Guest Post: Arial Conference Part V – Influence between Mass Media and Public Opinion

This is part five in a series of guest posts by Mark L. Levinson regarding the Arial Conference.

The Reciprocal Influence between Mass Media and Public Opinion

Dr. Miriam Billig, manager of Arial’s regional R&D center for Samaria and the Jordan Rift, chaired the panel on the reciprocal influence between mass media and public opinion. She said that the Israeli population has become alienated from the elite that runs the media.

Freedom versus responsibility

The first panelist was Nobel laureate Robert Aumann of the Hebrew University. He responded to the audience’s applause with a friendly, facetious military-style salute and then paused as if he had not yet decided where to begin.

Aumann said that certainly the media influence the consensus of public opinion, and that there is a reverse effect as well but weaker. The media has an agenda of its own that is not greatly influenced by the mass of public opinion, though it is influenced by the elite, such as the academics. In Israel the media is also influenced by foreign opinion.

Aumann favors a free marketplace of ideas, with limits placed only on government-sponsored media. Those working for government-sponsored media are public servants in a position that precludes expression of their personal opinions.

Some might say he goes too far, Aumann cautioned, but he even believes in the right to deny the Holocaust. Regarding such an issue, the facts should be able to speak for themselves.

He considers the closure of the right-wing Arutz 7 pirate radio station to be a mark of shame on Israel’s record. The excuses for the closure have no importance, says Aumann; we know that the government shut down the station for ideological reasons.

The media have a responsibility to tell the truth. Where lashon hara is concerned (that is, the sin of harming someone’s reputation), in Israel the media enjoys more leniency than the man in the street does. In Aumann’s opinion, the media should, on the contrary, obey a stricter standard than the man in the street because the media wield more influence.

For example there is the case of Bibi Netanyahu and Beitar Jerusalem. In the center of Jerusalem, the Beitar Jerusalem sports team held a victory celebration. Bibi arrived and spoke, smiling and waving to the crowd. On TV, the footage of Bibi smiling and waving was accompanied by irrelevant footage from half an hour later when some of the crowd took to shouting “Death to the Arabs!” The people responsible for the false juxtaposition were fired from the TV station, but after some protests on the grounds of freedom of expression they were — wrongly, in Aumann’s opinion — re-hired.

Another case is the New York Times photo from the start of the second intifada, which was labeled as showing a bloodied Arab who was beaten by an Israeli soldier when it was actually a bloodied Jew who was being rescued from Arabs by an Israeli soldier. The Times did print a correction, but the picture was on the front page and the correction was buried on an interior page.

Other examples of media irresponsibility include a case in which a child was kidnapped and the media were asked not to reveal a particular detail of the case. One journalist not only did reveal that detail but shamelessly remarked in his story that he had been asked not to.

Another time, Henry Kissinger went off on a secret negotiating mission to Moscow, and after the mission was completed and revealed to them, the media complained that they’d been deceived about Kissinger’s whereabouts while it was going on. But the government isn’t required to tell about every move it makes, is it?

When we should have repented, we rebelled

The next speaker was Dr. Michael D. Evans, an American author and evangelist, and he took the oratory up a notch, speaking as if he were haranguing a congregation.

He said a big contemporary problem is that people don’t believe in evil. They believe that Israel is fighting a war on terror and is using excessive force. That’s insane. The war is not against terror, it is not against an ideology, it is against evil. It’s not on account of land; they’ve been killing you for 4000 years anyway, says Evans. The conflict is because they’re idolaters and you believe in principles as absolutes.

We have the same problem in the USA, he says. They killed a King and two Kennedys and that created a crisis. The response to a crisis is always either repentance or rebellion. In this case, Americans responded by rebellion. They rebelled against the idea of God and embraced secular humanism. In the name of enlightenment they arrogated the right to create their own morality. One result was the recent economic disaster. And meanwhile the proxies of evil have been bombing Israel because Israel is the proxy of America. The war in Lebanon was a test to measure Western tolerance for slaughter: how many body bags can you stomach before you give up?

People need to ask deep questions, and they are inclined to blame everyone but themselves.

