I hope I don’t need to reiterate in The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle why Israel is right in defending itself from the genocidal Hamas terrorist organization. I also hope I don’t need to encourage Chronicle readers to join in local Israel support activities, particularly those of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. I think such a column here would constitute a proverbial “preaching to the choir.”
But I wonder if Chronicle readers truly understand why so much of the journalism profession — reporters and commentators — get Israel and its actions so wrong. After all my years in this field, I would like to set down some thoughts about this phenomenon with the help of the superb 2003 book “Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars” by Yaacov Lozowick, historian and chief archivist at Israel State Archives.
Journalism is sometimes called “the first rough draft of history,” and very rough it often is. It has the advantage of immediacy, putting down in words and pictures events as they happen. But that also constitutes its profound disadvantage: the short-term and narrow who-what-where-when-how that journalism gives does not explain why news events occur as they do.
To paraphrase poet John Donne, no news event is an island, entire of itself. Events before and around a present event also constitute part of the event and are essential to understanding it. But journalism can’t include these; it is too much of and in the moment.
Moreover, there is, or at least used to be, a culture within journalism that seemed actually afraid of reporters and commentators who had specialized knowledge. When I was a would-be music critic, I heard horror stories about music and theater and art critics who were promoted to those positions from being police reporters or sports writers.
It seemed editors feared that writers who knew too much background would not be able to write for a mass audience, would not have “the common touch.” But the result is journalists who do not have informed perception; they literally don’t know what they are seeing.
These are general problems in the field. Lozowick points to some others in the form of unspoken/unwritten rules and assumptions that he believes are specific to the difficulties of presenting Israel. These include:
• “The picture is reality. What you see is what really happened, else how could there be a photograph of it? Of course, this isn’t true, since often a mere picture has no context.” I would add that a photograph has the tendency to make events about individuals, and play into the observation attributed to murderous Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Thus for too many journalism consumers, one photo of a crying Palestinian Arab mother can trump 2,000 years of invisible persecuted masses of past Jews.
• “Life is like basketball — quick, action-packed, and with immediate results… For journalists trained to see the world this way, the very concept of winning a war of attrition through a slow, patient, and bloody accumulation of small victories, even while sustaining heavy losses, is quite foreign.”
• “Foreign languages are unimportant, and a dedicated journalist can find out what is going on without them.” Seldom does a journalist posted to the Middle East know Arabic or Hebrew, much less both. Yet not only does this cripple a journalist’s ability to understand “local reality,” but “Palestinians… know full well that Western journalists don’t follow what is said in Arabic, and often the discrepancies between what [Palestinians and other Arabs] say in English and in their native tongue are terribly significant.”
• “A reasonably intelligent reporter can learn enough in a short time to present a reasonably accurate picture of events. This is nonsense, but not obviously so.”
• “Discerning journalists can see through deceit. This may be a reasonable rule of thumb when applied to our own democratically-elected politicians. It is demonstrably false when dealing with people for whom lying is a legitimate weapon in a war for Western hearts and minds.”
I add that this is also nonsense when observing a different culture in which understood rules of language use, social posturing and moral values are very different from those of the foreign journalist’s own culture. Yet too many foreign journalists think their own culture is everybody’s culture.
• “Good journalists know better than the natives, whose antics they observe with cool detachment… This superior knowledge allows [journalists] to preach to the natives, even though they will not listen.”
• “No one remembers what journalists said last week, no one notices their mistakes, and no one cares. Unlike the first six rules, this one is true.”
• “Journalists are not thinkers, they are merely purveyors of news. This rule is also true. Faced with a given set of events, journalists will understand and report on them with commonly accepted explanations.
“Most reporters cannot conceive of a frame of mind radically different from their own and assure us that everyone is basically motivated by the same interests, ideas and passions…. [Journalists] do not try to evolve new explanations for reality, and they are not equipped to deal with anything truly mysterious, such as a hatred that is stronger than the will to live.”
These are just some of the reasons I would like to force any and all journalists who ever write about Israel to read Lozowick’s book. And it wouldn’t hurt for all of Israel’s friends to read it as well, if only to vaccinate themselves against some of modern journalism’s plaguing problems with reporting and understanding Israel.
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