Lecture on Media Bias against Israel

The following is a lecture I gave in Winnipeg after Israel's incursion into Lebanon in the 1980's, on the subject of media bias against Israel. It's a long piece which may put some readers off. I find however on rereading it that it still resonates with our current reality, unfortunately.


Well, finally, the Palestinian uprising is off the front pages of our newspapers, and off the screens and airwaves of the electronic media. It took almost two years before the media seemingly tired of the story. That's probably a record, give that it's inconsistent with everything we know about media staying practices. Yet, it happened. And I'll bet you that it will happen again. That the media will turn their binoculars and microscopes on Israel as soon as the total upheaval of both the West and the East takes on a repetitive pattern. The Israel option is always there, waiting in the wings, ready for media exploitation.

Look at what it took to change media emphasis: a revolution in the Eastern bloc, as one country after another began to unravel its authoritarian political system, a transformation of the USSR, the other big power and all that this implies, militarily, politically, ideologically, it took an invasion of Panama by the USA, and just today, the release of Nelson Mandela.

But that doesn't get the media off the hook as far as I'm concerned. If we've been witness to unfair media treatment of Israel, we have to be conscientious and outspoken witnesses. And we have to be prepared for more of the same.

Now, I want to do three things tonight. I want to look at the media record. I will offer some explanations or analysis of these events, and I'd like to suggest what options concerned Jews have.

There was always some criticism of the media by supporters of Israel. Over the past 40-some years, the period of continuous conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, there were objections, here and there, about specific editorial policies, or individual broadcasters/journalists/columnists whose views were seen to be prejudiced where Israel was concerned. There was for e.g. a well-known ABC-TV commentator who, minutes after the Israeli Olympic athletes had been murdered by the PLO at the Munich Olympics in 1972, said that his overriding worry at that moment was not for the murdered Israelis -- after all their deaths were blood under the bridge -- but for what might result from the well-known Israeli propensity to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That kind of obscenity, as you can imagine, did not go unnoticed and we don't forget it still. Or, when̅Time Magazine's record on Israel had the appearance of bias, it came under careful analysis and found to be venomous in its attack on Israel after the election of Begin in 1977 (see R.J. Isaac, "Time against Israel", The New Republic, 1980). For the most part, however, there was no sense of general, overall, mistrust or condemnation of the news media by diaspora Jews who were committed to the welfare of Israel. Not that they didn't understand that image, media, public opinion, government policy were all linked, it was simply a matter that media attacks that emerged with the success of Israel after the Six-Day War and intensified after the Yom Kippur War did not then seem to be generic. So, while there was concern and some discontent with the performance of the media among supporters of Israel, and some studies were undertaken through the 1970's, I wouldn't say that the media and diaspora Jewry were at odds, by and large.

All that changed following the incursion by Israel into Lebanon in the summer of 1982. I know that the opponents of the government of Israel will argue that diaspora Jewry's subsequent complaints against the media was paranoid since the criticism of Israel in Lebanon was fully warranted. Paranoia, I will remind you is a mental illness which induces notions of obsessive and fantastic danger. But, I don't think that diaspora Jewry was experiencing a societal disease. It was the virulent nature and inaccuracies of the reporting from Lebanon that incensed and frightened so many of us in the diaspora. Equating Israel with the Nazis became a commonplace. Cartoons in the Western press had nothing on the Nazi's Der Sturmer. Completely false figures of Arab deaths weren't innocently numbered; they were meant to identify Israel's deeds with those who murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, to suggest that Israel was no better than the Nazis.

