Does the Media Hate Israel?

It's complicated

Photo by Ivan Louis on Unsplash

Many of my friends are struggling to understand why so much of the mainstream media—the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Associated Press—seems to consistently favor the Palestinian cause, minimizing or distorting the events of October 7 and slanting their coverage of the resulting war in ways that seem less than even-handed.

Consider the Israeli release of Palestinian women and teenagers from Israeli prisons while Hamas released from Gaza the people they kidnapped on October 7.

In many headlines, the two groups are created equal:

Washington Post front-page headline: “Swaps of captives resume after brief protest by Hamas.”

Reuters referred to the released Israeli captives as “soldiers,” though they later corrected it after thousands had seen the original version.

The Associated Press called it a “wartime prisoner swap.”

Then there was the New York Times description of released Palestinian prisoner Isra Jaabees. According to the Times, she had been “accused of attempted murder by Israel and had been in jail since 2015.” And “She was arrested that year after her car exploded at a checkpoint near Jerusalem in the West Bank leaving her disfigured and an Israeli police officer seriously injured.”

These were true statements. But the Times did not mention that she was not just accused but convicted. The Times did not mention that her exploding car was not a matter of bad luck. The explosion and her disfigurement were from her attempted suicide bombing that went awry.

So the Times didn’t lie. But the Times deceived its readers. Why?

Why can’t the media distinguish between prisoners who have hurt people and innocent children who have been abducted? Why can’t the media distinguish between children who are killed in front of their parents and children killed in a bombing of northern Gaza weeks after the Israeli army told people to leave and even opened corridors for people to flee the area? Why does the media treat Jewish women who are raped differently from other cases?

Is it just Jew-hatred? Sometimes it feels that way, but I think the lack of objectivity of the media is more complicated.

It starts with us. The consumers of news and information.

I don’t mean to kill the tooth fairy for you, but most of us prefer comfort to truth. We like buying shoes that fit rather than shoes that are uncomfortable. As hard as it is to admit, we shop for news and information in the same way. We tend to choose news sources that agree with our ideological outlook. Social media allows us to curate our newsfeeds in the same way Zappos help us find comfortable shoes or Amazon helps us find books we like. It’s easy to fill our news feed with items that bring us comfort. If we do see something we disagree with, it is presented as either buffoonish to provide amusement or as evil to stoke our self-righteousness and outrage.

We might like to think that journalists are objective observers who report the news. But objective reporting with nuance has become dramatically harder now that software, in the insight of Marc Andreessen, has eaten the world. Andreessen meant that in the digital world, entire industries get remade. In the case of media, software has radically remade the competitive landscape.

In the old days, there were three major networks and your local newspaper. Then there was cable news. But with social media there are an infinite number of choices. This leads to a strange and surprising dynamic: Fox News’s main competitor is not CNN but Tucker Carlson with his own flavor of right-wingedness, with his own view of Trump, immigration, the Ukraine-Russian war, Covid vaccines and so on. Or you can choose someone to Carlson’s right if you choose. Easy to find.

CNN’s main competitor is not Fox News, its ideological opposite. CNN’s competitor is MSNBC and outlets that lean further left. Few who watch CNN are likely to switch to Fox News. But they will switch to MSNBC if MSNBC does a better job catering to their biases.

This competitive dynamic pushes all news sources away from a nuanced view somewhere in the middle, and toward more partisan, ideological extremes. If you are too even-handed, a more ideologically pure source will peel off listeners and viewers from your subscriber base. You won’t survive. If you are too even-handed, you will lose watchers and listeners to sources that will give consumers the news they want—a comforting stream of curated facts, videos, and commentary that reinforce self-righteousness or that stoke outrage.

Objective journalism is the road to bankruptcy. To understand how this colors the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, let’s add the insights of Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics.

Kling observes that liberals see the world through a lens of oppressor and oppressed. Conservatives see the world through a lens of civilization vs. barbarism.

For starters, the different lenses explain why it’s so hard to discuss politics with the people we disagree with. We all think we have the facts on our side. But we selectively consume the facts that support our narratives and the lens we use. And social media makes that easy. And the algorithms that underlie social media just reinforce our own tendencies.

The left sees Israel as the oppressor and the Palestinians as the oppressed. The Israeli army is an occupier of the West Bank and the besieger of Gaza. The Palestinians are oppressed. The left has chosen a side—they side with the oppressed.

To those on the right, the members of Hamas are thugs, rapists and murderers who have said that they would repeat October 7th a million times. They are barbarians. The people on the right see Israel as civilized (they try to avoid civilian casualties by encouraging Gazans to leave) and live in a vibrant democracy with a free press. The right has chosen a side—they side with the civilized against the barbarians.

Think about how those who hold these narratives experience the information landscape. The conservatives consume story after story of Hamas brutality reinforcing the view that they are indeed barbarians. (They are.) The liberals consume story after story of Palestinian suffering. (They do suffer.) People on the left do not want to linger on stories of Hamas’s barbarism and if they see such stories, they have a tendency to sympathize—can you blame the Palestinians, they are so oppressed! Conservatives don’t want to hear stories about Israeli cruelty or Palestinian suffering. If necessary they will dismiss those stories saying that such events do not give the Palestinians license to rape and murder.

The incentives of the information landscape ratchet up the outrage on both sides. The New York Times will eagerly repeat stories that make Israel look bad. That’s what their readership wants. They want to feel outrage about the oppressor. The BBC will eagerly repeat stories that show the suffering of the Palestinians to further cement the feelings of their viewers that the Palestinians are oppressed and deserve sympathy. Of course their coverage is more nuanced than this, but for those of us who support Israel, it feels like the coverage is completely one-sided. It isn’t. But our news feeds make it feel even more extreme than it actually is.

