Israel's English-Language Media, AFP, Selectively Report on Israeli Poll

Gilead Ini
CAMERA Media Analysis
30 November '10

A poll published by the Israel Democracy Institute noted that Israelis don't trust the media. In fact, at only 34 percent, the number of Israelis who trust the media is as low as it has been in the past eight years.

That same poll — or more specifically, the way Israel's main English-language news Web sites reported on one aspect of the survey — might also help explain why this is the case.

Along with questions about a number of weighty issues relating to Jewish-Arab relations, the poll asked Israelis whether it would bother them to have members of certain communities as neighbors.

Both Jewish and Arab Israelis were asked, for example, what they would think about living near homosexuals, foreign workers, ultra-orthodox Jews, immigrants from Russia or Ethiopia, mentally handicapped and others.

Perhaps most interesting to observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jews were asked if it would bother them to have Arabs as neighbors, and Arabs were asked if it would bother them to have Jews as neighbors. Indeed, the English-language Web sites of Ha'aretz, Yediot Aharonot and the Jerusalem Post each mentioned this aspect of the poll in their coverage of the overall findings. So did Agence France Presse. But in a striking double standard, each of these news sources presented readers with only half of the picture, relaying that many Jews expressed discomfort about the idea of living next to an Arab but altogether ignoring the fact that even more Arabs expressed discomfort about the idea of living next to a Jew.

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