Media Happy To Live Down To Netanyahu’s Smearing Of Them

“Give some credit to the American media for showing the way on how to save all the adversarial coverage for when a conservative is in office.”

Jerusalem, May 26 – News and commentary figures across the country voiced satisfaction today from their progress in an endeavor to justify every negative accusation the prime minister has hurled their way.

Editors, publishers, columnists, television news magazine hosts, reporters, and others within the print, online, and broadcast media in Israel gave separate voice Tuesday to their sense of gratification from the way they have handled Binyamin Netanyahu’s frequent characterization of their work as biased against him and his ideological allies, and from what he has described as their violation of journalistic ethics in pursuit of stories to paint him in a bad light at best, and attempt to implicate him in criminal activity, at worst: most have taken virtually no measures to demonstrate where he has spoken incorrectly.

Interviews with several dozen media figures in the country’s mainstream press, which leans to the left of Netanyahu’s stated positions on most issues, revealed that they have been only too happy to live down to the premier’s accusations of knee-jerk hostility, hypocrisy, selective reporting, tendentious framing, and sympathy even with those who would destroy the country, as long as the latter group helps them produce thinly-veiled propaganda.

“It’s considerate of Bibi to tell us how we’re expected to behave, with those accusations,” allowed Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken. “Without his constant reminders that we’re a bunch of post-Zionist terrorism-apologists who can’t mount a coherent or compelling argument for anything other than ‘Not Bibi,’ and who amplify everything that smacks of ‘Bibi bad’ while downplaying his accomplishments and repeated electoral success, we wouldn’t know what to do. It helps that he lays it all out for us.”

Columnist Nahum Barnea concurred. “He’s been helpful pointing us in the right direction, for sure,” stated the longtime Netanyahu critic. “But I think we also have to give some credit to the American media, and to some extent European and British media, for showing the way on how to save all the adversarial coverage for when a conservative is in office. The mainstream American media took a collective eight-year break from challenging Obama on almost anything, going so far as to defend Iran, a regime that murders gays, sponsors terrorism around the world, violates the sovereignty of numerous neighbors, foments unrest, and abets genocide in Syria, all while threatening to destroy American’s staunchest ally in the region. So Iran could have a legal path to nuclear weapons. But now a republican’s in office, and they’ve suddenly remembered how to ask tough questions. Similar story with Brexit, the Tories, Boris Johnson, you name it.”

“It can only be because conservatives are evil,” observed journalist Barak Ravid. “We journalists have to be an open-minded group, just because we’re so liberal in general, so that’s the only convincing possibility.”

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