December 5, 2013
MEDIA COMMENT: Yes, there is left-wing media bias
MEDIA COMMENT: Yes, there is left-wing media bias
by YISRAEL MEDAD AND ELI POLLAK, 04/12/2013
The extreme Left is often described as “peace activists,” but it is invariably “Jewish extremists” when considering the Right.
In an op-ed rant published in Haaretz on November 24 entitled “This extreme left-wing state,” Gideon Levy angrily asserted that Israel’s “true left has disappeared” and that “Israeli society is becoming more and more right-wing and nationalistic.”
One of his “proofs” was his claim that Israel’s media is not leftist.
Levy considers it rightist. It collaborates with the occupation, adopting “the language of the occupation and all the false versions of its instigators. It represses, deceives, hides, evades and denies,” he writes. Moreover, its quality is all wrong for it “provides mostly nonsense and entertainment, abuses its position, dumbs things down and blinds.”
He then makes an astonishingly Orwellian statement: “this is the way of the Right: To falsely tag people, to extort, threaten, intimidate and afterward to reap the harvest.”
Many dozens of our articles in this paper, in addition to other monitoring groups, put the lie to Levy’s skewed vision. His newspaper is engaged in a crusade against the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria; a strong defense policy; and a proud statement of Jewish religion and culture. This bias dominates both its views as well as the news. The bias starts at home, Mr. Levy.
A former Haaretz editor, David Landau, admitted the paper would restrain itself from over-investigating and over-reporting any of Ariel Sharon’s peccadilloes so as not to interfere with his disengagement project from Gaza. Its reporters have been proven irresponsible with their coverage and fined by the courts. Haaretz’s English-language edition has been accused of numerous errors of translation and fact stemming not from carelessness but from overzealousness to promote a political agenda. These include biased terminology, mistranslations, incomplete facts and omission of information.
For example, on October 14, as noted by the Presspectiva website, Haaretz ran an article titled: “West Bank village inhabited for 3,000 years faces eviction,” referring to the village of Sanuta whose inhabitants are illegally perched on an archaeological site. The Palestinian inhabitants have not been there 3,000 years. They haven’t even been there for 50 years.
Last year it was Gideon Levy himself who had to retract his false accusations, based on a misrepresentation of statistics, that Israel is an apartheid state.
It was Haaretz reporter Amy Klein who suggested falsely that singer Rihanna, performing in Israel, replaced the lyrics “All I see is signs, all I see is dollar signs” with “All I see is Palestine.”
Haaretz is the main offender in this regard, but Yediot Aharonot, its Ynet news site, the Walla website, other mainstream news outlets as well as the three television channels, 1, 2 and 10, as well as Kol Yisrael and Galatz radio have all committed similar “errors” in the past, invariably biased toward a leftist agenda. If there is a right-wing media, it is sectorial.
A critic of what he perceives as left-wing bias in the American media, Warner T. Huston suggests that the media sees itself as becoming “a profession increasingly assuming a national and ideological agenda.” Some of his American examples echo elements we recognize in Israel, which confirm the label of “leftist.”
These include employing phrases such as “violent rhetoric” or “climate of violence” as a scare tactic.
The extreme Left is often described as “peace activists,” but it is invariably “Jewish extremists” when considering the Right.
Relatively minor incidents are magnified disproportionately when they involve the Right.
Reporting on certain social protests that figure high on the left-wing agenda, even when violent, become “suffused with a touch of sweetness” by the media.
Thanks to media over-exposure it is only left-wing journalists who become our oracles, and we think of Ari Shavit, who appears with no counter-balance as the commentator on IBA’s Friday night digest of the weekly program, Yoman Hashavua. His “wisdom” is then magnified by other wise men such as Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. Consider the overwhelming majority of moderators of the discussion programs on television and radio: Yael Dan, Amnon Avramovitz, Moshe Negbi, Natan Zehavi, Rino Tzror, Tal Lipkin-Shahak, Aryeh Golan, Keren Neubach, Razi Barkai, Micha Friedman and more, all of whom express left-ofcenter to far-left viewpoints. Left-wing think tanks, like the Israel Democracy Institute, or advocacy groups like B’Tselem, are routinely referred to in a neutral manner whereas a group like Regavim or the Zionist Institute of National Strategies are always termed right-wing.
The charge of bias is not unique to Israel. In England last August, a report produced by the Centre for Policy Studies found that the BBC is biased toward the Left; it is twice as likely to cover left-wing policy proposals. Left-wing think tank reports are termed “independent” while right-wing research is identified ideologically. Left-of-center bias is expressed in “both the amount of coverage it gives to different opinions and the way in which these voices are represented.”
