'Israelis Don't See Images From Gaza Because Our Journalists Are Not Doing Their Job'
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2023-12-13/ty-article-podcast/israelis-dont-see-images-from-gaza-because-our-journalists-are-not-doing-their-job/
In the conversation, Saragusti also addresses the fact that Israeli mainstream media barely shows images of what's happening in Gaza and isn't regularly reporting on the dire situation in the Strip.
"The fact that Israeli audiences don't see images from Gaza means that journalists are not doing their jobs," she says. "They have to show the images. Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what's going on in Gaza. We don't see the atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different."
Israelis fear that the world doesn't see their pain and is only sympathizing with the Palestinians. Saragusti sees things differently. According to her, "The world saw the October 7 massacre. Journalists came to Israel, they saw the bodies, the remains of the Nova partygoers, the destruction in the kibbutzim. They delivered the message, they reported on it. But now the focus is somewhere else.
"The fact is that people outside of Israel are seeing a completely different picture of reality. If we don't see what they are seeing, we won't be able to understand the growing sentiment against us. The majority of people know what happened, they know there was a massacre, they understand Israel went through something devastating. The fact that we Israelis are living in a completely different dimension doesn't work to our advantage. We need to deal with it."
How Israeli Media Became a Wartime Government Propaganda Arm
After criticism of those in power in the initial days after the Hamas attack of October 7, the news channels have since devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties
The Gaza war is unfolding on Israelis' various screens via straightforward, unquestioning reporting of the Israeli military's official accounts, plus a daily press briefing by military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. The coverage meanwhile downplays critical questions that have arisen during the conflict, like how much the ground maneuver endangers the lives of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
The deaths of thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza are ignored, and the Israeli media's coverage shows images of destroyed buildings without mentioning the possibility of people being buried beneath the rubble. Only a few on-air voices challenge the establishment's perception, even though the war broke out because of excessive reliance on pre-established concepts.
There is an obsessive repetition that the reports have been approved for publication by military censors. The media also gives too much attention to emotionality at the expense of hard news reports regarding the subject of the hostages. Perhaps more than anything, the media landscape is marked by endless forms of self-censorship.
Journalists and media researchers fear that Israeli broadcasting is returning to bad habits as part of an effort to lift morale and maintain solidarity with soldiers risking their lives in Gaza – and, in doing so, is failing to show the reality in Gaza.
"There are no explicit instructions, but there's this kind of vibe that allows no place for stories of Gazan victims in the news broadcasts," says a reporter for a leading new channel. "This is a surrender to the public mood, one that says that after such a great disaster, you shouldn't 'give the enemy an opportunity.'
"The problem is that this is detrimental to the role of the journalist because viewers get used to not treating the other side as human beings and then don't understand why the whole world, which sees the difficult images from Gaza, turns its back on us and treats Israel as the aggressor."
David Gurevitz, a cultural researcher and lecturer in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Letzion, says that "at first after the war broke out, the broadcast media played a responsible role. Now it's becoming a propaganda arm of the government, full of populism and fiery patriotism. What motivates the media is the desire to appeal to the public and get high ratings."
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"On the one hand, delving into sensitive issues is our responsibility, but on the other, it's hard to deal with because of the difficulty the public has," she says. "So, again we aren't debating things that clearly will land on the public's desk in the future. When will we talk about the high number of reservists being killed, about friendly fire and the military accidents that are creating many victims, about the growing violence in the West Bank?
"There's fear of the public and its reaction, and fear of the politicians because everything is again becoming political, and 'the poison machine'" – as the network of incendiary, right-wing commentators and broadcasters that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attacks his purported enemies – "is very intense.
The most prominent figure in Israeli coverage of the war.: A daily update from IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari is being shown on Channel 12 News.
Despite Netanyahu's low level of support and trust from the public, every wartime statement he makes to the media has been broadcast live. But with all due respect to Kushmaro (or Netanyahu), the most prominent figure who must be examined to understand the coverage of the war is IDF Spokesman Hagari.
Unlike many of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers, Hagari is perceived as credible and popular – to such an extent, says Gurevitz, that the public "treat him as though he were sacred, without any criticism, and with endless deference such that we have never seen for an IDF spokesman. There's total acceptance of him on the news broadcasts." Hagari's live daily briefings have become a regular fixture on the evening news as if he were an on-air talent who transcended a single station.
"The formula is fairly fixed," Gurevitz says, referring to the order of the main 8 P.M. news broadcasts, "with the main news from the battlefield, two commentators, 'suffering and bravery' features – the soldiers who have fallen in battle and the hostages' stories – and the IDF spokesman's news conference."
Each evening, Hagari makes sure to note the names of the most recent fallen soldiers and says that the entire military is embracing their families. By contrast, the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children are entirely absent from the news and current affairs coverage.
An Israeli soldier overlooks the ruins in Gaza, this month. Israelis are exposed only to one-sided coverage.
"From the moment that the army entered Gaza on the ground, we've really been spoon-fed by the IDF spokesman," says Shwartz Altshuler, noting that in the initial days following the October 7 slaughter in border communities, the media managed to find creative ways to report from the ground, even when being at the scene posed a risk.
"But since the [ground entry into Gaza on October 27], the distorted picture of the world that we have been seeing is mainly based on the [IDF] spokesman, and that should not be happening," she says. "We have to examine what's broadcast from inside Gaza and what they're showing on the media abroad and paint a picture that reflects reality."
