“The people in real power, the ones threatening the future for the rest of us, are the ones the media take pains to show in a negative light: Jews who adhere to tradition, you know, the ones who are largely poor.”
Jerusalem, July 27 – Individuals and groups in a profession that has long boasted that it shows no favor toward those who exert control or influence over society, challenging without fear those with the control, have, for reasons experts find themselves unable to articulate, refrained from examining themselves with the same bold, critical eye even as they exert equal or greater levels of influence and control.
News media and commentators continue to speak truth to power, industry figures proclaim, and face down with courage those who have the political, economic, or legal power to harm them, observers note, by exposing alleged misdeeds and abuse of said power, in addition to publicizing the ways in which those in power endanger the public interest. The observers also confess they remain at a loss to account for the bizarre and unforeseeable fact that many of the same individuals and organizations in the news and commentary media seem unaware that they, as an industry, shape public opinion by framing their coverage and analysis based on their own political biases, and as such exercise similar power to those they hold to account without fear or favor, but without the speaking-truth-to- part.
“It’s weird, I guess,” remarked Haaretz television critic Rogel Alpher. “I don’t really think of myself as holding power, so I don’t challenge myself with tough questions, I suppose. Maybe that’s it? But the people in real power, the ones threatening the future for the rest of us, are the ones the media take pains to show in a negative light: Jews who adhere to tradition, you know, the ones who are largely poor. And those settlers, who insist on maintaining an active, living connection to the place Jews come from. They’re the ones with real power, the ones who hold a dozen seats in the 120-member Knesset.”
“Our brand, our image, is critiquing the powers that be,” explained television magazine host Dana Weiss. “It’s probably just a coincidence that all of our hard-nosed reporting and investigative journalism goes in one direction, while personalities such as Ehud Barak, Tamar Zandberg, and every single member of the Joint List get the kid-glove treatment. How else will their minority opinions, with which many journalists – but not he electorate – agree, ever gain traction, you know? The bottom line is, our credibility rests on our ability to set aside out political prejudices and devote our objective faculties to getting [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu out of office. We would do the same thing if the premier were from a different party, assuming that party also occupied a part of the political spectrum alien to most of my colleagues in the mainstream press.”
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