Australia / Israel Review

The overwhelming majority of Australian Jews would agree that the last year has seen some truly shocking reporting and “analysis” coming out of elements of the local media. Immediately after October 7, there were numerous journalistic efforts to explain that there was a “context” to Hamas’ campaign of mass murder and rape that made it understandable. Since then, media misconduct and blatant unprofessionalism have been a constant problem – recall the al-Ahli hospital lies, media defences of the doxxing of Jewish creatives and other examples of overt antisemitism by the anti-Israel protest movement, and the megaphone offered to the ugly and extremist campus protests by many outlets, alongside many other incidents. 

Matti Friedman, a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press (AP) news agency from 2006 to 2011, has just written something that goes a long way towards explaining what is causing such shoddy journalism.

Previously, Friedman has written on a number of occasions about the ways in which he witnessed the news from Israel being slanted by editors with an agenda at AP. He cites numerous examples, but perhaps the most dramatic is that all Associated Press reporters were ordered not to cover – at all – the peace offer proposed to PA President Mahmoud Abbas by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. This offer – which Abbas later said he rejected “out of hand” even though it promised the Palestinians a state on land equivalent to all of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Jerusalem – simply did not fit the narrative about Israel and the Palestinians his editors wanted to convey. So, readers were not to be told about it.

Friedman’s new essay in the US-based Free Press, titled “When We Started to Lie”, offers important insights into what drives many of today’s journalists and editors when they make decisions like that one – and similar decisions we have seen since October 7. 

Here is his description of how journalism has been transformed:

Starting out as a journalist, I knew the fundamental question to ask when reporting a story. It was: What is going on? 

When I left the AP after nearly six years, I’d learned that the question was different. It was: Who does this serve?

You may think that a news story is meant to serve readers, by conveying reality. I thought so. What I found, however, was that the story was more often meant to serve the ideological allies of the people in the press. If your ideology dictates that Israeli Jews are symbols of racism and colonialism, and Palestinians symbols of third-world innocence, then a story that makes Israelis seem constructive and Palestinians obstructive must be avoided even if it’s true, because it serves the wrong people.

And Friedman has some valuable insights in his essay about how this process has worked in practice:

By selectively emphasizing some facts and not others, by erasing historical and regional context, and by reversing cause and effect, the story portrayed Israel as a country whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies. The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information…

Journalists devoted to asking first of any story “Who does this serve” seems exactly right to me in explaining what is afflicting journalism, and indeed, far too much of Western society these days (for instance, social media). Many people today appear to judge everything in terms of, “Does this fact, or event, or story or meme or picture or utterance help my ‘cause’?” And if it doesn’t, it must be spun so it does support that cause, or else discredited, or else marginalised as unimportant or, better still, never acknowledged as existing at all. 

Moreover, when a journalist or intellectual asks about some event or data point “Who does this serve?”, they usually seem to consult a hierarchy of values based on “levels of power and oppression” which is supposed to tell them who a “good” anti-racist and compassionate person should be seeking to make the news serve. 

According to theories of structural racism and sexism, which both academia and, more recently, popular culture have been emphasising, anti-racism and compassion means always serving women above men, LGBTIQ+ people above straight people, people of colour above white people, developing world people above people from wealthy countries, disabled people over non-disabled people, etc. And for historical reasons, this hierarchy also places Jews near the very bottom of this value hierarchy – and Palestinians near the very top.

Needless to say, I think this tendency to approach every event in terms of “Who does this serve?” – especially but not exclusively in journalism – is terrible for the Jewish people. But as Friedman further notes, it is also terrible for democracy, where our political “institutions have sunk into the Manichaean fantasy world” ideological activists have helped create, while “huge swaths of the public know what they’re supposed to support, but lack the tools to grasp what’s going on.” 

More Fatah Follies

Last month, I collected some examples of officials from the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority, controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, engaging in violent and often antisemitic rhetoric demanding Israel’s violent destruction little different from what Hamas says. Here are a couple more examples from just the last month:

Fatah Revolutionary Council member Bayan Al-Tabib said on official Fatah radio on Sept. 4:

“We will not surrender to this criminal occupier (i.e., Israel) nor to the criminal US that supports this cancerous entity …We are closer than ever to freedom and getting rid of this criminal occupation, this thieving cancerous entity. Its days are numbered…”

An official PA-TV interview with Lebanese journalist Kamal Zebian on Sept. 3 saw him engage in blatant Holocaust denial, with the connivance of the program host:

“The Zionist entity was founded under the banner of the Holocaust – that Zionist lie…There is no such thing as the Holocaust… some Jews or Zionists might have been burned, but not in those numbers… They exploited the Holocaust in order to create a guilt complex for the Germans first of all, and for the Europeans as well, in order to reach the goal they had been planning for.”