Sifting through the bias about Netanyahu, Hamas and Harris
The search for objective truth is both difficult and by nature a subjective exercise.
Jonathan S. Tobin/JNS
Journalists, however, are supposed to persevere and pursue the facts, following the evidence wherever it leads them. But in an age of Internet journalism where much of our corporate and legacy media have abandoned that quest in favor of political activism—much of it tilting hard to the left—the whole notion of truth and the credibility of the press has been thrown into question, if not largely lost.
That’s a tragedy for a number of important reasons, not least because a free press that can be trusted by the public is an essential element of democracy. If much of the media is perceived as dishonest—or, worse, largely acting as agents of the government and/or the political establishment and its institutions—then a nation must be considered less than free. Among the most important consequences of this is the way a biased press, acting in unison on an issue, can make it hard for thinking people to know what to believe.
That’s the context for the problem in deciphering the truth about a number of leading stories in which the leading elements of the corporate media all seem to be reading from the same playbook.
How agenda journalism works
One is the question of whether Israel’s war on Hamas terrorists in Gaza has failed. Another is the battle between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on one side, and the heads of his country’s military and security agencies on the other. Add to that the argument with the Biden-Harris administration which, we are told, also centers on whether Israel’s premier is the only obstacle to a ceasefire and hostage release deal, and why he’s supposedly acting in this manner. Still another focuses on the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and whether it, as the American liberal press keeps telling us, is an astonishing and runaway success.
The public’s understanding of these stories—both in the United States and Israel—hinge on whether we should believe the accepted narrative that leading journalists have all agreed upon.
In each case, it might be true. Israel may be failing to defeat Hamas, and, if so, the entire 10 months of war since the Oct. 7 massacres in southern Israel must be considered a futile, bloody exercise that has hurt the Jewish state. Netanyahu might be behaving irresponsibly by opposing both his own security chiefs and the Americans. And Harris might be pulling off an amazing turnaround in which much of the public has suddenly accepted her as a brilliant leader rather than the problematic figure she had been seen as up until the last few weeks.
Still, given that each of these narratives is exactly what liberal media opinion leaders would like to be the truth (and that the reporting on all of them seems skewed and heavily influenced by their outlets’ editorial positions), skepticism is more than justified.
Yet the problem here goes deeper than just the way a partisan media illustrates its bias on a wide range of issues. When citizens don’t trust the media, it’s not a theoretical threat to democracy. It sets in motion the collapse of the basic premise of democracy.
Each side reads, listens and watches different media—and not merely draws different conclusions about what is right but about what is actually happening. If we can’t agree on the difference between factual events that are reported and mere opinions about what is going on, then there can be no agreement to disagree and to accept the results of elections. In an atmosphere of such distrust, societies become completely bifurcated. At this point, conspiracy theories fly, and there is little way for even informed citizens engaged in critical reading to know exactly who is telling the truth, who is lying or who is merely mistaken.
Labeling truth as ‘disinformation’
Adding to the confusion is the willingness of the same media establishment that is skewing the news to label contrary reporting and views as “disinformation” and subject to merely refutation but censorship.
We’ve seen this happen during the COVID-19 pandemic when mainstream media—slavishly following the dictates of government institutions and politicians—labeled any dissent about measures like lockdowns, social-distancing, mask-wearing and vaccine mandates, or even the origin of the virus, as not merely rooted in falsehoods but ill-intentioned conspiracy theories. In almost all cases, most of those beliefs labeled as such turned out to have more truth to them than the official line that had been relentlessly peddled by established media.
These weren’t the only examples of damage done to the credibility of the media.
The promotion of the Russia collusion hoax in which former President Donald Trump was falsely portrayed as a Russian agent in the first years of his administration was, in retrospect, particularly shocking since so many people who were not his opponents were initially prepared to believe it because they didn’t understand what was behind the inaccurate reporting. The suppression of reporting about the uncovering of evidence of Hunter Biden’s corruption scandal by labeling it “Russian disinformation” in the waning weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign was also egregious because of the brazenly partisan nature of the media coverage of the story.
And it is impossible to discuss journalistic bias without mentioning how most of the media covered President Joe Biden before his disastrous debate on June 27 against Trump. The same prestigious outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC all denied the growing evidence of Biden’s physical and mental decline for years until it became obvious and politically inconvenient for their editorial stands on who should win the 2024 election.
They then turned on a dime and suddenly began telling the truth about Biden as they joined in efforts to force him out of the race. Then they immediately celebrated and began puffing up Harris, who until being anointed by the party leadership as the Democratic presidential nominee without having to win a single vote was widely seen as unable to speak without engaging in incomprehensible word salads that said nothing. Now, without giving a single live and unscripted interview in which her mettle might be tested, the same media tells us that she’s an incandescent star who by the sheer strength of her appeal has turned the election upside down.
She may well win in November. But at this point, it’s hard to say whether that will be because of heretofore untapped brilliance now on display or because so many talking heads, editorial columns, news stories and analyses are telling us that it is so, whether or not it is rooted in anything but their desire to defeat Trump by any means necessary.
