Ynet Reports Fake Stock Exchange Figures; No One Notices

“Anyone who is in a position to know or care that our numbers are a crock doesn’t use Ynet for business news anyway.”

Tel Aviv, March 12 – The popular Hebrew news website Ynet has been using completely random figures each day in its breaking news feed to report on securities trading, but readers have not paid any attention, an editor at the site disclosed today.

Ynet’s homepage news ticker features updates several times per hour with breaking stories, in addition to the full-length articles and opinion pieces linked there. To help maintain the frequency of updates in keeping with the purpose of an online, real-time news source, the site depends on certain regular items to report in the scrolling section where those items appear, among them the latest developments on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Instead of putting in actual news of the TASE’s movement, Ynet has been inserting numbers that bear no relationship to the actual trading data, but not a single reader has reacted to the inaccuracies.

Hayim Metikha, Business Editor at Ynet, told PreOccupied Territory that the use of fictitious numbers began six weeks ago amid certain shifts in the newsroom aimed at cutting costs and increasing efficiency. “We found that a single simple computer script was able to produce the figures we need, instead of having a paid employee pay attention to stock market movements,” he explained. “Anyone who is in a position to know or care that our numbers are a crock doesn’t use Ynet for business news anyway.” For those purposes, says Metikha, Hebrew-speaking users tend to consult sources such as Globes and The Marker, not sites of Ynet’s ilk that are essentially online supermarket tabloids with an anti-Netanyahu ax to grind.

The shift toward automated generation of made-up stock exchange data helps the publication maintain the appearance of diversity in the types of news it reports. Without such items in its news ticker several times a day, says online news media analyst Etti Clickbait, Ynet’s narrow obsession with celebrity gossip, attacking religious institutions, and undermining the current prime minister would be more transparent, and the operation would be less able to present the façade of journalistic objectivity.

“It takes actual work to find, develop, and edit stories, and news organizations long ago began to transition away from that kind of thing,” said Clickbait. “Ynet still occasionally assigns capable correspondents to worthy stories and provides a reasonable account of some events, but that costs man-hours and resources that don’t really bring in the user eyeballs necessary for a profitable advertising fee threshold, so they’ve been cutting back on real reporting and relying more and more on low-cost hack writers and, as of several weeks ago, computer-generated news.” She wondered aloud whether Ynet’s readers would even notice of the bona fide journalism were to disappear entirely from the site, considering the centrality of bikini-clad celebrities in the publication’s business model.

The aforementioned developments fit in with a broad global trend is news coverage, in which news about Israel seldom involves actual journalistic integrity; instead, editors and reporters alike strive to fit the events being reported into the familiar trope of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood, saving the news agency time, effort, and money that would otherwise have to be expended to convey a more truthful picture.