An analysis about the biased reporting in the New York Times:
Rape underreported: Seven NYT articles mention Israel's viewpoint vs. 1,398 Gaza's - analysis
While in Hungary several people told me that "Israel should do a lot more showing its side of the story" and I am trying to think how can I react to that.
The above article described how incredibly biased against Israel is the reporting in NYT. It is quite clear to me that that the problem is not that don't have material to be balanced or at least less biased. The problem is that they choose to be symphatetic only to the Palestinians.
While the above article is based on an analysis into the New York Times it seems that in the majority of newspapers and and other media the situation isn't different.
The question is why?
- The owner or the top leadership sets this tone.
- This the agenda of the journalists or the majority of journalists.
- They think this is what will get people to consume the "paper" more.
- ...
Though eventually I'd boil it down to 2 possibilities:
- The journal sets this anti-Israeli agenda
- The journal reacts to what the public will (likely) consume well - so the public has the anti-Israeli agenda the journal only tries to serve it.
Other conflicts?
I would go a bit in another direction as well. There are quite a few ongoing armed conflicts in the world. I don't have a research about this, but I guess most of them are hardly ever mentioned in the newspapers.
Why is that?
As one of my friends, who was a journalist for several year, told me it all boils down to what they call news values Or how newsworthy is an item.
These days it seems newsworthy is basically measure by the number of clicks. How many people visit the web site of the paper when seeing a title, how many people click on the article, how many people read it.
This would indicate to me that it is the public that sets the tone. For some reason - it seems - the public is more interested in reading about how horrible is Israel even if it turns out to be a lie than to read about any other conflict or about the actual horrible thing done by Hamas.
Can Israel change this?
I also wish that people around the world would see and understand our side of the story as well, but unfortunately, it seems, very few quality publications are ready to publish anything condemning Hamas or the more general Palestinian lie (that many people call "narrative") that they are the victims of some nefarious Jewish agenda.
The one quality publication I like is The Free Press of Bari Weiss.
I'd also recommend Israel State of a Nation podcast and videocast by Eylon Levy and some other reources in English.