The way I see it, we readers now have to do more journalistic work than the reporters who are commissioned to do that work for us.
In the past month, Palestinians have initiated attacks on Israelis every single day, murdering innocent civilians at knifepoint, driving cars through bus stops and a myriad of other violent terror attacks. Video footage recorded by bystanders and foreign correspondents alike reflect the horrifyingly true events transpiring on Israeli streets today.
And yet, despite the footage, despite the witnesses and despite the truth, much of the American media has conducted egregiously biased reporting on Palestinian terror attacks in Israel.
Headlines blare that tell only half of a brutal story: “Multiple Stabbings in Jerusalem After Weekend of Deadly Clashes” (CNN); “Palestinian Teen Killed, New Stabbing in Israel” (The New York Times); “Two Palestinian Teenagers Killed, Two Injured By Israeli Police (The Wall Street Journal).
Individual reporters have also been using their careers as a platform to propagate their own biases. Take MSNBC/NBC foreign reporter Ayman Mohyeldin who claimed that a Palestinian running toward the Damascus Gate “did not appear to be particularly armed” and “did not have a knife.”
He was interrupted by his corresponding news anchor, Jose Diaz-Balart, who looked at the footage from the scene and said, “Now hold on..we can clearly see the man…with what appears to be, in his right hand, a knife.” All of this occurred live on the air last week.
In his article for The Atlantic titled “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel”, writer Matti Friedman addressed the recent headlines.
“There are banal explanations for problems with coverage—reporters are in a hurry, editors are overloaded and distracted. These are realities, and can explain small errors and mishaps like ill-conceived headlines, which is why such details don’t typically strike me as important or worth much analysis…A few years on the job changed my mind. Such excuses can’t explain why the same inflations and omissions recur again and again, why they are common to so many news outlets, and why the simple “Israel story” of the international media is so foreign to people aware of the historical and regional context of events in this place. The explanation lies elsewhere.”
The explanation is that certain media outlets have made it clear that their “angle” is to report the tragedy of Palestinian deaths that occur on Israeli streets at the hands of the IDF–to “expose” the IDF for what it truly is–knife-wielding and gun-pointing aggressors aside.
Their “beat” is not the daily struggle of the Israeli civilian who is told by his or her employer to come to work armed in case of a terrorist attack, but of the Palestinians who perish at the hands of said Israelis after threatening their lives.
As a journalist myself, I don’t want to hear that an irresponsible headline or story is just a result of “the angle”; “the beat” or “the spin” of a given network or newspaper. These words are just ways to hide a bias behind a veil of industry buzzwords that attempt to conceal what is simply bad reporting.
Perhaps some want to chalk all of the gross reporting up to money. When writing is commoditized in the form of journalism, words aren’t written to tell the truth, but rather to garner clicks, comments, readership and conversation. If headlines are all just going to compete in a popularity contest, then their writers are going to dress them in the most controversial words they can write. Once again, as I journalist, I don’t want to hear it.
Unfortunately, journalism is no longer an industry in which many writers and editors strive for pure truth. Clearly there are few reporters left who understand the responsibility they have to the public to provide information in the most objective way possible. Instead of placing the public’s need for truth at the forefront of their career, they have begun to see the media as an avenue for their own opinions.
When a network or publication does not draw a hard and necessary line between news and opinion, bias seeps into every word and the media just becomes a rusty pipe filled with holes and leaks. And when that happens, as it is happening right now, the burden of honest reporting is shifted from the journalist and onto the reader or listener.
This fact is troubling. To think that we cannot always rely on the people who are hired to tell the world’s story is uncomfortable, infuriating and may leave many of us at a loss. But just because the truth is not being told in print or on the air, does not mean that the truth does not exist.
The American media has made it implicitly clear that if we want the truth, we need to go out and get it ourselves. As readers and listeners we are now charged with the responsibility to fact-check for ourselves. We must call upon our own sources and conduct our own interviews. We must do our own research and watch our own footage. And without a deadline hanging over our head, we can spend the time necessary to uncover what is really happening in Israel and beyond.
Be your own journalist and do the work that others have failed to do. And when you find the truth, share the facts.