What’s amiss here is not so much whether the media cover-up allowed Biden to maintain his candidacy when it should never have lasted so long or if Harris has been helped, as she almost certainly has been, by the way she has been parachuted into the contest with Trump. It’s that evidence that contradicted the narrative that the political left and its media cheerleaders had decided upon was trashed as “disinformation” until it was accepted as truth by the same people who had been denying it, without an apology or even the feeblest of explanations.
It is in that context of not just media bias but also groupthink narrative setting that destroys press credibility that we should view the reporting about Israel’s war on Hamas and the quarrels inside Israel’s government.
Is Hamas winning?
CNN’s story about how Hamas has weathered 10 months of war and succeeded in fending off the Israel Defense Forces’ efforts to eradicate the terrorist group provided sobering reading and viewing. The contention is that while the terrorist organization that ruled all of the Gaza Strip for more than 16 years until Oct. 7 is no longer able to operate as a conventional army, some of its battalions are still functioning as a formidable guerrilla force able to inflict casualties on the Israelis, recruit thousands of new members and return to areas previously cleared by the IDF without too much trouble.
It also argues that efforts to use the sort of counterinsurgency tactics that have worked in conflicts elsewhere—in which armies hold positions and develop good relationships with the local population while developing alternative leaderships to the terrorists, like that used by the United States during the 2007 to 2008 surge in Iraq—isn’t possible in Gaza. The conclusion is, therefore, that Israel can’t win a military victory over Hamas and that the Jewish state must therefore adopt some sort of “political solution” to extricate itself from a bloody mess.
Yet this is exactly what the same talking heads and opinion leaders in the liberal corporate media have been telling us since Oct. 7. Indeed, the Times was publishing stories to that effect as early as November when the IDF offensive was in its initial stages.
No war goes perfectly according to plan and expecting Hamas terrorists, who were deeply dug into not just Palestinian society but a tunnel metropolis that is larger than the New York subway system, to go easily or quickly was never likely. But the problem here is that Hamas’s willingness to hang on and keep fighting to the last Palestinian civilian, all the while still holding Israeli hostages who were kidnapped on Oct. 7, is largely based on their rational analysis of the ability of Netanyahu’s opponents to force him to give up.
They launched this war on Oct. 7 with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction because such actions were in line with the genocidal ideology that is the belief system of Hamas and the majority of the Palestinian population that supports them. But it was also begun in the belief that the West and the Israeli left would bail them out even if things got rough. And that is exactly what may be about to happen.
Since the Israeli left, the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and its press echo chamber believe that Hamas is an “idea” that cannot be defeated and that a “political solution” involving more Israeli territorial retreats is the only answer, it colors everything the public reads and views about the war from those outlets.
Creating pressure for a deal
Does that mean that the opposite of the narrative is the truth, and that Israel is close to or will soon achieve a military victory in Gaza? We don’t know for sure. It’s also difficult to gauge the authenticity of stories floated in anti-Netanyahu outlets like Israel’s Channel 12, The Times of Israel and Haaretz, and regurgitated in the American press about the Israeli military and intelligence establishment all being in favor of a deal that would essentially allow Hamas to survive in order to end the war and, presumably, the political career of the prime minister.
But we do know that pressure being exerted on Netanyahu to accede to Hamas’s demands in the ceasefire/hostage talks about removing the IDF’s checkpoints in Gaza or abandoning the Philadelphi corridor along the border with Egypt through which Hamas receives supplies will ensure that the terrorists not only emerge battered and unbeaten by war but, as the CNN and Times stories insist, retake control of the Strip. And a Hamas that is still alive and well in Gaza and likely still holding on to some of the hostages would be able to claim that it won the post-Oct. 7 war—something that will unquestionably alter the future of the conflict for the worse.
Given the barbarity with which it conducted the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent fighting, the notion being floated in the liberal media that it will be more radicalized by the war or the killings of its leaders by Israel is ludicrous. But the narrative about Israeli military failure and the futility of Netanyahu’s policy of continuing the war until “victory” is achieved is rooted as much in pre-existing beliefs about the necessity of reaching a political deal with an opponent that we know very well has no interest in any solution but the end of Israel and the genocide of its population.
At the heart of every discussion about these troubling questions about the extent of the IDF’s success or whether Netanyahu is right to stick to his position on any ceasefire is the certain knowledge that much of the information we are getting about all of this is not being served up objectively. Rather, it is part of a political narrative about the peace process and Netanyahu that has much more to do with Israeli and American politics than it does with the facts on the ground in Gaza or the reality of the negotiations.
It turns out that people who only get their news from prestigious outlets like the Times and CNN, in addition to their Israeli moral equivalents, can be among the least informed people on the planet even while still thinking themself in possession of all the key facts. Accepting without question what we are being fed by the mainstream media about these issues is not just a mistake; it has consequences for the future of the Jewish people, Israel and democracy that are unthinkable.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
