Commentary/Contentions..
07 January '13..
The liberal bias of the mainstream media played a not inconsiderable role in helping Barack Obama skate to what turned out to be an easy victory last November. But as his longtime antagonist Benjamin Netanyahu coasts toward his own re-election, one of the interesting sidebars in the story of that vote is the way a largely left-wing media has proved unable to do much damage to the prime minister. The leftist cast of most Israeli news outlets is so widely recognized, few even on the left bother to deny it. As Akiva Eldar, the longtime columnist for Haaretz once told me in an interview, the bias of most Israeli journalists is not in doubt but since the right has won most of the elections in the last 30 years, it didn’t matter. It’s certainly true that the tilt against Netanyahu in the media won’t help the dismal chances of Israel’s left-wing parties. But the willingness of some of the leading outlets to hype the complaints of a former security official about the PM has raised the eyebrows of one of Eldar’s colleagues on the self-styled New York Times of Israel.
Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz’s current lead political columnist, wrote today about the way the Yediot Aharonot newspaper has tried to inflate a filmed interview with former Mossad chief Yuval Diskin in which he blasts Netanyahu into a cause célèbre. That a paper whose own longstanding left-wing bias is as blatant as that of Haaretz would consider this absurd tells you a lot about how off-the-charts the prejudice of the mass market daily Yediot about Netanyahu has become. While the foreign press has picked up this narrative about Netanyahu’s alleged failings, it’s fairly obvious even to Haaretz that there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the story.
As Pfeffer notes, Diskin’s charges about what he believes are Netanyahu’s irresponsible attempts to push the security services to agree with him about the nuclear threat from Iran and the need for potential action on the issue have already been fully aired and largely ignored by the Israeli public. That’s because they know something that most foreign readers don’t about the political nature of the old boy network that runs the security services. The willingness of Diskin and his colleagues to go public with their carping about Netanyahu’s handling of an issue on which there is a pretty strong consensus within Israel—the need to take the Iranian nuclear threat seriously—tells us more about the way Diskin and his friends feel about the prime minister than anything else.
However, as Pfeffer also writes, one of the other factors driving the brazen Netanyahu-bashing in liberal outlets is the fact that a well-funded competitor with a very different political outlook has overtaken Yediot as the country’s highest circulation newspaper. Much like the way Fox News stole the thunder of the more liberal CNN and the American broadcast networks, Israel Hayom has ended the left-wing monopoly of the major Israeli dailies. Bankrolled by American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Israel Hayom has given Israelis a free conservative alternative and they’ve made it the most read paper in the country.
While the influence of Adelson’s paper probably doesn’t equal that of the combined forces of the rest of liberal Israeli media, its pro-Netanyahu bias seems to have help driven that of its competitors over the cliff into what could almost be described as parody. But it appears the Israeli electorate is smart enough to see through the anger of the press and the hysteria about the “Diskin document.”
The ability of Netanyahu to survive the slings and arrows chucked at him by a frustrated Israeli media that knows the only question about the election is the size of his margin of victory shows that in one sense Eldar remains right. Israel’s voters are too sophisticated to be influenced by their biased press.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/07/media-bias-israeli-style-netanyahu-adelson/
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