Scholars, columnists, and institutions began to seriously study and assess the media's performance after 1982 precisely because accuracy and fairness in reporting needed to be looked into in a more professional way. Joshua Muravchik in “Policy Review”, Norman Podhoretz in Commentary, Edward Alexander in̅ "Encounter" and Martin Peretz in "The New Republic"̅ all documented the pattern of misrepresentation in the news out of Lebanon. Stephen Karetsky scrutined the New York Times [and in doing so, not only documented the case of bias in that paper but also provided a model for studying all newspapers; for analysing ways papers can distort material, misuse of photographs, inappropriate use of sources, false analagies, misleading terminology, biased headlines, etc.] It turned out that the conduct of Beirut-based journalists was that of complicity with the PLO, because those journalists who were able to remain unharmed in Beirut were either unworried about PLO threats because of their basic sympathy with them, or had acceded to PLO censorship out of fear and intimidation. Even Thomas Friedman, who is hardly sympathetic to Israel, admitted in his recent best-seller "From Beirut to Jerusalem" that Arafat's personal spokesman complained about his insufficient friendliness to the PLO, and that he lay awake all night fearing that it might be his last. The next day the PLO man told him that he wanted him "to do a little better in the future". Undoubtedly the intimidation worked because, as he concedes, ultimately, he and his Beirut-based colleagues coddled the PLO. Some objective journalism!! (Friedman, however, notes only the transgressions, not the transgressors.)

But not unexpectedly -- and I will soon tell you why I don't expect otherwise from the media -- media people dismissed and continue to dismiss criticism and deny wrongdoing, even when proven to have falsified stories, as they did in the case of the Sharon libel suit. It seems to me that journalists react to criticism about their practices vis-a-vis coverage of Israel in one or all of following ways. They ignore it, which I think is itself a piece of arrogance. Or one finds oneself as a critic accused of blaming the messenger for the message; in this there's an inherent assumption that the distractor cannot be saying anything that has any veracity at all. Or, sometimes I hear that since both sides of an issue criticize their coverage, ipso facto, it must be accurate. I think all those who say anything as silly as this need a lesson in logic. Professor Long, the man who taught logic to so many Canadians would have demolished them in his class. Another tactic is to reject the criticism on the ground that the critic is a neoconservative or worse, a "reactionary". Of course this kind of reasoning is circular; if you denounce the media you must be ideologically unacceptable, hence the criticism is invalid. I must say that this sort of ̅ad hominem attack is the resort of either the loser or the scoundrel.

So, by and large, media personnel will not take seriously any criticism of their practices. Only this past month I received an issue of an Israeli magazine called ̅Israeli Democracy̅; it's a supplement in the international Jerusalem Post. This is a very interesting issue for those of us interested in media attitudes to criticism. Here is a report of a major survey of Israeli public opinion. And what did they find? That the Israeli public doesn't trust the media. And how did the media and analysts react to this information? On the whole, blaming the citizens for not appreciating freedom of the press, or for being too conservative, or for being politically motivated. But that the media might in fact be irresponsible and inaccurate! You won't find that in their explanations. The distrust is really not their doing in any way; the blame lies with the inadequate citizenry.

Since the media insist therefore that any impressions we might have of media bias against Israel is due to our own prejudice, I thought it necessary to examine this question with some precision. Shortly after the outbreak of violence in the territories I decided it was not sufficient to rely on mere impressions, and I thought we needed to know more about what the Canadian media were doing. So, in Feb. 1988, I organized and trained a group of monitors to examine two of Canada's most prominent newspapers -- The Globe and Mail which bills itself as Canada's national paper, and the Toronto Star which has the largest circulation in the country -- and we compared their performance in regard to the coverage on Israel specifically and the Middle East generally on a daily basis with the New York Times. I used a technique of surveillance known in the field as content analysis.

I'd like to tell you, very briefly, some of the things we found out from our surveys. First, we found that the scrutiny of the conflict in the Territories is out of all proportions to its importance in actual news value or relevance to world affairs. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict received more prime-time TV network news coverage in the US than any other event last year, including Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign. Here in our Canadian papers, for the duration of the survey, you would be hard-pressed to find a single day on which there wasn't extensive coverage of every nuance of the struggle between Jews and Arabs, specifically the violence in the Territories. I found that between February 29 and May 1, the Globe averaged 4 items per day on this subject, while the Star's was even higher, at 5.1 items per day on average. This high degree of obsessiveness with Israel was also found in the New York Times.

I call this inordinate attention "obsessive" because the term "obsession" refers to something or someone behaving abnormally or unreasonably. You see, it's not normal for commercial media to keep going on with an old story. Old news is not supposed to make good copy because it doesn't attract audiences and hence bring in the advertising dollars. In a recent and enormously revealing ABC Nightline (Sept. 27, 1989) on journalism, significantly entitled "Pack Journalism: Horde Copy", very prominent journalists spoke about their "profession". Hodding Carter, columnist, commentator and former government spokesman was a panelist on that Nightline. Here's how he responded to Ted Koppel's question about commercial media's staying power; "We are simply incapable of maintaining a level of commitment to any story if, like a dog offering itself to a flea, a better one comes along. And they are constantly offering them to us." But when it comes to the story on Israel and Palestinians, media attention both in print and electronic form proved to be unending, not only during the period I studied, but for the well over a year and a half. Now that's obsessive.

