How And Why The Media Targets Israel

A new generation of journalists views the once admired Start Up Nation as the villain of the Mideast story.

Under the microscope: Israel receives more media scrutiny than any other foreign country.

Dear Reader,

American Jews have been deeply interested in – and sometimes obsessed with – press coverage of Israel and the Mideast for decades. Many in the Jewish community have long insisted that mainstream media is biased against Israel, citing The New York Times – the most influential newspaper in the world,  based in the world’s second largest Jewish city – as a prime culprit. Watchdog organizations like CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) and Honest Reporting do extensive work monitoring and reporting on media bias against Israel, a seemingly permanent assignment. 

Does this prove mainstream media is biased against Israel or that American Jews are paranoid? Or both?

I plan to post several pieces on the subject in the coming days. 

One will explore efforts to analyze The New York Times’ coverage of Israel, including the results of an Israeli university journalism project. And I will offer suggestions about how to evaluate Mideast reporting.  

This piece seeks to explain how and why there has been a worrisome, dramatic downward shift in the media’s framing of Israel of late, especially these last 11 months.

B’shalom,

Gary

When the bodies of the six young Israeli hostages were found in a Gaza tunnel on Aug. 31, Hamas, whose forces kidnapped them and 245 other men, women and children last October 7, claimed the four men and two women were killed in an Israeli Air Force strike. A few hours later, Hamas revised its story and alleged that IDF soldiers shot the hostages. 

Ultimately, autopsies performed by Israeli pathologists found that the hostages were executed – shot in the head multiple times with Hamas-weapon bullets.  

One would think that by now, no objective reader could believe Hamas claims in this war. Not after the group has lied about virtually all aspects of the conflict, including refusal to accept any responsibility for the death of innocent Gazans and has consistently distributed inflated casualty figures that don’t distinguish Hamas fighters from civilians. 

The telling incident that underscored how Hamas manipulates the media’s obsession with “getting the story first” was the missile attack on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, 10 days into the war. Mainstream media organizations quickly accepted the Hamas claim, via its “Gaza Health Ministry,” that the IDF bombed the hospital and that about 500 innocent Gazans were killed. For the most part, the media did not question how rescuers could have gone through the rubble and reached an accurate accounting of fatalities so fast. Reporters relied on Hamas casualty figures rather than do their own research and they did not acknowledge that Hamas lacks credibility as a source of factual information.

None of the Hamas claims were true. In the end, it was widely determined that an errant Hamas-fired missile struck a parking lot adjacent to the hospital, killing between 100 and 300 people. But in the interim the false information sparked anti-Israel riots around the world.

 Why is it, then, that the mainstream media all too often gives equal weight to information provided by a genocidal terrorist organization as it does to the democratic Jewish state, no doubt impacting on public opinion as Israel has become the pariah of the media, and much of the world? This is a blatant case that can be applied to what Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor of The New York Times and media columnist for The Washington Post, calls “false equivalence,” which she defines in any number of examples as “equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair.” 

Since October 7, the media all too often has framed Hamas and Israel as equal in terms of their claims and credibility, even though Hamas puts out “facts” that are not substantiated while Israel, often slower to issue statements until the information has been verified, is put on the defensive in responding to Hamas misinformation. In addition, Israel’s responses are credible, most notably in acknowledging when mistakes are made, like the IDF expressing regret this week in stating that “indirect and unintended fire” likely killed a young Turkish-American activist in the West Bank on September 6.

The media problem goes deeper than “false equivalence,” though. There seems to be a willful avoidance of presenting history, context and basic facts, like explaining why Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s two proxies that border Israel, south and north, are at war with Jerusalem. As Islamic jihadists, their goal is not to establish an independent state for Palestinians alongside Israel but rather to replace the world’s only Jewish state. Yet amidst all the renewed calls for a two-state solution, the media has given scant attention to the fact that there is no model for democracy in the Arab world and every reason to believe the leaders of a Palestinians state would use it as a platform to make war on Israel from close range. 

For many years I defended the mainstream press, and especially The New York Times, against charges within our community of anti-Israel bias and even anti-Semitism. There were times I felt the paper’s Mideast reporting lacked context, headlines were misleading, positive stories were missed, etc. But I also believed that critics sometimes confused honest mistakes with intentional bias, and didn’t appreciate the pressure of “getting the story right” on deadline, every day of the year, in covering perhaps the most contentious conflict in the world. So I tended to cut the media some slack.

