Guest Post Series: Arial Conference Part I

This is a guest post by Mark L. Levinson.  If you are interested in guest posting at The Israel Situation, please take a look at our guest posting guidelines.  This is the first part in a series of posts about the Arial Conference, focusing on Israel, legal issues, and the media.

Israel, the Law, and the Mass Media

In seven successive Novembers, the Israeli general public was invited to a day of enlightening presentations from local and foreign experts at the David Bar-Illan Conference on the Media and the Middle East, in Arial, memorializing the man who was editor of The Jerusalem Post and author of its Eye on the Media watchdog column.  Not only was the public invited to attend for free, there was complimentary bus transportation from various cities.

This year the Bar-Illan sponsors lacked the budget for the conference, but a new sponsor stepped in and a somewhat similar program was mounted in December — the Ariel Conference for Law and Mass Media.

For those who were unable to attend despite the free bus transportation and free simultaneous translation, I’d like to present a summary from my notes.  This summary hasn’t been cleared with anyone else; any inaccuracies of reportage are unintentional and are my responsibility alone.

Opening

Launching the conference, Professor Abraham Sion, who chairs the Center for Law and Mass Media at the Arial University Center, noted that the legal system and the mass media are two essential components of a democracy these days.  The press functions as a sort of meta-authority monitoring the legislative, executive, and judicial authorities, and the Internet functions as a corps of inspectors. 

A poll shows that the Israel public tends to trust the media — 64% found the media trustworthy, and 24% more found it somewhat trustworthy.

Asked whether the press influences public opinion or only reflects it, 81% said it is an influence, 8% a reflection.  So the public believes that it is being influenced, but by a trustworthy source.

Asked about ties between the media and the political left, 62% said they believe such ties exist, 25% said no. 

53% believe that the media advance the agenda of the left.  As for the courts, 43% believe they advance the left and only 6% believe they advance the right.

Professor Sion himself sees the media as promoters of the Oslo Accords and of subsequent conciliatory policies.  Sion quotes Amnon Nadav, a broadcasting authority head, as regretting that the media find the leftist vision of the truth the only truth worth broadcasting.  Sion says leftist MK Shelly Yacimovich, previously a broadcaster herself, agrees that the media serve the left.  And he quotes journalist Mati Golan as saying that the left has erected icons that are treated as unassailable.  Although he is on the left, he says “it arouses my resistance.”

As an example of media rule, Sion related the example of parliamentarian Haim Ramon.  Anticipating his trial for kissing a surprised female soldier, the media assailed him morning, noon, and night, and the public wanted blood.  When the court announced its verdict, suddenly the spell was broken and everyone said, “How big a crime was that after all?”  Then accordingly, the sentence came down relatively light, there was no finding of moral turpitude, and Ramon returned to be deputy prime minister.

Thus the media are functioning as a fourth branch of government, and while there can be no demand that all the privately-owned media exercise political balance, the publicly owned media certainly should.

The University That Isn’t

Next, Professor Dan Meyerstein spoke.  He is president of what is known as the Ariel University Center of Samaria, which hosted the conference.  A better translation from the Hebrew might be the Arial Universital Center of Samaria, if the adjective universital existed in English.  The name doesn’t imply that a university exists, but that a center exists that has something of a university’s characteristics about it.  There is a belief at the Center that they would have been officially dubbed a university long ago if they weren’t east of the Green Line.  Currently the Center is pursuing a mutually agreed five-year program to meet the government’s requirements for university status.  Prof. Meyerstein said the degree students number 8700, and 2500 more are in non-degree programs.  Four departments are teaching for master’s degrees.  As far as the media are concerned, he complains, the whole campus doesn’t even exist.

Meyerstein recalled visiting the city of Safed with his wife and hearing on the radio that snow was falling there.  They hadn’t seen any, they didn’t see any, and as far as they could tell there wasn’t any.  “Maybe we’re not really in Safed?” his wife said.

It’s odd, says Mayerstein, that on the one hand whenever the media cover a subject he knows, such as chemistry, without exception he notices inaccuracies, while on the other hand, when he reads about a subject he’s personally unfamiliar with, he still tends to believe the paper.  He says that in other countries, while there may be a slant, you can at least be sure that the printed facts are facts.  (I restrained myself from running up to contradict him.)

“I Built a City from Two Tents”

Mayerstein was followed by the mayor of Ariel, Ron Nachman, who said that as far as he is concerned, he is at Arial University, period.  Having served as deputy to the head of the broadcasting authority, Nachman said (in English): “I know how they cook the news.”  On Channel 2, his city doesn’t exist.  The weather map shows no human habitation between Tel Aviv and Amman.  He’s managed, by persistent lobbying, to get Arial mentioned on Channel 10.

Coverage is selective.  Former Knesset member Yossi Beilin, for example, goes jetting all over the world.  Have the media ever thought to investigate where his budget is coming from? 

The media don’t exist on their own.  Journalists exist, and they can advance their agendas through the media.  They can influence public discourse to the point where someone can be labelled a “settler” and the courts won’t give that person justice.

“I built a city from a pair of tents,” says Nachman, and he claims descent from founders of Nes Ziona, people of the wave of immigration that is known as the First Aliya.  Do even the schools teach about the First Aliya?  You would think that the Second Aliya, the more socialist and less religious one, was not preceded by anything.  And the slant that was always present in the original Israel Broadcasting Authority persists in the new channels, Channel 2 and Channel 10, because they were set up by Broadcasting Authority veterans.

Oxford University Recognizes Palestine

Concluding the greetings was Peter Simpson, the sponsor of the conference.  He said that when his family became Simpsons, they had no thought of associating themselves with the world’s foremost cartoon family.  It was merely that the British army didn’t want to send someone named Schweitzer out to fight the Germans.  Simpson was educated at Oxford, practiced law in the UK, and three years ago immigrated to Israel.  He notices that in the directory of Oxford alumni, some are listed as living in Palestine.  He is indignant that Oxford has bought in to the idea of an indigenous Arab people of Palestine.  Before Israel became independent, and indeed into the 1950s as the “Joint Palestine Appeal” continued fundraising among the Jewish community, people understood that the ethnicity associated with Palestine was Jewish.  Now they are calling Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood a settlement, and its Pisgat Zeev neighborhood a settlement.  They call Ariel a settlement, with 20,000 people.  If those are settlements, then what Israeli neighborhood isn’t?

Next, Daniel Ayalon the Deputy Foreign Minister was scheduled to give the opening speech.  However, he was said to be too busy with discussions regarding the warrant issued in England against Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni — a case, not the first, in which international law is invoked as a weapon against the enlightened states of the world.

Some time was filled by an open discussion.  One student remarked that the news does not necessarily reflect the biases of the reporters so much as the biases of the managers and owners of the media.  It was also remarked that as Ariel University turns out new journalists, they may help pull the general slant of the media away from the left.