Israeli Media Self-Criticism: “We Fanned the Hysteria”, by Hillel Fendel (Israel National News)
Listing the media’s sins: Television and print reporter Raviv Drucker spoke out at a journalists’ gathering in Tel Aviv Tuesday night.
He spoke of the perceived need to fill airtime with frivolities, the failure to apologize, correct or encourage, and the binding dependence upon financial influences.
The event, with the participations of some 150 reporters, was sponsored by the Hebrew website Scoop – for which most of the participants work.
Guest speaker Raviv Drucker, the diplomatic commentator for Channel Ten, listed what he felt were several faults of the Israeli media over the past few years. “We have not yet managed to overcome some internal problems,” he said, “such as following up items publicized by competing news organs. We also have not yet learned to correct or to apologize. The competitiveness has slightly driven us out of our minds.”
Drucker criticized the “obsessive need to fill the news shows’ air time with non-stop items.” He said that the need to “entertain makes us more cynical; the news becomes entertainment.”
In 2005, shortly before the Disengagement/expulsion from Gush Katif and northern Shomron, Raviv Drucker co-authored a book entitled, “Boomerang: The Failure of Leadership in the Second Intifada.” The book charged that the Disengagement plan was born because then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was sure that then-State Prosecutor Edna Arbel was on the way to indicting him. The book also claimed that decisions on the Disengagement plan were made by marginalizing military experts, and without the participation of the ministers and the Cabinet.
Criticisms of the press were heard for the way it largely ignored the allegations. Israel’s Media Watch submitted a complaint charging that the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Channel 1 totally ignored it. MK Yitzchak Levy told Arutz-7 at the time that the Israeli press was “betraying its basic mission.” He said, “The almost-absolute silence regarding the astonishing revelations by Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelach leave no room to be surprised. Everything that does not fall into line with the Prime Minister’s policy is apparently not worthy of being covered. It’s as if it’s nothing. Every squeak by some beginning singer is covered more widely than these scandalous revelations of the book Boomerang.”
In his speech, Drucker even decried the lack of supervisory bodies over Israel’s media: “Practically speaking, there are barely any watchdogs over the media to determine that you have done your work unfairly or irresponsibly.”
The media lost an opportunity to encourage and strengthen the populace during last summer’s war, Drucker charged: “During the war, we sinned by fanning the public hysteria… What the public wanted was some kind of massage to the national ego; it wanted all’s-clear sirens. But during the war, we did not succeed in calming down the hysteria or in reducing the element of tension – and sometimes we did the exact opposite.”