But perhaps this degree of coverage is warranted on other grounds, you might ask? I want you to ask yourselves these questions. Is the struggle between Jews and Arabs in the Territories actually more important than the destruction of a whole society in Lebanon? Does approxmately 600 Palestinian deaths instigated by their own tactics merit more attention than thousands of Christian Arab -- @1500 in one week, just in the latest round of fighting, maybe hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Christians by their Moslem brothers, at least 100,000 Ethiopians in Eretrea, uncounted still but surely very large numbers of Kurds gassed by Iraqis, etc. Are you even aware that 100,000 people have been slaughtered in Mozambique in the past two years alone, 10% of whom are children? Where are the humanitarians among the journalists to tell you about this atrocity? Last fall more than 100 bodies of innocent Egyptians were killed by Iraqis who didn't like them taking jobs there, and more deaths for expatriate Egyptians were expected. Do Canadian media not concern themselves with Arabs killed by Arabs? Are their lives worth less because they weren't lost while fighting Jews? Is that a reasonable criterion? I think not.

I've been told that the voluminous coverage is only a reflection of the cultural identity with a segment of the Canadian people and with another democratic state. As for the first point, there are more Chinese in Canada than Jews, yet the story of China's repression has long since faded from the media. As for the second point, that is, identifying with a democratic state, I don't believe that for a minute. I think the real reason is that totalitarian regimes don't let the Western press operate freely, and the money to be made as a stringer, a journalist who works by the piece, so to speak, is to be made through being stationed in democratic countries.

In the first three months of 1988, seven hundred foreign correspondents scrutinized the activities of 8,000 Israeli soldiers trying to quell the Palestinian riots, that's one for every 11 soldiers, and they compete for selling their products by feeding the media the material and the slant they like. So, journalists use democratic rights in a crass, materialistic way, and then want us to applaud their so-called professionalism. On the contrary, this isn't professionalism, it's shere opportunism, which induces the very antithesis to objectivity and responsibility. I might add that one of the reasons Israel is off the front pages is because Eastern European countries are letting all those reporters in, and they can now make their living in countries which had previously shut them out.

Well, what else did we learn from our monitoring? When we examined the press for balance, we were astonished at how deficient our Canadian papers were compared to the New York Times. What do I mean by balance? Since the conflict is, to say the least, contentious, differing points of view need airing if the media is to inform properly. The wonder was that the Globe and the Star could be worse than the Times on this matter, because the Times had been shown wanting by other studies. Yet, in the Times, if Tom Wicker writes a scathing piece one day, A.M. Rosenthal uses the same space the next day to respond and criticise. When Abba Eban writes for the New York Times, a balanced and opposing view is offered alongside. Our G&M buys articles from the NYT, but inevitably it prints only the one against Israel without the balancing piece. Beyond that, our papers seek out people who on any other subject they wouldn't allow a letter to the editor let alone half a page, people of the radical left that for these conservative papers are perceived as unreliable on other international issues, and rightly so. But where Israel is concerned, the radical left is seemingly acceptable sources of information and opinion. Moreover, I found that the Times consistently publishes more complete and better informed articles. And you should know that Times editorial policy cannot be said to be anything but highly critical of Israeli policy. Had I come across the Globe and the Star for the first time, and known nothing about this conflict, I would come away with the impression that there's no issue here, that there's only one point of view, that is, the Palestinian position.