There is a second level of media bias bothering Uri Misgav, who published his criticism of the cultural “criminalism” he sees in Israel’s commercial television programming on November 22 in Levy’s own newspaper, Haaretz: “Channel 2 is celebrating… [t]wenty years of public and cultural degradation and erosion… [and] a clone channel [10] has flowered in its shadow. The dam has burst and both channels have begun sullying their professional evening news programs…. The public is exposed to every ill wind. Twenty years of corruption, brutalization and pandering to the lowest standards…”
What we face is not only political- ideological bias. Politically the agenda over-emphasizes left-of-center issues, analysis and punditry.
At the same time in the cultural sphere, we are being dumbed down. The media is targeting our minds and numbing them, desensitizing them.
Last week, singer Arik Einstein died. Without detracting from his personality and cultural contributions to Israeli society, one cannot escape the fact that his death was used by the media to define what they believe is “the ultimate Israeli,” spinning it to the Left. These lines from his song “My Little Journalist” are quite a fitting epitaph to Levy’s tirades:
“They write in the papers / What they want / Twisting, dirtying / Without mercy / Into the beds they go / They peek through holes / And there’s nothing to be done / No mercy here…. They kill using words / They fooling with a soul / ‘Where to?’ I ask / The love has gone.”
Perhaps what really bothers Levy is that the Israeli public is no longer willing to accept a leftwing- biased media. Perhaps too, nowadays he can no longer get away with his perversions without immediate exposure.
Whatever the case, we prefer Gideon Levy complaining than Gideon Levy complacent.
^
August 23, 2012
MEDIA COMMENT: Iran and Israel’s extreme left-wing media
Media Comment: Iran and Israel’s extreme left-wing media
By YISRAEL MEDAD AND ELI POLLAK, 22/08/2012
Our suggestion: let the news speak for itself. Our media “experts” should stick to reporting the facts. That is the professional, the democratic and the lawful way for them to do their job.
On Tuesday, during an interview by a sports reporter a politician commented that: “political reporters are a lot like sports reporters. They’ve all got opinions, even if they never played.” That politician was US President Barack Obama, and the interview was broadcast over the Des Moines, Iowa, KXNO sports radio. In Israel, the term we would use would surely be “kibitzing.” But there’s a multi-pronged barb in Obama’s words, which are applicable to our local media and those who run it.
As we understand it, this political contender for office knows well that reporters are not objective. It is only a matter of the degree to which they insert not only wrong information, through sloppy work or otherwise, but a bit of bias, whether through omission or commission. In addition to opinions that sometimes insert themselves into the reporting of news, there is also the lingering concern as to whether reporters are truly knowledgeable about their beats. Are they sufficiently experienced “players” who can take to the field to compete not only with rival journalists but also with the people and events they cover?
This last point is especially relevant to the tom-tom beating that has been going on, at ever-increasing volume, in certain media quarters covering the possibility that Israel’s government may be forced by circumstances to employ military alternatives to curb the nuclear weapons program of Iran.
Iran is the country whose supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently announced that Israel will disappear from the “landscape of geography” and that its land will be returned to the Palestinians.
A few days later, on the occasion of Al-Quds Day, he characterized Israel’s administration of the disputed territories and, for good measure, the formation of Israel as the root of evil in the Middle East, which was a “conspiracy [of] colonialists and oppressors.”
This past Friday, in a speech marking Iran’s Quds Day broadcast on state television, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke of “the Zionist regime and the Zionists” as “a cancerous tumor.” And he added that the nations of the region will soon finish off the “usurper Zionists” and that “in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists.”
The Israeli media’s response to the Iranian challenge is perhaps surprising. Haaretz, not known as a great fan of either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Defense Minister Ehud Barak, outdid itself over the past few weeks in presenting a fair and rather comprehensive picture of the dilemma created by Iran for Israel’s political leadership. Its headlines were typically factual. Some examples are in order.
On August 1 it was: “Netanyahu: the political leadership will decide whether to attack Iran.”
On August 3: “Estimates – an attack will set back Iran by a year or two.”
Another large headline on August 7: “Iran is in an advanced stage in its nuclear program.”
On August 10: “Senior Israeli: Iranian sword at our neck is sharper than the situation in 1967.”
Two days later it was: “Iran has made progress in the development of nuclear warheads.”
Compare these to Yediot Aharonot’s coverage.
