnect:** The quantitative and qualitative analyses are not integrated to test the core hypothesis. They are two separate descriptions presented as mutually reinforcing evidence.
3.  **Purely Descriptive Statistics:** The quantitative analysis lacks any inferential power. It cannot support claims about relationships, causes, or the significance of the observed patterns.
4.  **Lack of Comparative Analysis:** The claim that this case is "unprecedented" or demonstrates a unique trust mechanism is untested without comparison to other conflict zones.

**Minor Flaws:**
*   The phrase "They kept filming until the end" in the title is powerful but anecdotal; its representativeness is not established.
*   Some theoretical concepts (e.g., Origgi) are mentioned but not meaningfully operationalized in the analysis.

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### 5. Recommendations for Improvement
**For a Major Revision (Required for Resubmission):**
1.  **Reframe the Claims:** The paper should be reframed as a **descriptive case study** that documents the patterns of fatalities and the themes in final communications. The grand theoretical claims about "relational reciprocity" must be severely tempered or removed until supported by stronger evidence.
2.  **Conduct a Comparative Analysis:** Add a systematic comparison with data from at least one other major conflict (e.g., from CPJ databases on Syria, Ukraine) to contextualize the findings and test claims of uniqueness.
3.  **Incorporate Audience Data:** If possible, the authors should analyze secondary data on audience reception (e.g., engagement metrics, sentiment analysis of comments on the journalists' final posts, or a meta-analysis of how international media framed these deaths) to provide a direct, rather than inferred, link to trust.

**For a Future Submission (To make it Tier-1 Quality):**
4.  **Strengthen the Quantitative Analysis:** Move beyond descriptive statistics. Employ inferential tests. For example, test if the cause of death (airstrike vs. other) is independent of journalist affiliation (local vs. international), or if the temporal distribution of deaths correlates significantly with independent measures of conflict intensity.
5.  **Formalize the Integration:** Use a joint display table to explicitly show how specific quantitative findings (e.g., high airstrike deaths in Gaza City) directly inform or are explained by specific qualitative themes (e.g., "courage under siege"). The current integration in section 5.3 is vague and unconvincing.
6.  **Ensure Full Transparency:** Publicly archive the `press_killed_in_gaza.csv` dataset and any analysis code to ensure full reproducibility.

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### 6. Verdict
**Final Score: 2/5 - Weak Reject**

**Justification:** This paper should be rejected in its current form. While the topic is of undeniable importance, the methodological execution is fundamentally flawed for the claims it attempts to make. The core argument about trust formation is speculative and built on an analytical structure that cannot support its weight. The absence of primary audience data, the purely descriptive nature of the statistics, and the lack of a comparative framework render the study incremental and its conclusions overstated. There is a path to a respectable publication, but it requires a significant down-scoping of claims and a substantial strengthening of the analytical methods, particularly by incorporating direct evidence of audience perception and comparative context.