Time to Repair the Media’s Institutional Biases

It has become a cliché of those of us who support Israel that the media are biased. The claim is true—but not in the way that most people understand it. There may be reporters, copy tasters, news editors and camera crew who are thoroughly committed to the aspirations of Hamas and find ways of saying so, even when working for ostensibly objective news organisations. Far more important is that, at a deeply institutional level, the way the media operate is itself helpful to the pro-Arab, pro-Leftist, pro-academic, anti-Israel cause.

Typically, an event happens and the media roll up to report on it. In media terms, the event is a stone thrown into a pond, and what follows are the resulting ripples.

In the case of Israel, the stone in the pond is typically an IDF operation; what the media report on are the ripples that that operation has caused. There’s never any reporting of the background that led to the stone being thrown because the media aren’t good at looking at background situations on an ongoing basis: it’s not in the nature of the news-gathering machine.

That means that, as the stone-thrower, Israel is always the protagonist and aggressor. The Arabs are never seen to be protagonists—because, with the exception of October 7, their aggression is kept below the horizon and doesn’t translate into news events.

That makes it perfectly legitimate, as the media see it, not to track, say, the build-up of arms inside Gaza or on the West Bank or the Lebanon border. The consequence of that failure is that when the IDF takes action against threats, those on the receiving end are always portrayed as victims—the ripples caused by the cast stone, the ones to whom a bad thing has been done.

It means also that in all the time that Arab-Iranian forces have been building up their capacity for combat, the media have acted as if there really is nothing to see—reporting, for example, that resistance to Israel involves nothing more than rudimentary sticks and stones, or improvised missiles that go off-target, and that the population of Gaza is made up wholly of innocents: children, women, the old, the infirm.

Even now, there is no calculation of the astounding amassing of materiel deployed by Gazans in the last eleven months or of the vast arsenal which Hezbollah is waiting and primed to use. That is because there is no mechanism within the media for investigating these background issues—and that systemic incapacity works wholly to the advantage of Israel’s opponents.

This non-reporting of Arab fighting capacity damages the world’s understanding of the facts, but it is not directly the product of reporting bias: it’s a systemic failure, the consequence of how newsrooms work.

It is reinforced by the fact that it is too dangerous for media organisations to carry out genuine reporting on the operations of fighters with no allegiance to any international peace protocols. Anyone likely to uncover uncomfortable facts won’t survive to tell the story. They’ll be disposed of, whether by Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah or any of the other combat groups.

This means that the building of subterranean supply routes, or the creation of fully-equipped command-and-control centres, or the importing of Iranian arms, or the embedding of combat units in schools and hospitals and homes and UNRWA centres, or the setting up of finance mechanisms which divert UN relief payments into the bank accounts of Arab political leaders, or the workings of extortion rackets among the Palestinian rank and file, or the thieving of aid supplies by Hamas operatives—none of this has ever been “the story”, the stone in the pond, because it all happens out of sight: unobserved and uninvestigated.

So much is this the case that as the Gaza conflict played out earlier this year, it was possible for BBC news presenters and others like them in other news organisations (all operating to the highest standards of news reporting within the limitations spelled out above) to imply or state outright that Gaza represented no threat and that claims to the contrary were nothing but IDF and Israeli-government propaganda. One of the most highly-placed news hosts on the BBC sneered at an Israeli government spokesman who talked about there being a vast network of tunnels under Gaza.

So when crazy right-wing Israelis claim that the media are biased against them, they’re right—but without understanding why they’re right. What the media say doesn’t have to be intentionally biased, because the media are already unintentionally biased by virtue of how their news machines work.

For reasons that always defy my understanding, there is no effort by those concerned about the impartiality and honesty of news reporting to bring this monumental institutional lapse to the attention of the offending media and have them repair it. But repairing it is what is required, and at an international level. Who’s going to lead it?