Journalist Ben Caspit, considered to be in the political center and as a left-wing counterpoint to Amit Segal on Channel 12 and Yinon Magal on the right-wing Channel 14, described in a tweet the suffering in Gaza being ignored as a moral necessity: "Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]? They've earned that hell fairly, and I don't have a milligram of empathy."
'The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn't any basis for showing anything.'
"Numbers such as 20,000 dead become abstract when you don't see the difficult images," Gurevitz warns. "The Israeli audience isn't capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim on the other side as such, and the media follows suit."
Shwartz Altshuler's assessment is that the main motive for the Israeli coverage of Gaza isn't actually a lack of empathy for the Palestinians living there but rather the relationship with the IDF spokesman and a lack of access to content that isn't suspected of being biased in favor of the Palestinians. Unlike in prior wars, the IDF has been largely preventing foreign reporters from entering Gaza.
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A related issue is the narrow range of views presented on media outlets' various panel discussions. Most of the commentators– including large numbers of reporters and people previously in positions of authority who have crowded the studios since the outbreak of the war – use the same source, Shwartz Altshuler says.
"So how exactly will there be multiple views and perspectives regarding reality?" She asks. "For example, Tamir Hayman, the former head of Military Intelligence, who is a commentator on Channel 12 News, is a member of a limited team of advisers to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the war. "What's the difference between him and Jacob Bardugo?" she asks, referring to a close associate of Netanyahu who has worked in radio. "I don't think Hayman represents Gallant, but he does represent the defense establishment."
The issue, she says, is not just who appears on the air, but also who doesn't. Shwartz Altshuler cites revelations in the media about IDF border post spotters and an officer in Military Intelligence's Unit 8200 who had expressed concern about indications that Hamas was planning an attack before October 7. The Israel Democracy Institute fellow also asked why the channels didn't take the opportunity to feature more female commentators.
"Unlike men, they weren't part of the [mistaken] doctrine and the system that failed. Instead, again they're bringing in women to talk about psychology and men about defense," she says.
On December 4, the journalists' issued a letter calling on the directors of the TV news outlets to change the model and have at least half of the panel participants be women. But even more glaringly than the absence of women, the voices of Arab citizens of Israel have become a rarity on news broadcasts, even by the usual Israeli standards (unless their name happens to Yoseph Haddad, a high-profile pro-Israel advocate).
"The Arab community has been entirely excluded from the discourse, and therefore the public impression has been created that it doesn't exist at all in connection with these events," says Kholod Idres, the co-director of the Department for a Shared Society at the Sikkuy Association for the Advancement of Equal Opportunity nonprofit.
"The clearest example of that is that the hostages from the Arab community were totally ignored at the beginning of the war. For more than a week, with the exception of Army Radio, the main media outlets in Israel didn't mention the fact that among the hundreds of Israelis who were abducted to Gaza, there were also Arab citizens. On Channel 12, the first reference to the subject only came on October 20."
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The full picture of the war isn't being shown, and the tours of Gaza that the IDF Spokesman's Office arranges for reporters don't really fill it out, but the media's quest for "an image of victory" explains at least some of the media's conduct.
"We'll see it more and more strongly in the coming weeks as the war begins to wane," Shwartz Altshuler predicts. The desire to portray the end of the war as a victory papering over the war's declared goal of completely defeating Hamas is mainly financial, she says, not ideological. "The media can't indicate to the public that 'we've lost' and still sell advertising," she says. "It needs the government to create the drama and the government needs it to create the narrative."
The initial signs of the trend were seen in the emotional images of the return of the hostages to Israel. "It was a total reality show," Shwartz Altshuler says. "Content to fill a vacuum, without news value but infringing on the privacy of the hostages who have returned."
The releases were documented even though the hostages' privacy has been respected in Israeli media coverage of hostage videos released by Hamas. Also absent from the Israeli coverage are pictures from foreign media news of Palestinian prisoners whom Israel released in exchange for the hostages and their reunion with their families.
A more recent example is the images of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, handcuffed and in their underwear – broadcast despite the assessment (reported in Haaretz) that only about 10 to 15 percent of them were actually active in Hamas or identified with the organization. (A similar photo was released in the 2014 Gaza war.)
Enlisting the media during wartime is hardly a new concept, but Gurevitz has the feeling that this time, it's more pronounced than before: "The media is now reflecting our traumatic situation and the legitimization of acting in an extreme fashion because of it, and reflects a public thirst for revenge," he says. "Revenge is something that obviously motivates armies, but it doesn't really solve problems. The harsh rhetoric and sense of hysteria don't project Israeli strength, but rather despair and a desire to see pictures of surrender at any price."
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Naor casts doubt over the argument that criticism of a war shouldn't be voiced while it is being fought ("quiet, we're shooting," as the saying goes in Hebrew). Such an approach, he says, cannot last for long.
You can't discount the shock that the events of October 7 have caused, but if anyone had hope that they would produce positive changes in the conduct of the Israeli media, they're bound to be disappointed. "Catastrophes don't create a change of reality. That requires genuine processes," Shwartz Altshuler says, pointing out that even amid the current fighting, the Israeli government hasn't stopped trying to intervene with the media for its own ends – pressing for concessions, for example, to Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu station, and to regional radio stations.
"Why isn't anyone in television saying that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is exploiting 'quiet, we're shooting' to alter the television market?" she asks. No positive process will be possible, she says, without comprehensive soul-searching, which cannot wait until the war is over.
