Hey, tribe.
So yesterday I wrote Part One of my post about media bias regarding Israel.
Let me tell you what spurred me to tackle this topic.
A couple of days ago, a friend posted something about the war, and a mutual Facebook friend — Tom — whom I’ve never met but whom I truly respect, commented: “This ongoing military campaign has ceased to have a point.”
It would be hard to overstate how alarmed I was by that comment. And my distress was not alleviated by the exchanges that ensued in the subsequent thread. A lot of Jews were understandably angry. But let’s just say the discussion did not remain fastidiously civil and calm. One participant wrote (and this was by no means the most aggressive response in the thread): “Tom, are you one of those guys who never studied a lick of history?”
But the reason I was particularly alarmed by Tom’s comment was that he is most certainly not “one of those guys who never studied a lick of history.” He is a historian, and a phenomenal one at that. So how could he be missing such a vital piece of the picture?
Love Israel or don’t, support this war or don’t, but no one can credibly argue that the IDF’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza has ceased to have a point.
Yet I do have to concede you wouldn’t know it from the presentation of our own media.
Tom is a rightfully lauded historian, but the Middle East is not his wheelhouse and he is almost certainly not reading news outlets from that region — though I would bet a lot of money that he is reading the New York Times. I can understand why he thinks the IDF is pursuing vengeance in Gaza, rather than fighting an existential battle for Israel’s survival.
And as I said yesterday, no one has helped me understand why the presentation of the I/P conflict is so surreally skewed in its sympathies against Israel more than Matti Friedman.
Matti is a Canadian / Israeli author and former AP journalist who served several tours in Lebanon as part of the IDF. And he wrote a few extraordinary and seminal articles about the western media’s anti-Israel bias as long ago as 2014. It is absolutely breathtaking how much they still apply, word for word, to what’s happening now. This picture has been a long time in the making. The public’s perception of Israel has fossilized over years and years of this systemic bias.
The first article he wrote on this topic — An Insider's Guide To The Most Important Story on Earth — appeared in Tablet magazine, and there is no way for me to exaggerate its importance if you want to understand the difference between what you’re reading in America and what’s going on 6,000 miles away.
In that essay, he establishes at length and in depth the outsized coverage and scrutiny Israel received by the AP while he was with their Jerusalem bureau, compared to all other foreign countries.
Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.
Moreover, Matti makes a very persuasive case that only one sort of story about Israel, and more specifically about the I/P conflict, was acceptable to publish. Critical attention to Palestinian government or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian militants, or any other suggestion that Palestinians have agency or accountability in their struggle against Israel is discouraged and repressed.
Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.
Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)
For every paragraph I include here, I am necessarily sacrificing countless other ones that are just as vital. The article is long but it’s essential reading and I hope anyone who hopes to understand coverage of the region here in the U.S. will find the time to take it in.
Several months later, Matti followed this article with another in The Atlantic, titled What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel. Here he cites author and journalist Philip Gourevitch’s observation in 2010 of an “ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs (non-government organizations). Gourevitch was decrying the lack of scrutiny these self-identified humanitarians received from the press. “Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals?” he asked. “Why should we [press members] work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties or government agencies?”
Gourevitch is drawing attention to a clear conflict of interest in the Middle East, where such NGOs are power players who provide reporters with (in Matti’s words) “social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment — a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.”
In such a context, we can understand how reporters might be loathe to critique the hand that feeds them, or provide reportage running counter to their agenda. And Matti goes on to assure us that they do indeed have an agenda:
In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.
As a result, these international orgs, which wield such power in the region, are nearly immune from criticism:
Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered.
Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.
In this article, too, there are so many paragraphs worth quoting that I could easily end up pasting the whole thing in here. I hope you’ll have a look at that one too.
Finally, Matti recently joined Dan Senor for a conversation titled How Hamas Fooled The World on the latter’s dazzling podcast, Call Me Back — yet another resource I can’t recommend highly enough. Dan is the author of The Genius Of Israel and Start-Up Nation, and he is just great, and every single one of his guests is brilliant. If you have only one hour a week to educate yourself on this conflict, I would advise spending it on this podcast.
Yet again, Matti had so many important things to say, but I’ll provide just one shred of what he told Dan here, which represents the over-arching reason why the Israel story is so aslant in the western media:
If you think that the job of a journalist is to explain what’s going on, then yes, the way the news is being reported is a problem. But if you think the job of a journalist is actually to fight for justice, using coverage, and that news coverage is actually a weapon in a fight to make the world better, then you make different choices about which stories to cover and how to present them.
So if you look at October 7th through our eyes, you see an act of medeival barbarism that was carried out by a group of religious fanatics with their own ideology that they’re quite open and honest about… but which is very far from any western or liberal values that we’re familiar with. And it seems like a pretty clear-cut example of a very regressive and violent force attacking a democratic country, murdering civilians, raping women, kidnapping children. And it seems obvious that the military of that country is going to have to do what it can to eliminate the threat and it doesn’t seem necessarily that complicated.
But if you think that news coverage is actually some kind of parable about oppression -- and that in this story, Palestinians are the oppressed and the Israelis are the oppressors – then your news coverage has to be calibrated to help your reader reach the right conclusion. And in order for that to happen, you have to play down Israel’s concerns to any extent possible. You have to play up Israel’s faults to any extent possible. And you have to play down Palestinian faults and present them as something approaching perfect victims, and that has been the case in news coverage here for the past 20 years at least.
Put another way, what we’re seeing here in the west represents a trend over the last two decades toward journalism as political activism as opposed to an objective and impartial presentation of what’s actually happening.
We can recognize this phenomenon quite readily when it’s Fox News.
We are much more likely to miss it, rationalize it or accept it when it comes from our own side of the political aisle.
But we shouldn’t.
If you can only hold onto your political convictions by whitewashing, obscuring or outright censoring the truth, then it’s time to re-evaluate your ideology.
Okay, fam, once again this is long. So I’ll wrap up here and be back with you tomorrow.
I send you all heartfelt love and courage, and hope your week is going well.
Stay strong. Chazak v’ematz.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Just today I read a New York Times article detailing the rape and torture of an Israeli hostage. Her horrific account was followed by a quote from a Hamas terrorist who said that Hamas believes the body to be sacred so she must be lying. In what messed up, twisted world does a journalist interview the kidnapper and rapist to get their opinion about whether we should believe the victim? I’m a NYT junkie like any nice educated progressive, but I’ve been absolutely blown away by their glaring bias. I wondered who was funding this. And now it all makes sense, as does the confusion of employing Hamas terrorists at aid agencies and then using their testimony to report on the situation in Gaza. I am reading Times of Israel to supplement this nonsense.
I have noticed a trend among journalists to define themselves as advocates for several years now. There was the case a few years back of a Palestinian woman who graduated from Stanford I think whose Jewish mentor lauded her for her advocacy! I’ve read and heard young journalists define themselves as advocates. They see their role as being the ones to make the world a better place through their work. The comparison to Fox News is quite apt.