Israel Matzav

Haaretz: A case study in the collapse of modern journalism

In a Sunday interview with journalist Kalman Libskind of the radio station Galei Yisrael, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken set out to defend Hass’s article. Growing flustered, however, Schocken ended up saying that moving to a settlement was a form of deliberately endangering the welfare of one’s children, something that in another context would trigger the intervention of social services. As for Hass’s sympathy for rock-throwers, Schocken refused to distance himself. “Sometimes,” he concluded, “you have to fight violence with violence.”

The method Amos Schocken chose to defend Hass’s article, and his defense of editor-in-chief Aluf Benn’s decision to publish the piece in full, sheds some light on the recent changes at the once-venerable Israeli daily. In a series of interviews conducted with current and former Haaretz employees, some of whom held high-level positions at the paper and most of whom still hold it close to their hearts, a consensus emerged to the effect that the paper is undergoing a process of major change that has led to a dramatic reduction in staff, a precipitous decline in journalistic standards, and a willful radicalization of its politics in pursuit of Internet traffic.
As Israel’s longstanding newspaper of record, these developments have raised important questions about the future of print journalism, especially in a country where a free and dynamic press has always been at the center of Israel’s democratic discourse.

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according to the employees interviewed for this article, all of whom refused to be identified out of fear of the impact on their careers in Israel’s small and insular media environment, the Amira Hass affair was a red flag not only for the Israeli public, but also for many on the Haaretz staff. As one former editor at the news desk put it:

Amira Hass’s article must be seen as the result of a conscious decision to radicalize the paper, to make it something shallow, sensationalist, and shocking, and to give it the image of a paper—really, a website—that is courageous and groundbreaking. At the end of the day, there is only one goal: To generate traffic. It doesn’t matter if the piece is good or bad, what matters is that it leads to website traffic.

Like most of the people we spoke with, the editor does not identify with the political Right in Israel. Yet he felt a need to add the following: “Amira Hass’s article fits Aluf Benn and Amos Schocken like a glove. She wrote shocking things. Any editor with a minimum of discretion would have said that it wasn’t suitable for publication. But here? The more provocative you are—to the Left, of course—the better the editorial staff thinks it is.”

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An even more pointed criticism of the editors’ objectivity came from another staffer familiar with the news desk. “There is almost no one who is not on the radical Left, or more precisely, who hasn’t accommodated themselves to it and suddenly become a Leftist. Except for Amos Harel and Haim Levinson, there are almost no journalists I would allow myself to call trustworthy. The rest are sycophants who suddenly joined the extreme Left. Israel Harel is the token Rightist in the opinion section, but if you look at the section in its entirety, it’s obviously getting systematically worse.” The same staff member also took issue with Benn’s decision to dedicate time to giving public lectures and writing opinion pieces for the paper.

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Though the newspaper has always taken a progressive political line, even its ideological detractors once recognized the benefit that a newspaper rooted in quality journalism and rigorous about its standards provided Israeli society. As Hanoch Marmari, who served as the paper’s editor-in-chief for close to 50 years after being appointed by Amos Schocken’s father, Gershom, put it: “Today Haaretz is not in the playing field. Rather, it is morphed from a player to a spectator in the bleachers. When you are a distant observer you do not necessarily see the complicated dynamics of the game—and you definitely exert less influence.”

Labels: Aluf Benn, Amira Hass, Haaretz, Israel's Hebrew Palestinian daily, Israeli media bias, liberal media bias

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:25 AM