It used to be said that if only Israel fell from the headlines, how nice that would be. If only Israel were not the focus of so much world attention, it would mean that peace would be closer and Israel would be less controversial and criticized.
It hasn’t exactly worked out that way even though Israel has become much less of a focus for major media outlets than it used to be. Israel has not fallen from the headlines, though one might expect this in retracing these major media shifts:
Major American newspapers have closed their Jerusalem bureaus. These include the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune. Time used to have a full time bureau in Jerusalem. No more. Ditto: CNN, Fox, BBC. They’ve all closed up shop in Israel.
It’s much easier just to send in a reporter if a major story breaks. That reporter will almost always be radically inexperienced in the region.
Not far behind, the LA Times, The New York Times and Washington Post have drastically curtailed their operations in Israel to “bare bones.” They no longer invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in bureaus, which, when this happened, was an investment in educating their foreign correspondents in the history, mores, personalities, pressures and politics of Israel.
What all this means is that the news out of Israel has become homogeneous. Subtlety in reporting is gone. Competition is virtually non-existent. The story, in the words of one former foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem, has become “routine.” That’s become the standard, such as it is, for the only news agencies that still maintain a base in Israel: AP and Reuters.
Other cities in the Middle East have displaced Jerusalem as major media centers.
For example, after the “Arab Spring” in 2011, Cairo became a major base. That changed as Egypt imprisoned journalists. Then Istanbul became popular. That, too, is losing its shine as Turkey expels journalists for no reason, with no notice, with no appeal. Now Beirut’s star is rising. It’s a good base from which to report on Iraq and Syria.
If only we could express gratitude for the shift of attention away from Israel. We cannot, since the attention really hasn’t shifted. Instead, it has been been thinned, simplified, routinized, flattened, decontextualized, reduced to a template, with a single story line dominating most everything: Israel oppresses Palestinians.
In the past, the plethora of news organizations with full-time operations in Israel sometimes meant superficial or blatantly anti-Israel reporting, based on ignorance or bias. But the concentrated news focus on Israel also had a distinctly positive side. It meant that the endlessly fascinating sides of Israel were covered, that, therefore, a rounded picture of Israel came through; and that, as often as not, stories which presented Israel’s view of the Arab-Israel dispute or the Palestinian-Arab dispute were told dramatically.
Quoted in a long piece by Genevieve Belmaker in Quill, from which many of the facts (and none of the opinions) in this editorial are taken, Timothy McNulty says:
“Jerusalem is a great place to live, but the day-to-day [story] gets to be depressingly routine. It’s a story that everyone seems to have heard over and over and over. Unless something major happens, you don’t get that much attention.”
McNulty was based in Jerusalem for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s, then was an editor of the Tribune until 2008, and now is a lecturer on journalism and co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University. He is emblematic of the professional journalist who used to be based in Israel, whose professional task was to take the time to get the subtleties of the story, but who now not only doesn’t work from Jerusalem but doesn’t encourage his students to, either.
We are not romanticizing “the good old days,” when the major media did focus on Israel. A lot of uninformed or selective anti-Israel propaganda passed for dispassionate reporting. But overall, Israel had a better shot at getting the story across. Those days are gone, at least for now.
All this is another consequence of the recalcitrance of the Palestinians to come to terms with the permanent presence of a Jewish state in the region. Say “no” to peace and coexistence long enough, and indeed the story becomes “depressingly routine.”
That Israel’s willingness to help Palestinians with goods and services only to see them transmogrified into terror tunnels; that Israel has a thousand stories of worldwide significance technologically and medically as the “start-up nation”; that Israel has human interest stories more variegated than any place on earth; that Israel is the religious cynosure of much of the world — all this? Not of great interest to a journalism community, much of which has bought into the decontextualized, inaccurate, dominating storyline: Israel oppresses Palestinians.
The Palestinian tactic of trying to defeat Israel by delegitimating it has an ally not so much in a hostile press as an indifferent one. The Palestinian tactic has rendered the Palestinians faceless, too.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