The same is true for people on the conservative side. Fox News and the social media feed of pro-Israel users will be filled with example after example of Hamas cruelty, vindicating the view that this is not just about Israel but about the future of civilization. Stories that make Israel look less civilized will either not show up or will be glossed over or excused. Stories of Palestinian suffering will either not show up or will be excused—after all, they will say, so many Palestinians support Hamas. Did you see how ordinary citizens treated those Red Cross vehicles carrying the hostages home from Gaza? Somehow, a crowd of 100 jeering Palestinians becomes a representative sample.

And it’s worse than that. The New York Times and the BBC don’t just slant the news in favor of the oppressed and against who their readers and viewers see as the oppressor. They find reporters who feel the same way as their audiences. Those reporters don’t have any cognitive dissonance reporting on the war. They think they’re pursuing justice.

If I write for the New York Times, I will find myself avoiding stories that make the pro-Palestinian cause look bad. If I’m a reporter for Fox News, I’ll avoid stories that make Israel look bad. Sometimes, it’s not even conscious. It’s what is sometimes called “cognitive capture.” My brain, without even my realizing it, will find stories that reinforce my viewpoint as very salient. Stories that make me uncomfortable I find ways to dismiss. The media plays to these human tendencies without even having to do it consciously. Prisoners become captives. Close enough! If put my thumb on the scale a bit, is it really so bad?

Kling’s taxonomy helps you understand why those idiots on the other side (whichever side that is) don’t get it. They look at the world differently. Different lens. And the facts that get fed to them in the modern world just make them hold ever tighter to their world view. Same with you and me. So don’t hate your neighbor who feels differently than you do. You’re living in alternative universes.

I spoke to an American Jewish college student the other day who said she was wearing a button on her jacket with the face of one of the kidnapped Israelis when a Jewish student, wearing a kaffiyeh to show her support for the Palestinian cause, said to her, “Oh wow. Do you think he was really kidnapped? Do you know him?” Alternative universes.

A video is making the rounds on social media showing speaker after speaker at an Oakland California City Council discussion of whether to support a ceasefire. (I know, Oakland doesn’t have enough skin in the game for a six hour hearing, but never mind.) The speakers take one of three positions: the atrocities of October 7 didn’t take place, if they did take place they were mostly done by Israel to its own people or if they did take place and it was Hamas that did it, they were justified because of Israel’s oppression. This is the world we live in. Or more accurately, worlds, plural. Those speakers are consuming different news sources from the ones I do. Alternative universes.

Finley Peter Dunne said the job of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. But in the digitally-driven brave new world of highly competitive journalism it is the consumer of the news who is always afflicted and who seeks comfort. Left-leaning journalists want to comfort their readers and viewers with how afflicted the oppressed are. Right-leaning journalists want to comfort their readers with the decency of the civilized relative to the barbarians. Both sides have someone (the oppressor or the barbarians) to be outraged about.

This explains why we feel so strongly about what we believe and cannot imagine the stupidity or evil of those who believe otherwise. The informational landscapes we inhabit and the facts and scenes we encounter in those landscapes are radically different.

The bottom line is that our social media feeds which we curate and whose algorithms reinforce what we already believe combine with our natural tendency toward one lens or another to push us apart. Outrage grows. Compromise becomes more and more challenging. Democracies are going to find it very hard to overcome these forces. They will pull us apart.

A few important additional thoughts.

One, you may have your reality and I have mine as we follow our own different curated news feeds. But that doesn’t mean that we’re both right. We both feel we’re right. But the fact that truth feels more elusive than ever doesn’t mean there isn’t truth. There is. It just has gotten harder to tell where truth really lies and this challenge will only grow as images and videos are even more easily manipulated in the future.

Two, people change. A lot of people, especially Jews, who were on the left on October 6 found themselves on the right on October 8. They realized that they had underestimated the importance of the war between civilization and barbarism. They’ve chosen Israel. And I am sure there are those who have seen scenes from the bombing of Gaza that have moved them from the right to the left. A thoughtful person can shift to a different lens.

Three, a really thoughtful person can use two lenses at the same time—you can believe Hamas is made up of barbarians and at the same time concede that it’s really hard to live in Gaza. Such a person might end up as a conservative because they believe that too much barbarism isn’t just unpleasant but existentially threatening to the Jewish state. But that doesn’t mean that Israel can do whatever it wants in Gaza.

Four, a lot of people say that in this conflict, you have to pick a side. I think it’s more that you have to pick a lens. In my case, partly because I’m Jewish and partly because I live in Israel, while I sympathize with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and while I, like many people I know, ache over civilian deaths in Gaza, I’ve chosen civilization vs. barbarism as my lens. I believe the veneer of civilization is thin. That means I lean toward Israel. But I have a leftist side—I can still acknowledge Palestinian suffering and Israeli mistakes. And I have a libertarian side, too, a lens I’ve ignored in this essay, but I am wary of governments having too much power.

Five, it is tempting to say that those on the other side are not bad people—they just see the world differently from the way I see it. I do the best I can to understand the lens and narrative of those I disagree with. But some of the people on the other side actually are bad people. If you say that each of us is entitled to our own narratives and never the twain shall meet, you’re a moral nihilist. And worst of all, some of the people on the other side, right or wrong, want to kill me. So I best beware and take them at their word. I’m happy to be open-minded about their narrative, but not at the cost of my life, my children’s lives or the lives of my neighbors and friends.