WHY PEOPLE THINK JEWS AND ISRAEL ARE EVIL — Part 3: News
I will begin at the end….
Jews and Israel are Evil because we have all been trained to believe that Jews and Israel are Evil through a concentrated, systematic, and coordinated effort stemming back four decades.
This is not to defend Israel. Israel has done deplorable things. But it is to say that BOTH SIDES have done deplorable things.
But these concentrated efforts are not presenting both sides. These concentrated efforts are overtly and purposefully one-sided and biased and are aimed at undermining liberal democracies around the world. These concentrated efforts have eroded any chance of meaningful coexistence between Israel and Palestinians.
The ramifications are extremely dangerous:
- Dooming the Palestinian citizens in Gaza to continued oppression
- Promoting Violence and Destroying any chance of coexistence in the Middle East
- Dehumanizing Jews and rampant unfounded antisemitism
- Eroding liberal democracies
Part one explored Social Media. Part two explored Academia. We turn now to Traditional News and Media. Next will be the dangers of all three.
I encourage you to read below with an open mind — all the way to the end — because this affects all of us and it is important to understand what has been going on behind the scenes for 40 years, how it has led up to what we are seeing today, and how it will destroy any path toward peace in the future.
Understanding how decades of biased misinformation has affected traditional media is complex, and is connected to the increasing polarization of liberal democracies at large.
The troubling vicious cycle of polarization of traditional media is well documented. As society becomes more polarized, news becomes more polarized to attract eyeballs, which only leads to more polarization until you have one sided echo-chambers instead of objectivity.
Channels like Fox News and MSNBC contribute significantly to this by blurring lines between news and entertainment to engage audiences, which often leads to biased reporting and misleading information.
Objective critical thinking has given way to narrative driven opinion and an “us vs. them” mentality between two extremes with no middle ground.
Uri Berliner, a 25 year veteran of NPR, recently wrote about his experience with the increasing polarization of media. In many ways it mimics the influence of academia: self-perpetuating echo chambers that pushed specific agendas and actively quelled nuanced two-sided understanding of complex situations.
The NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage… what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.
Berliner gives a high level perspective of traditional news in general, but when it comes to Jews and Israel the polarization becomes exponentially magnified.
Matti Friedman, who worked for the Associate Press from 2006–2011, gave a detailed understanding of how this played out regarding Israel and Jews. In a must-read speech he gave in 2015, Friedman explained exactly how polarized media and one-sided bias manifested itself regarding coverage of Israel:
Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy [Associated Press], for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict.
The Hamas military build-up amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat — that is a story
In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialized. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality
Berliner and Friedman’s sentiments over one-sided bias are echoed by other journalists as well, like a 10-year CNN veteran Josh Levs, former NYT Opinion Editor James Bennet, former BBC TV director Danny Cohen, Judith Miller, Bari Weiss’ much-discussed resignation from the NYT, and photojournalist Ian Lloyd:
As Bennet recently stated in the Economist: “The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious.”
Professor Steven Thrasher, from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, said the quiet part out loud regarding the status of modern media when he stated bluntly to a Pro-Hamas crowd at the university: “Our work is not about objectivity”.
The one-sided media bias against Jews, Israel, and the West can been seen all over modern media, stretching back a number of years. It appears as deliberate skewing of facts, distortions, and quick-on-the-trigger publications that do not have credible backing, like this:
The BBC’s notoriously false claim that Israel hit the Al Ahli hospital is one recent example of a major news outlet publishing potentially incendiary information without pausing to fact-check. This was one of the major early turning points that affected international response to the current war.
The BBC made the same error in 2002, publishing that over 500 civilians had been killed in the battle in Jenin, and referring to the battle as a “massacre”. The subsequent international response was to be expected.
Months later, factfinding missions by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Time Magazine, and Fatah all concluded that there was no massacre, and the death toll was around 55, of which half were terrorist combatants.
Al Jazeera refers to the Israeli hostages as “captives”, which falsely implies they are military personnel and not citizens.
The BBC famously does not refer to Hamas as “terrorists”, which distorts not only their overt genocidal intentions, but also ignores the 20-year brutal oppression they impose on the people of Gaza.
The BBC has been pressured to correct false reporting over 80 times since October 7th. For example, the BBC Arabic program “Trending” was forced to remove an episode that questioned whether the massacre at Kibbutz Kfar Aza even happened at all.
It is a weird twist of irony when David Cameron, current Foreign Secretary and previous Prime Minister of the UK, very recently called out the BBC’s biased reporting, while on the BBC.
[UPDATE — A major 3rd party report of the BBC just released headline finding confirming long-standing breaches of editorial guidance regarding blatant bias against Israel since Oct 7th.
This is not the first time such a report has been written about the BBC. The Balen Report from 2004 revealed the same thing, but the BBC buried it under lawsuits and nobody has seen the full contents.]
In more extreme examples of the role of media in actively eliminating balanced two-sided dialogue, Iran has been actively creating their own version of mass media. PressTV is an Iranian own “news” agency that publishes content in English and French and regularly promotes debunked antisemitic and pro-Russian conspiracy theories to unsuspecting viewers.
The distortions and one-sided narrative actively manipulate viewers and erode any balanced two-sided dialogue that could lead to understanding.
Douglas Murray pointed out the deliberate attempts at distortion when he sat down for an interview with Jane Dutton in March. Dutton is an Al Jazeera correspondent from South Africa:
The Anti-Israel/Jew/West bias of many mainstream media and news outlets happens so frequently that most people have become numb to the effects, even when the bias and misinformation is overt.
James Macpherson highlighted the extent of the bias in his recent post about the rescue of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv.
Macpherson gives many examples of the media response to the rescue of the four hostages, noting the many ways in which known news outlets bend or outwardly ignore facts in order to support a predetermined narrative:
Wajahat Ali’s question regarding why 200 Palestinians were killed in the rescue mission is legitimate.
But another legitimate question would be: is 200 is a credible number considering the fact that any casualty numbers from Hamas have been proving to be fabrications. Another legitimate question would be: why were hostages held in dense residential areas. Any serious and objective journalist would also ask why civilians where the ones holding the hostages in the first place.
And any serious and objective journalism would also ask why Hamas has consistently rejected ceasefire deals — including the most recent one by Biden- preferring to utilize civilian deaths as clickbait instead of ending the war by releasing the remaining hostages.
Words matter. Facts matter.
But words can distort facts, as we all know.
We live in a polarized world, and in too many cases mass media has become both a reflection and a patron of polarization. Both sides skew their wording to attract eyeballs, and news outlets are painted “left” or “right”, and each side thinks the other is “propaganda”.
But in the case of Israel, and by extension Jews as a whole, there seems to be no middle ground. Instead of any discussions about mutual struggles, conflict resolution, coexistence, or reconciliation we get people like Briahna Joy Gray who deny mass rape even happened on public television.
Image instead that mainstream news was objective, reported all sides, and let readers come to their own informed conclusions based on fact and reality. We could potentially have seen more people working together to overcome differences, as opposed to turning to QAnon and Jewish conspiracy theories to huff the paint of the echo chambers.
Continue to Part 4: Summary and Implications
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