Its headlines during the same period went as follows: “Cabinet Ministers: we are not kept up to date [on Iran]”; “Saudi Arabia: We will shoot down Israeli planes on their way to Iran”; “Netanyahu and Barak have decided to attack Iran in the fall”; “Is Israel prepared for an attack against Iran? – unprepared for war”; “The atomic error of Ehud Barak”; “US Chief of Staff: Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nukes.”
DOES YEDIOT really know what the prime minister’s plans are? Have they become mind readers? Israel’s media consumers should be asking whether Yediot’s criticism is based on facts supplemented by analysis or whether it is just the result of ideological opposition; that whatever decision Netanyahu makes, military, economic or social, is to be countered in editorials, columns and even news stories?
One response to this was given by Defense Minister Barak in the Knesset when, in referring to a strike on Iran, he said, “The decision, if it is required, will be made by the government, and not by a group of citizens or editorial articles.”
A poll conducted by New Wave for Yisrael Hayom found that 83 percent of the public think there is too much chatter on the matter of Iran. One left-of-center personality, Hebrew University professor Shlomo Avineri, was honest enough to point out that “things several writers and journalists have said on this issue are infuriating, and they are a dangerous sign. They have no place in a democratic state.”
Some of the foreign media have also demonstrated rather unprofessional standards. Richard Silverstein, Tikkun Olam blogger who previously revealed Anat Kam’s name, was defined as a “well-informed source who has been very accurate” by Judith Miller, a FOX News contributor.
The BBC granted Silverstein an interview, elevating him to the status of kibitzer-plus. This followed Silverstein’s claim that he had published a secret official document, received from a reliable source, detailing Israel’s plan of attack against Iran. It just so happens that this “secret document” was publicized four days earlier on the Israeli “Fresh” website (fresh.co.il) and that moreover it was written by a user of the website who openly clarified that the plan of attack was nothing but his imagination.
So, what have we? “Much ado about nothing.”
Yediot knows no more or less than Haaretz, Yisrael Hayom or The Jerusalem Post about the Iranian issue. The central difference is that Yediot does not seem to know how, or perhaps does not care to distinguish between news and views.
It uses the Iranian issue as a springboard to attack the present Israeli government. It would seem that the Iranian issue has brought with it a fundamental change in the balance of Israeli new outlets. At least here, Yediot has outflanked Haaretz to the left. It has replaced the principle of vox populi vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) with vocem nostram deus est vox (our voice is that of God) and is attempting to force on Israel’s society a media putsch of the minority.
As Avineri openly admitted: “It is regrettable to see that now those questioning democratic authority are personalities from the Left.”
IN FACT, everything being said now in the media is rather meaningless. If the government attacks Iran and is successful, then all those in the media who are criticizing the government today will take the credit, claiming that it was their warnings which assured that the government acted responsibly. And if heaven forbid such an attack fails, then no matter what one thinks, the Netanyahu government will be replaced – but this would be the least of our worries. And if the government decides to do nothing, we will be facing a nuclear Iran, and these same critics will criticize the government for not taking action on time.
Our suggestion: let the news speak for itself. Our media “experts” should stick to reporting the facts. That is the professional, the democratic and the lawful way for them to do their job. And if they don’t, then we, the media consuming public, should stop listening to them.
^
June 27, 2012
MEDIA COMMENT: Media doublespeak
Media Comment: Media Doublespeak
By YISRAEL MEDAD AND ELI POLLAK
27/06/2012
Has media literacy become a difficult task rather than a celebration of democracy and freedom of expression?
Walter Lippman noted in his 1922 book Public Opinion that the media helps its consumers understand the links between news events and why they could be critical. In 1963, Bernard Cohen famously observed that the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”
Cohen viewed writers, editors and publishers as drawing maps for their consumers, and the danger was in getting lost. Drs. McCombs and Shaw added the agenda-setting concept – the more frequently an item is repeated and the more prominent the coverage it receives, the more important audiences will regard the issue to be regardless of its true value.
There is another important concept, especially prominent in Israel’s media; the use of language. Society is influenced not only by the language used by the media, but more so by the language it isn’t “authorized” to use.
For example, on June 17, Ynet carried the headline, “Youngsters [na’arim in the Hebrew] ignited a blaze, 14 soldiers injured at an Army base.”
Are these “youngsters” kids? Or perhaps teenagers, or even young men? Could they be Jewish? If so, were they haredim, or crocheted- skullcap wearers, or secular? Or maybe they were Christian? Journalistic ethics dictates that ethnic labeling is to be avoided, and Ynet justifiably did not use an ethnic headline.
