I spent a lot of time shouting at television sets last summer. And I know that I wasn’t alone, particularly among American Jews who care about Israel.
As we watched media coverage of Israel’s war with Hezbollah, read about captured (rather than kidnapped) soldiers, heard superficial stories that ignored history and context, and compared images of blood and death, many of us wondered about bias in the news media.
Why did the story of Israel’s suffering and its sense of existential threat not penetrate the ink and pixels of American and British news media?
As American news media covered uncomfortable-looking Israelis in stuffy bomb shelters, viewers saw the parallel but not at all equivalent horrific images of Lebanese residents bleeding and dying.
While Israel did not distribute photos of its dead or wounded, Hezbollah spokespeople spun their stories in televised tours of bombed-out residential areas of Beirut. “Does this look like a bomb factory?” they asked.
“Where are the Israeli spokespeople?” we shouted at our TVs, radios and computers. Why are Israel’s enemies so good at public relations while the Jewish state, rich with academics and intellectuals, can’t get its story to the rest of the world?
A panel confronted these questions during the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for North American Jewish federations. The GA was held Nov. 12-15 in Los Angeles and largely focused on Israel.
Two Israeli officials and two American journalists spoke on “Media Lessons Learned From the War.” They were:
• Irit Atsmon, former deputy spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces.
• Jeffrey Goldberg, staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and author of the book “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.”
• Michael Parks, director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism.
• Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media and public affairs at the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Divided message
According to Atsmon, part of the problem last summer was that the spokesperson’s office was understaffed. “There were 1,500 foreign journalists in the North and only six spokespeople,” she said.
Both Atsmon and Shir-On touched on a major failing of Israeli hasbara — the lack of a unified message or strategy. Atsmon bemoaned the lack of a “coordinator” from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office to “build up the story…. That [missing piece] was one of our lessons,” she said.
And Shir-On agreed. “When we talk about our problems with the media, it’s not only coordination but unity of the message,” he said.
Critics of the media’s coverage of Israel may point to Israel’s failings, but more often deride the writers and editors who interpret and process events and statements. Indeed, there is a cadre of journalists whose grasp of Middle Eastern history and religion provides too thin a foundation for understanding the current conflicts.
Goldberg, a seasoned journalist who often writes about Israel, contended that “Oftentimes what you assume is biased or prejudiced is ignorance.”
“We [journalists] are designed to be generalists,” he said. “We’re supposed to know 10 percent of everything.”
Still, he admitted, “There is a bias in the American press: the underdog is axiomatically right. That’s a very American way of looking at the world. And it’s not a bad way to look at the world. It makes you care about people.”
The problem is, though, that “Israel sometimes does bad things,” said Goldberg, who was in the North during part of the war. “The Israeli performance on the media part of this war was about on par with the military performance.”
Parks, an educator of journalism, took a wider view. He discussed three challenges that journalists always face.
One is a systemic and basic tendency to generalize: “You only know what you see. To generalize is a mistake,” he said.
Another challenge is psychological, he said. “How do you convey pain? Are we informing the public or are we asking them to share our outrage?”
Parks used South African apartheid as an example of such a quandary (“American journalists had a story because they value human rights”); but it’s easy to see such “outrage” being used to defend the supposed powerless Palestinians against the supposed powerful Israelis.
Though it’s easy as news consumers to pound our fists and lay out our list of media wrongs, it’s more difficult to bear the slow process of change and education.
Atsmon suggested that Israel embed journalists with IDF units and that more photographs should be taken during wars.
Shir-On highlighted a bright spot in Israeli’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the creation of a new department that works to get the Israeli message to Arab media. “We found very good results. The [feedback] we have received from Arabs is very positive,” he said.
Goldberg is working with a program that brings journalists together to learn about religion. “Giving depth and education is always good,” he said.
(Goldberg will visit Milwaukee on Wednesday, April 11, as part of the Jewish Book and Culture Fair, which is a program of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. He will speak at 9:30 a.m. at Congregation Shalom.)
The needs seem clear: Israel needs to get its act together and devote some of its brilliance to public relations; and journalists need to be educated about the roots and context of the Middle East.
For my part, I am comforted somewhat by this process of questioning, self-flogging and revising plans.
Israel’s exhausting and exhaustive dissection of these issues elucidates its failings but also displays its strength as a nation that engages in constant vocal debate, tireless public self-examination and a stubborn commitment to rise from failure and try again.
Perspectives from the GA
“There’s no doubt that the young people today will not be just like us. There’s a lot that’s not working, a lot that’s not worth joining and there’s a lot that’s not directed at them. We can’t really look at 18-year-olds and 25-year-olds as future propagators of the Jewish people. We have to work with them as individuals with hearts and souls and minds that we need right now; that we have something to say to right now.”
Dr. Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor-elect, Jewish
Theological Seminary
“Israel is still the only country in the world that when someone does not agree with its policies, they talk about getting rid of the state, of Zionism itself.”
“In Europe, there was the tendency to believe that if we were very quiet … we would be spared [the effects of] radical Islam. Now we know that it is absurd — a lovely and stupid dream. We are in the same boat and in equal threat.”
Bernard-Henri Levi, philosopher and author of “Who Killed Daniel Pearl” and “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville”
“This is 1938, Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to get atomic weapons.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli opposition leader
“We believe that part of the ethos of the Jewish Agency is contributing and having relationships with non-Jews in the Galilee…. It’s not easy. We are called the Jewish Agency and the money comes from Jewish donors.”
Hagai Meirom, treasurer of the
Jewish Agency for Israel
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