Our survey also showed us that the theme of the headlines -- by the way, headlines are the only part of the story that most readers read in a newspaper, including our own parliamentarians, according to a study by DeWitt and Curtin -- are dominated by negative images of Israel. Often these headlines were out and out distortions of the actual story behind them. Similarly, pictures and cartoons were used to promote barbaric images of Israelis and of Jews generally. As I wrote in one of my columns, pictures can and do lie, where photographing and apportioning the part to be shown is a selective process, and captions too were at times misleading. On television -- here I'm relying on American studies because so much of the visual footage from the Middle East we Canadians see comes from US bureaus and networks -- news about the riots were packaged so that rock- and Molotov-throwing street toughs were and still are presented as would-be Davids facing up to their Goliath-like tyrants. The victimized Israeli kid in uniform was never shown as such. And as Michael Deaver, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff told Ted Koppel, "80 to 90 percent of the American people get all their information from the visual impressions on television". That is to say, distorted imagery on television has as powerful propoganda potential.

Lastly, although I could say much more on the subject of evident media bias against Israel and Jews, I want to stress that the media were censoring the news to favour the PLO and to harm the image of Israel. How do I know that what I'm saying here is true? Because the media did not publish or air very important, telling statements of the PLO that didn't fit the nice-guy image of the PLO they promoted. The statements I'm talking about are those that completely contradict what the PLO leaders have said to the western press. These are the words they address to their Arab audiences in Arabic. There's no problem with availability or translation of those Arabic statements because if I know about the hypocracies in PLO commentaries, so can major news gathering organizations like the G&M and the Star, or the CBC. I published a list of a dozen such instances and there have been many more since then.

Now, the real question is why? Are the people that work the media all anti-semites. I don't think so. I think there are probably as many anti-Semitic personnel in journalism as there are in the rest of society. But where many of our anti-semites don't have a voice, in journalism they do. Therefore, someone like that ABC announcer/commentator airs his venom and can thus have an inordinate influence on public opinion and on other media.

The news production system is one that is highly centralized. On any given day, out of the possible thousands of news stories, you can hardly find a paper or a radio or television news broadcast with any variation in subject matter, and even the slant is only subtly different, if at all. In the show I told you about earlier, Ted Koppel asked his panelists whether or not the US media behaved herdlike. Here are some of the answers;
Deaver: Herdlike, lazy. Yeah, I would say so. ... whatever is above the fold [in the Washington Post and New York Times] is the story they work on that day. ...
Carter: the fact is that newspapers, television, individual reporters, editors, news directors, they really don't like being alone. They don't like being out there with a story. And one of the myths in our business is that we look with eager respect upon those who go in a different direction, and we forget our own history.
Grossman (NBC News president): The press, particularly the majority press, television and the major newspapers, are terribly conventional thinkers ... They don't have the stories because they don't pursue them in an independent way. I think that's my own biggest criticism of all that we do.

These men are eliciting their own experience with a centralized structure. But there's a much deeper explanation for the uniformity of news throughout the western world's press system. One should remember that media are business enterprises. Like any other business they want to maximize profits, and to do that they try to capture the largest audience possible. It's very good business to offer simple fare that doesn't take too much concentration or knowledge. It's also why news programs emphasize entertainment value rather than educational values, and that's been more and more evident over time. Given the economics of the business, and the minute or two that can be allotted to any particular story on the evening news, the way to get a message across is to make of the story a simple morality play, like a cowboy picture, with good guys and bad guys. Israel has clearly taken on the bad guy image within the world of media. Journalists, the best of whom, as we heard, fear going out on a limb on their own, and who don't know very much about subject matter with which to go out on a limb on their own -- I'll say more about that in a minute -- take on the current line with equanimity, because after all, isn't that what all their colleagues are saying and doing? Besides, most of the foreign stories are ready-made for them. They get them fed to them from news agencies like Reuters and Associated Press.

In addition -- and I must preface this with a disclaimer that I do not think that journalists are dense, or any denser than professors -- there's is no need within the requirements of a journalist's know-how to be well-versed in the subject matter about which he or she writes or speaks. Journalists are trained for technique not for substance. Moving journalists about from one field to another is common practice, because it is assumed that the main thing is technical skill and therefore journalistic skills are transferable. I think that news reporting suffers from what I call the Anne Medina syndrome. Poor Anne, I've made of her a symbol for the common condition of lack of substantive knowledge in news production. Here's why.