On the other hand, the story continues, we learn from the firefighting unit’s spokesperson that between June 1 and June 16, 284 fires had been deliberately set in periphery neighborhoods such as Har Homa, Arnona and Armon HaNatziv.
What could be behind these torchings? Is it pyromaniacs or anti-state elements? Why does Ynet does not find it necessary to consider the possible motivations for such crimes? Did the Ynet reporter ignore his investigative training and simply not ask the spokesman? Or perhaps the perpetrators are not “price tag” activists, so that it would be embarrassing to actually disclose what really motivates such acts? Or did he ask the question and his editor spiked that portion? Why exclude the possibility of a nationalist-inspired crime? And now we have experienced fires set near Lifta and Motza near Jerusalem.
THE BLOGGER “Elder of Zion” posted a critique of what he thought was a similar language manipulation on June 15, but by foreign media. It had been reported in Haaretz that after altercations broke out between Sudanese migrants living in the town of Kfar Manda and the local population, that a hundred of the migrants agreed to move elsewhere.
In fact, 15 persons were injured in the fracas when noise, coming from an adjacent apartment, caused violent altercations to break out between dozens of locals and the African migrants. The townsfolk reportedly even chanted “clear out the foreigners” according to Ynet news.
Language-primed media consumers would assume the location was another center like the south Tel Aviv area where riots had broken out a few days previously. After all, that is the agenda item. That is the box of comprehension to which we have been sensitized.
In this case, however, the incident occurred in Kfar Manda, an Arab village in the north of the country. In reviewing the mainstream media abroad, EOZ couldn’t find any news about it and surmised that due to the identity of the “locals,” the media preferred to simply ignore the story. The frame of “Jews being racist” and “Jews versus blacks” was not to be disturbed and language self-censorship was to be the tool. To his mind, that actually represented media bigotry.
Another aspect, more purposefully unethical, is the media language bias when a news outlet that produces material both in English and Hebrew, as does Haaretz, alters the information between the two sites. This phenomenon is well-known in the Middle East but was usually the domain of Arab leaders like Nasser and Arafat, who said one thing to their own people while providing the West with a much more palliative version.
It has been adopted now in Israel.
One example is the doubt that has arisen over how Haaretz selectively translated Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s words in a Ma’ariv interview to make him sound racist. The story’s sub-headline reads: “Interior Minister says migrants do not recognize that Israel ‘belongs to the white man.’” However, the quotation is partial. As the original Hebrew has it, the quote really is: “Most of the people coming here are Muslims who think the land doesn’t belong to us at all, to the white man. A number of them have said that openly on television.”
Yishai was quoting what the illegal immigrants had said, claiming that this was their opinion, that Israel doesn’t belong to the “white man,” but Haaretz in English implanted a racist spin to his words.
The first to note, over a decade ago, the serious discrepancies between the versions of Haaretz was the late Dr. Joseph Lerner. At the time, he initiated Israel’s Media Watch’s first review of this phenomenon. Today, Israel’s Media Watch is completing yet another report on Haaretz and its English edition.
The findings indicate simple errors or typos (sloppy editing), the usage of progressive, post-modernist nomenclature such as “peace activists” for left-wingers and “militants” for those engaged in terror, mislabeling, such as “House of Dissension” rather than its official name, or such as “administrative prisoners” rather than “detainees,” leaving out relevant information that provides proper context, among others.
Presspectiva, the Israeli arm of CAMERA, has also been focusing on Haaretz, as well as on Ynet. Their findings are similar. They noted mistranslation, ignoring of facts, such as “an injured man” rather than “an injured Palestine Authority security officer.”
They have even succeeded in gaining a judgment from the Ethics Court of the Israel Press Council against Ynet and reporter Elior Levi. The court’s decision declared that in a video clip that was uploaded to the Ynet web site “there is a complete contradiction between what is written in the article and the pictures seen in the video clip. It is a substantive contradiction.”
The paper claimed that a mother had not been allowed to accompany her child who had been arrested. The video showed that in fact the mother was request to accompany her son eight times – but refused.
Has media literacy become a difficult task rather than a celebration of democracy and freedom of expression?
^
June 7, 2012
MEDIA COMMENT: Respect for the law?
Media Comment: Respect for the law?
By YISRAEL MEDAD AND ELI POLLAK, 06/06/2012
One would hope that the attorney-general will not give in to sectorial pressure and carry out his job as mandated by the law, and not by the press.
Faced with the evidence, the attorney-general made the decision to charge the journalist with criminal action. He had been found to be in possession of stolen government documents. That is a felony, and, if convicted, he could be sent to jail. The formal charge in court was that the investigative reporter did “unlawfully receive, conceal and retain… government documents… and records, with intent to convert the said property to his own use or gain,” knowing the documents had been stolen.