Not anymore, though. Over the last few years, and especially in the last 11 months, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that much of the mainstream media, often following the lead of The New York Times, the main subject of this report, fails in a fundamental responsibility to give readers and viewers the fullest and most accurate information to help them better understand the Mideast conflict in all of its complexity. Journalists should present both sides of a dispute, but if only one side is being truthful, let the reader know that. It’s hard to over-emphasize the need to maintain journalistic credibility. One reason newspapers have lost readership, and trust, in recent years is that their staffs have ceded that role as the line between News and Opinion has blurred. 

Journalists should begin an assignment with a blank slate, a mission of open exploration. But in recent years mainstream media has become grounded in an ideological or political point of view already in place. 

‘A Hostile Obsession With Jews’

A leading proponent of this viewpoint is Matti Friedman, an Israeli award-winning author and journalist who has written extensively on what he believes is “a hostile obsession with Jews” among media organizations. He first made the case a decade ago in a classic and much-cited piece on “how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters,” based in part on his experience as an AP correspondent in Jerusalem from 2006 to 2011. See “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” which appeared in Tablet in August 2014, and still rings true today. A second powerful essay by Friedman on the subject, “What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel,” published in The Atlantic in December 2014, asserts that “the news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news.”

Friedman updated his observations this week with an essay in The Free Press, entitled “When We Started To Lie” (behind a paywall), where he states that “the new goal” of journalism is “not to describe reality, but to usher readers to the correct political conclusion … that the ills of Western civilization – racism, militarism, colonialism, nationalism – were embodied by Israel,” which is “covered more heavily than any other foreign country.” That explains why Israel’s every flaw is scrutinized by the press, Friedman argues, while there is precious little coverage of politics, corruption and violence in the Arab world. 

Friedman’s observations on coverage of the Mideast conflict are in sync with recognizing that a new generation of journalists are bringing their progressive views and values to their work and having an increasingly significant influence on their editors. The most dramatic example of how this dynamic can create internal conflict is the case of James Bennett, a senior editor of The Economist and former editor of The Atlantic, who was forced to resign his post as editorial-page editor of The New York Times in 2020, after publishing a controversial Opinion piece. It was written  by Sen. Tom Cotton, where he raised the issue of calling in federal troops to quell riots following the murder of George Floyd. 

After initial support for Bennett, The Times publisher and executive editor gave in to demands from younger staff members who said the piece made them feel unsafe. Bennett resigned but got his revenge last December when The Economist published his 16,000 word essay, “When The New York Times Lost Its Way,” which asserts that The Times has become a “publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

One of Bennett’s hires, Bari Weiss, resigned from The Times soon after he left. Her letter of resignation, which she posted, charged the paper with allowing her to be bullied by her peers for her “centrist” views that did not align with The Times’ “predetermined narrative” promoting “progressive causes.” The “ethics and mores” of Twitter “have become those of the paper,” she wrote. Weiss went on to launch a column on Substack and soon built it into a robust, lively and highly successful media company, The Free Press, that champions its independent approach, though critics say it consistently leans right.

Stepping back, what we are witnessing is the new landscape of American journalism, which like so much of the rest of our society, is increasingly binary – Red vs. Blue, CNN vs. Fox, The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal (whose editorials on Israel are as appreciated by Zionists as the paper’s editorials on American politics are disliked by liberals). When applied to Israel, this new lockstep orthodoxy of mainstream media views the only democracy in the Middle East, once the darling of the press when it was the underdog in 1967 that defeated five Arab armies, as having morphed from the valiant David to the monster Goliath. 

Will pointing out the illogic, bias and violation of the values of traditional American journalism make a difference to mainstream media today in its framing of Israel? Maybe not, but we have no choice other than to tell the story as truthfully as we can. 

“Justice justice shall you pursue,” the Torah teaches (Deut: 16-18), and that obligation still stands.

 Coming soon: The results of an Israeli university journalism project in analyzing The New York Times’ coverage of Israel. And a primer on how to evaluate Mideast reporting.