Haaretz, NY Times To Stop Reporting Antisemitism

“Giving coverage to attacks on Jews would only encourage more such attacks.”

Tel Aviv, February 9 – Two major international daily publications announced this morning (Monday) that they would no longer publish news stories involving incidents of Jew-hatred.

The New York Times and Israel’s Haaretz daily published a notice in their print editions today announcing the change and explaining the reasoning that went into it. The policy will go into effect next week for Haaretz, and the following week for the New York Times.

For the Times, Executive Editor Dean Baquet gave several rationales. “Our primary concern as a journalistic organization is the objective coverage of important issues. While we have been satisfied at our balance in handling such items, the Times editorial board concluded that in the end, stories of Jews getting attacked or otherwise abused are simply not newsworthy in the way that, for example, our readership needs to know about an email criticizing an angry basketball fan.”

“Second,” continued Baquet, “giving coverage to attacks on Jews would only encourage more such attacks, whose whole purpose is to generate attention and fear. And third, we as an organization have adopted the view that ethnicity-based definitions in news coverage are no longer relevant, which is why we also recently decided to stop looking for stories about race.”

Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn echoed Baquet in declaring stories of antisemitism passé. “As Tzipi Livni observed today, so many Israelis have been brainwashed into thinking that the world is against us. That perception is simply false. They’re only against us when Jews stand up for themselves and insist on not being wiped out.” He added another consideration that Haaretz used in arriving at its decision, namely that journalism itself should be secondary to activism.

“This publication’s political and social agenda comes first, and objective reporting of facts second at best,” he explained. “That means if we have to choose between the two, so-called journalistic integrity gets waived. Stories of Jews getting attacked simply do not fit with this paper’s vision of an ascendant Jewish nation constantly asserting itself unjustly at the expense of weaker, always-innocent others.”

For both publications, the anticipated reduction in demand for column space will translate, however modestly, into greater potential revenue, as the stories, or paragraphs within stories, referring to or describing antisemitism, can be replaced by advertisements. Benn acknowledged the tradeoff involved, as some readers might be turned off by the change of editorial policy and refuse to buy the paper, which in turn will hurt ad revenues. “In the end we decided to adopt the new policy despite the financial risk, since, again, Haaretz is an activist organization first and a newspaper second or third.”

According to Haaretz News Editor Migdala Shenhav, readers will have other ways to revel in stories of Jews getting what they probably deserve. “Few, if any, of our readers do not also follow Electronic Intifada,” she explained, referring to a rich alternative source of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda. “Also, our opinion pages will still feature the term, primarily in the context of Jew-haters being allowed to hide behind protestations of ‘I am not an antisemite.'”