Uri Blau, Israel, 2012? No, Les Whitten, 1973. And there were other cases, such as Thomas Drake, 2010, or James Risen, 2011. The United States government decided to prosecute all three for willful retention of national defense information or other security-related documents.
The first instance, of course, is not fully comparable. Whitten never went to court, his arrest was a result of a vengeful president and the documents were not security- or military- related. Another important element is that the US Constitution was amended to include a prohibition to abridge the freedom of the press.
Israel has no constitution.
Nevertheless, both cases are linked to the passionate debate over whether, how and to what extent journalistic privilege should be protected versus the issue of journalistic liability for violating the law. In this connection, the name Julian Assange could also be mentioned, or even Winston Churchill’s Regulation 2d during World War II, which severely limited the press.
The dilemma, which we also face in Israel, is: Should a journalist who acts in concert with a source who has stolen classified government documents, or who solicited the source to misappropriate classified documents, be immune from criminal prosecution? A secondary aspect of this debate in Israel is that the parameters of the debate and how it is being debated is being directed here mainly by other journalists, who understandably have quite a vested interest in the case.
What are the facts in this case? Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein decided that Haaretz’s journalist Uri Blau will be charged with unauthorized possession of classified information, but not with intending to harm state security.
According to Weinstein, “the potential acquisition [of the documents] by hostile parties could have damaged the state’s security and endangered the lives of IDF soldiers… Possessing operational documents is entirely different from collecting journalistic data for publication in good faith.”
When it became known to the authorities that Blau was in possession of secret documents he was asked to return them. He provided 50 documents. His partner in crime, Anat Kamm, who is now serving time in jail for her part in the affair, testified that there had been 1,800 documents.
The attempt to force Blau and Haaretz to return the missing documents resulted in Blau fleeing the country. Blau violated an agreement he had signed, asserts the state, and had “given the authorities the false impression that he had turned over all the classified documents.” The counter-charge by journalists (not all) and their professional associations is that all this “calls into question its [Israel’s] status as a true democracy.”
Avi Benayahu, former IDF spokesman, ex-head of Army Radio and a veteran journalist, described the unfolding of the events in an Army Radio interview last Wednesday: “We approached journalist Blau…. He was told in my name that he holds secret material, that we have no interest in his sources, we don’t need the documents but are concerned that the material is in a private home and is not secure.”
Benayahu claimed that the army had offered to come to Blau’s home and destroy the documents in his presence. Blau claimed that he had already done this. Benayahu continued: “We found out that there were further documents. We suggested trashing the computer; it could all have ended there.”
Benayahu’s conclusion to this sordid affair was: “This is a black day for the Israeli press….[This was a] false employment of the concept of freedom of the press by journalists and editors.”
Benayahu’s voice was the exception to the rule. Former Supreme Court justice and president of the Journalists Association Dalia Dorner defended Blau: “It is not right to prosecute a journalist just because he was in possession of a secret document for the sake of carrying out his job. Journalists who deal in these cases [security issues]… hold documents in their possession even though formally this is a violation of the law.”
Dorner did not deny that it would seem Blau had violated the law, she only took the position that freedom of the press is, in this case, above the law.
Dorner’s position is not unique.
The majority of the press have taken the high moral road in defending Blau. Uzi Benziman from Haaretz considered this to be a “decision tinged by revenge…. What did Uri Blau do? …he revealed problematic behavior with the IDF… the publicity angered the army… I see this as terrorizing the press.”
The attitude of IBA legal guru Moshe Negbi was also predictable: “From the point of view of the dry law, there is enough material to justify an indictment. But this is an antidemocratic paragraph which is being used undemocratically. …Prosecuting him [Blau] harms the freedom of expression.”
The outrage of journalists knew few limits. The journalists demonstrated in front of the Justice Ministry, seemingly unaware of the severity of their actions. At the same time that they commend Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for upholding the rule of law if he destroys the Givat Ulpana neighborhood, they demonstrate and defend a colleague who seemingly violated the law.
Don’t they understand that if they are allowed to violate the law in the name of a “freedom” which doesn’t have the same status as the law used to charge Blau, then everyone may be allowed to do the same? Don’t they understand that they are undermining the very foundations of the democratic state when they claim that there are some journalistic laws which one is allowed to violate in the name of democracy? One would hope that the attorney-general will not give in to their sectorial pressure and carry out his job as mandated by the law, and not by the press.
MEDAD'S WORDS 