There are those who want to kill you, and you can’t change their minds. By making you accustomed to injustice, eventually they dumb you down. In Ahmadinejad, Israel is facing someone who believes his own propaganda, and only divine help can save us.

Human rights should not be seen as a leftist issue

Before giving her talk, Dalia Dorner, a retired supreme court judge and now president of the Press Council, remarked that the next time this conference is held, she hoped to see more women invited to speak.

Israel still has a set of Basic Laws instead of a constitution, and freedom of speech is covered not by a Basic Law but only by court precedent. And it isn’t like the freedom of speech in the USA; in Israel, for example, neo-Nazis would not be allowed to march provocatively through a Jewish neighborhood. In addition, we have a law against Holocaust denial and we have censorship where military information is concerned. However, Israel wouldn’t be a democracy if it didn’t respect the principle of free speech.

The media aren’t monolithic, there are many media outlets and the more the better. Currently there is a proposal to forbid foreign ownership of Hebrew-language dailies, but Dorner believes every newspaper is a welcome addition to our democracy.

The criterion for limiting freedom of expression is whether a strong likelihood of significant harm exists.

You aren’t influenced politically by the newspaper you read. If the newspaper disagrees with you, you are irritated and switch to a different newspaper.

The newspapers do have an influence in creating an identification of human rights and environmental causes with the political left, and it’s a false identification. Meir Shamgar and Moshe Landau were Israeli advocates of human rights who had a right-wing background as well. Defending human rights is everybody’s business.

While the influence of a newspaper can’t change anyone’s opinion, it can ruin a person. There is a court of press ethics that should deter journalists from inflicting unnecessary damage on individuals. Also, the media should not attempt to influence trials, those mentioned in the media should receive the right of reply, facts should be checked, and such censorship as exists should be respected.

Dorner invites anyone to contact the Press Council and report any instances of truly harmful behavior by the media (not merely differences of opinion).

Selective news and selective prosecution

In response to questions put to the panel, Evans said he believed Israel was right to bar the media from Gaza during the recent operation there. He said that during the Lebanese war he’d seen reporters falsifying stories, with some even photographed in Haifa claiming they were in Lebanon. Asked about the Goldstone Report, he said that in the USA people haven’t even heard of it.

Evans says that in the USA, the media are mostly run by liberal Democrats and that their money won the recent election.

A member of the audience challenged Aumann regarding Holocaust denial, saying that while anyone should be free to say God doesn’t exist, there are additional implications when you say that the Holocaust didn’t exist. It implies that the Jews are liars with the power to alter the history books and extort money and sympathy for something that didn’t happen. He asked Aumann to either clarify himself or think again.

Someone mentioned a remark by a left-wing media figure advising the terrorists to restrict their attacks to settlers east of the Green Line. Isn’t a remark like that an actionable offense, encouraging violence against others? Judge Dorner mused that it does seem bad. Aumann said that the political left tends not to be prosecuted for its behavior.

The topic of discriminatory treatment in Israel struck a chord with Evans, who asked why Christians are persecuted in Israel. A fifteen-year-old Christian boy — whose parents are in the audience today — was critically injured by a bomb left at his house. Evans said he’d expected such an incident to create an uproar in Israel but it was almost ignored. Dorner said she found it hard to believe that there was any anti-Christian motivation in any such incident. People in the audience called out that Evans was referring to a crime for which American immigrant Jack Tytell had recently been arrested, and evidently Tytell had deliberately targeted a Messianic Jewish family (by many people’s definition, a “Christian” one). Dorner seemed unfamiliar with the story.

To a complaint about the intrusion of editorial opinion into the reportage of facts, Dorner replied that first of all, the situation used to be much worse. You could read the national news in a left-wing paper and in a right-wing paper and you’d think you were reading about different countries. But anyone who does see opinion prominently appearing where only facts belong should notify the Press Council.

Aumann remarked that the public is influenced not only by how the news is presented, but also by the choice of what is to be presented and what is not. In fact the choice of news may have a greater impact than the opinions expressed by the media.

A member of the audience asked why incitement by Jews is prosecuted while incitement by Arabs is not. Dorner denied that such a distinction exists. Aumann said it does.