Amid Software Failure, Haaretz Must Manually Generate Anti-Israel Headlines

“All I can say is we’re working on it,” said a worried Amos Schocken, the paper’s publisher.

Tel Aviv, July 25 – Two days into a malfunction of one of the publication’s most intensively-used applications, the organization’s staff has been forced to perform the work the software would otherwise do: create headlines that extract from their respective articles the most damning, anti-Israel slant possible.

Haaretz’s offices have been grappling with an apparent bug in the headline-generating algorithm since Sunday afternoon. Editors first noticed the failure when a blatantly anti-Israel opinion article featured a bland headline, and traced the problem to the application, called the Lexical Intelligence Brief Extract Labeler (LIBEL). Sometime in the mid-afternoon, LIBEL began applying headlines at odds with the publication’s editorial guidelines, a phenomenon the staff noticed when an article about an increase in the number of Palestinian patients from Gaza in Israeli hospitals was given a headline that did not use the words “siege,” “Apartheid,” or “the most densely-populated area on Earth.” As a result, Haaretz writers and editors must manually generate the proper headlines, using valuable time and energy that could otherwise be used to generate anti-Israel angles in the articles themselves.

“All I can say is we’re working on it,” said a worried Amos Schocken, the paper’s publisher. “I can’t say when it will be resolved. Both the print and online versions of Haaretz make liberal use of LIBEL, so this is slowing us down. Our technical consultants are doing what they can. Unfortunately, LIBEL is proprietary software that we commissioned several years ago. That means we’re dependent on a very specific team of developers to fix it. We haven’t had such a problem until now – LIBEL performed exceptionally well to date.” Schocken said it was not yet known whether the malfunction resulted from errors in the LIBEL code, some accidental modification to it, or malicious activity, but that the latter possibility should not be discounted.

“We don’t have direct evidence of malice, of course, but with the current government I wouldn’t rule out anything,” he continued. “You know, like when there’s an electrical short that causes a fire at an NGO’s Jerusalem office – hypothetically, you know? – and all the evidence is there, confirming it’s an electrical malfunction, but of course the one thing on our minds is automatically assuming a right-wing criminal act, and that’s the angle that has to be explored most deeply, most immediately. You know, hypothetically.”

“You’re going to call this article ‘Free Speech In Israel Threatened,’ right?” he added.