The digital age has made choosing news about Israel a battle - opinion

In these troubled times, my thoughts often meander back to my early years in Israel. I was in my early twenties then. There was no social media, no cellphones. Israel was still a relatively young country surrounded by belligerent enemies. Threats came from Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. There were daily terrorist threats, and even though Israel had Western allies, the international support for Israel was lukewarm, much as it is today. In those days, news was very important. Everyone needed to know what was happening at any given time of the day or night. I have vivid memories of sitting on Egged buses traveling from A to B. 

Many bus drivers had the radio on while they transported their passengers. Often, they were listening to local stations which played popular music. The volume was always kept low until the time for news on the hour, when the volume was raised and the shrill sound of six pips reverberated around the bus. Everything went quiet; people stopped talking, and everyone strained to listen to find out what was happening in the country. This ritual was embedded in the daily life of almost every citizen. At home, there were only two television channels to watch. They were both run by the national broadcaster, the Israel Broadcast Authority (IBA). 

Everyone listened to the same news, which was delivered in Hebrew. English speakers got their news from The Jerusalem Post or listened to the brief English newscasts broadcast twice a day on Kol Yisrael. For me, coming from South Africa, Israel’s news offerings were a great deal better than life in Johannesburg, where there was no television at all. We received our news through three radio stations, none of which were free of the apartheid government’s censors. If you wanted to know what was really going on in the world, you had to tune in to the BBC World Service or Voice of America on a shortwave radio. Sometimes in Israel, one could tune in to Jordanian TV, which broadcast a nightly program in English. Their news was always a chilling experience, as it served as an insidious propaganda tool aimed at English listeners in Israel.

“This is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” the attractive female announcer would begin. This was often followed by a diatribe of anti-Israel slurs and misinformation. A similar radio broadcast could be heard every day at lunchtime from Cairo. It was called The Voice of Cairo, or Kol Kahir. A thin Lord HawHaw type voice would spread its anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish venom on a daily basis in Hebrew. It filled the average listener with considerable discomfort and even dread.

Today things are vastly different. We live in the digital age and are bombarded with a massive amount of printed, spoken, and visual information. In 2009, I ran management development workshops with a team of international TV producers in London. At that time, the producers had to engage in an exercise where they needed to think outside the box and predict the future of television in Europe and across the globe. They worked in teams, and one team came up with the idea of hand-held television on your mobile phone. People were fascinated. Nevertheless, the idea got shot down because the proposers could not explain how broadcasters could get around the limitations of bandwidth, copyright, legal hurdles, etc. Well, despite having their proposal rejected out of hand by the RTL [media] judging panel, the proposers were spot-on with their creative idea. It is hard to imagine our lives today without the intervention of “content on the go.” WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the massive number of apps created by all the major broadcasters around the world are part of everyone’s daily media consumption. I remember the proposers pitching the plus points of their ideas.

“Can you imagine a world where you can choose news you want to watch?” They went on to explain how the concept would revolutionize public opinion. “Instead of just four major television stations massaging our opinions in one sociopolitical direction, we will be given the freedom of choosing what news and what opinions we want to hear.”

The big question is: Was this a blessing or a curse for society at large?

Sadly, the events of October 7, 2023, have proven this point. From the minute the war started, content producers began to pump out stories about the war in Gaza. The Western media began with an unusually positive tone regarding Israel’s plight. It didn’t take long before the BBC and CNN exposed their anti-Israel bias. The most sickening example of this was the false reporting by the BBC that Israel was behind the [October 17] bombing of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Even after Israel had denied that it was responsible for the destruction of the hospital, many other media outlets jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon. Eventually, the journalists at the BBC were forced to admit that they were wrong. Their apology came in the morning after the false allegations had been spread around the world. The news anchor at the time made the apology early in the morning when very few people were watching the BBC. 

It was then that I and many other supporters of Israel made the decision not to watch BBC news reports on the conflict. They simply could not be trusted. Sadly, a similar situation developed with Sky News UK, whose reporters have shown more than an “unconscious bias” against the IDF and Israel. They were joined by other news outlets in Europe, such as France 24 and Deutsche Welle English news. We went on to delete the Euronews app on our smart TVs. Most of the Arab media decided to weaponize the news in the fight against Israel. 

A recent YouTube video featuring Egyptian author Dalia Ziada gives us some insight into what is happening throughout the Middle East. She describes how she and about 300 other Egyptian journalists were invited to attend a press briefing soon after the October 7 massacre. They were to be briefed on what happened in Israel along the border with Gaza on that day. The journalists were shown footage of the massacre, including footage taken by the Hamas terrorists. Ziada was shocked, horrified, and outraged by what she saw. She went public and made her views clear about the fact that Hamas had committed these terrible atrocities. She was particularly affected by the footage showing sexual violence against women. Following Ziada’s anti-Hamas coverage, she began to receive a massive wave of hate mail from all over Egypt and the Muslim world, including vicious threats to her life. Things got so bad for the journalist that she was forced to flee from her homeland and go into hiding. 

What she saw in the footage later became documented and reproduced by Israel’s public diplomacy division. The 47-minute video has been shown to many key people, including heads of state, leaders, business leaders, politicians, and celebrities who have come to Israel to show support. In almost every case, the reactions to the footage were shock, disbelief, and even trauma. One individual who watched the footage was Elon Musk who, to begin with, had been accused of having a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bias. Viewing the video footage made him change his viewpoint. The next day, he attended a business meeting in New York wearing the dog tag that has become the symbol of the “Bring Them Home Now” hostage campaign.

One tireless warrior against the anti-Israel news is HonestReporting. Led by the indomitable Gil Hoffman, a former Jerusalem Post journalist, HonestReporting’s team meticulously examines news releases. On March 30, my wife and I had the privilege of watching Hoffman and Eylon Levy, the brilliant (now dismissed) Israeli government spokesperson, being interviewed at the Begin Center in Jerusalem by the center’s Senior Fellow Paul Gross. 

“Far from tuning out of these broadcasters’ programs, one should keep watching them,” Hoffman told the audience. “We rely on the pro-Israel public to help us to weed out the inaccuracies and deliberately biased reporting.” He showed a clip of a CNN reporter’s account of what was happening in Gaza, one day after the conflict began in October. It was astonishing to hear the anchor claim that the IDF “attacked Gaza, with its nine million citizens crowded into the most densely populated land area in the world.”

Hoffman went on to urge supporters to keep reading The New York Times, despite the virulent anti-Israel stance that the newspaper chooses to adopt.

The sad truth about modern technology and the media is that we have reached a stage where the news may be unobtrusively choosing you! I am referring to media such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Whenever I search or see news items on YouTube, I start getting similar video posts sent to my devices. This has a lot to do with the technology of algorithms, which means that the Internet platforms and content providers search out patterns of viewing from every user across the globe. If you watch pro-Israel content on a regular basis, you will begin to receive similar content on a daily, if not hourly, basis. By the same token, if you watch anti-Israel footage from media such as Al Jazeera, you will begin to receive a tirade of vicious anti-Israel content from different sources. 

Add to this the predicted consequences of AI as a tool for creating and faking news stories, and we can look forward to the very worst excesses of a media war against Israel. Hoffman’s words resonated with me. We all need to be vigilant, to act as anti-propaganda foot soldiers in our asymmetric war with our enemies.■