Anne Medina was the CBC "expert" who reported to us from the battle front in Lebanon during the Israeli expedition. When she returned to Canada she spoke at a public meeting I attended. During the question period following her talk she was asked what she knew about the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict before she was sent by the CBC to Lebanon. She volunteered quite candidly that although she knew practically nothing about the region at the time of her assignment, her staff prepared a file -- this thick, she said, while demonstrating with her hand to indicate its thickness of about two inches -- that she was to read on the airplane in preparation for her new duties. And that was our CBC authority when we actually had someone on the scene. Anne Medina wasn't embarrassed in telling us this, nor defensive. It was obvious to us all that she regarded this as normal practice, and in this she's right. That's why I call it a syndrome -- it reflects a normal standard within the profession in foreign news gathering. It's the common state of affairs, not some aberration.

All that I've said so far should persuade you that what we are dealing with is not only continuous microscopic scrutiny of Israel by the media, but also a ceaseless barrage of bad press. It is this prejudicial climate then that is the environment against which some good and sincere diaspora Jews must decide what they should do when they wish to go public with their criticism of current Israeli policy. And if Jews who are high profiled are willing to offer their critical perspective to the public media, their offerings will be very warmly received because that fits the logic of the media bias. Not all Jews are "good" in their motivations and we shouldn't assume as much. Some Jews have a long history of ideological objection to the existence of Israel, and such "bad" Jews have nowadays the easiest access to the media.

So what should good Jews do? It's easier to say what they shouldn't do than what they should do. So, I'll start there. First of all, they should not play Israeli politics here in the Diaspora. What do I mean by that? Some Diaspora Jews sympathetic to a particular Israeli party calculate that if they can help shift public opinion in the West it might influence electoral outcomes in Israel which in turn could reshape that country's approach to the Territories and other matters. I'd like to quote Alfred Moses writing in the July 1989 issue of Commentary -- a man who evidently is himself opposed to current Israeli leadership and policy vis-a-vis the Territories -- on this matter. Here's what he wrote; "The fact is that American Jews have little, if anything, worthwhile to contribute to the security issue facing Israel today on the West Bank and Gaza. The less said from the Diaspora, the better. The issue will be decided the ̅only place it can be, in Israel, through the Israeli political system. In the meantime, those calling for one solution or another from a distance of 6,000 miles are a little like John Wayne, who was a hero only to people who confused the movies with real life where people pay for their mistakes. The same goes to those who rush to embrace Yasir Arafat; for the Grand Rabbi of Lubavitch, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, ... and for the editor of Commentary."

Secondly, I don't think "good" Jews who want to have their say publicly can afford to ignore the media condition into which they bring their messages. That means they may be inclined to introduce more balance to their own pieces. Or they may inquire about the compostion of panels and programs in which they participate, making producers more conscious of the justice of a more balanced approach. It's disgraceful to see two Jews who are supposed to be the balance to two Arabs on a TV Ontario program, using that opportunity to air a community quarrel between the president of the CJC and a past-president, the past-president insisting that the present president doesn't speak for Canadian Jews. I repeat here a question I heard Rabbi Friedberg ask of the past-president from his pulpit. When he was president did he tell the Prime Minister or his ministers that he wasn't representative of Canadian Jewry? Of course he didn't.

I suggest also that well-intentioned Jews have an obligation not to naively ally themselves with ill-intentioned or those I call "bad" Jews. More, I think that they should make clear that they are not part of the gang-up against Israel, that they will not be trapped as some kind of fellow-travellers to the radical left. Of course, there's always the option of keeping the debate confined to the Jewish media, although I know that's not always attractive to those who wish to broaden the discussion.

I close with this assurance that I'm one who is committed to the principle of free expression, as a fundamental underpinning of a democratic society, and so I understand fully the desire for an open debate on matters of grave concern. But even those who laid down the principle of free expression recognized that people must be sensitive to the limits of that power; to know when and how to use that power. I am not proposing some kind of outside or societal censorship but rather I believe that democracy requires self-regulation in the interest of the overall welfare, or social consciousness. We don't yell "fire" in a crowd, ABC now doesn't allow terrorist messages to be aired now that they've learned the hard way about terrorism when one of their own journalists was taken hostage, we agree that expressed racism is intolerable under our laws, and so on. And I say it is also incumbant upon good and sincere Jews to assess the hostility surrounding us as perpetrated by the media, and to weigh their own actions in the light of that assessment, and to act responsibly for the Jewish people as a whole.