Seeing Through Distorted Media Coverage of Israel

This article was originally published in "Elder of Ziyon."

I recently took a three-week trip to the United States from Israel to visit family and friends. At each visit they pounced on me for information about the situation in Israel. Even though they all follow current events in the American media, the news they were getting about the war between Israel and Hamas left them bewildered.

This is not surprising. A recent research article published in the journal Israel Affairs studied the coverage of this war by the New York Times. The findings were damning, among them “misquoting Israeli leaders, employing questionable journalists..., misleading repeated errors, inadequate corrections, significant omissions, and poor editorial supervision.” The authors concluded that “the Times pretends nothing has changed, but its newsroom has radically changed and does not uphold the same standards it once did. This misleads many readers who still believe they are receiving broad well-founded views, as well as accurate and impartial information.”

So widespread has distorted reporting on Israel in western media become that watchdog organizations have sprung up to counter it. Two long-established examples are CAMERA and Honest Reporting.

Such reporting also tends to cause perplexity among visitors to Israel whose positive impressions clash with the negativity so widely portrayed in the media. One such visitor was Professor Cherryl Smith. In her book Framing Israel she defines and illustrates six patterns of distortion in coverage of Israel in mainstream media and campus discourse, and for each pattern gives the necessary basic historical background. Once you learn to identify them, the distortions will no longer leave you perplexed as you read the Washington Post or other major western media outlets, but will seem transparent and even unprofessional.

Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the impetus for writing the book. Chapters 3 and 4 are more academic and explain the theoretical underpinning of the method of rhetorical frames. Chapters 5 through 10 develop the six rhetorical patterns. The book is written in a personal, narrative style, and is engaging, not so abstruse as to make it challenging yet at a level that satisfies intelligent readers.

It’s a great book for incoming Jewish college freshmen to read and discuss during the summer preceding their first semester. They will be much better prepared to see through and resist the anti-Israel indoctrination and activism they are about to confront from their professors and fellow students.

Like my family and friends, I have always been a staunch supporter of Israel, and like them, I trusted NPR and the New York Times, except that their reporting about Israel almost always got my hackles up--until I read this book when it was first published four years ago. Since then I’ve been relying on other, more trustworthy sources for news and analysis about Israel.

The Israel-Hamas war has seen, and continues to see, egregiously distorted reporting. Rereading Framing Israel now, I find its unique way of deconstructing distorted media coverage of Israel–to our great dismay–more relevant than ever.