Russ Roberts:Our topic for today with you, Matti, is the media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the word ‘Gaza.’ And the reason you’re invited is that–for listeners–Matti worked in the Jerusalem Bureau of the Associated Press [AP] between 2006 and 2011. In 2014, he wrote a piece about that experience: 2014, almost 10 years ago. I encourage you to read it. We’ll link to it.
My suspicion is that not much has changed in how the mainstream media–Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]–how they cover the Arab-Israeli conflict, in particular how they cover the current war with Hamas. And, I’ve invited Matti back to the program to talk about this issue, but I’m sure we’ll get into other issues as well.
Now, let’s start with how many reporters, as you did in your piece in 2014, are assigned to the, say, Jerusalem Bureau or the Arab-Israeli conflict, or Hamas, or Gaza, or the West Bank, relative to other parts of the world?
Matti Friedman: I guess I should say at the outset that my experiences at the AP come from my time on the desk in the Jerusalem Bureau, which is between 2006 and the very end of 2011. I’m not in the Bureau right now, so I don’t have access to the current numbers, but I’m speaking broadly from my experience in those years and based in a general sense on those two essays that I wrote in the summer of 2014, one for Tablet and one for The Atlantic. When I was at the AP, we had about 40 full-time staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. So, we’re talking about Israel, a country of about nine million people today. In the West Bank, in Gaza, four million, five million. It depends on which numbers you believe. So, we’re talking about a story that incorporates about 14 million people.
And, just to give listeners a point of comparison, the number of staff we had here, which was 40–and sometimes it was a bit more–that number was dramatically higher than the number of staff we had at that time covering India, which is a country of 1.3 billion people. It was more staff than we had in those years covering China. It was more staff than we had in those years covering all of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, that’s 50-something countries. There were more staff, more news staffers here in Israel, than in all of those countries combined.
I think that quantifies something that most listeners will probably get anyway, which is that you hear a lot about Israel. Israel is a story that gets tremendous amount of news coverage even when very little is going on in many years over the past decade.
For example, the death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was lower than the homicide rate in Indianapolis, but the story is covered often as if it were the most important story in the world. And that was certainly true when I was at the AP. The Jerusalem Bureau was the AP’s biggest international bureau, and the AP is or says it is the largest news organization in the world. That claim is also made by Reuters, apparently, so, we’ll take it with a grain of salt. But these are the big news organizations that are doing the heavy lifting of news coverage. And, by and large, this story has been considered, if not the most important story in the world, then certainly one of them.
Russ Roberts: Of course, today, it seems to be the most important story on Twitter, and probably in many, many other media outlets. Although, that may be due to my selective choice of who to follow on Twitter. But it’s clearly the case that the world’s eyes are on Israel and in particular on its behavior in Gaza.
Russ Roberts: I want you to start–let’s talk about the nature of media. I think a lot of people–I certainly did until I thought about it more as an economist–when I thought about a major newspaper like the New York Times, or, say, when I lived in St. Louis, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I imagined that the reporters get together in the morning with the editors and they have a meeting and they say, ‘What happened yesterday?’ And they say, ‘Well, this, this, and this’; and they write it up, and that’s the paper.
But, of course, that’s naive beyond words. The nature of a news organization is they decide what the news is to some extent, and there’s some group think. So, they tend to follow each other. Is that accurate, my cynical view of the news business, in your experience?
Matti Friedman: I’m glad you mentioned Twitter, because I think it is important to remember that a discussion of mainstream news outlets or the mainstream media, if that term still applies–it always makes me feel like Rush Limbaugh when I say ‘mainstream media’–but I think we know what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the big players in the traditional news industry–the New York Times, the BBC, AP, CNN [Cable News Network]–places like that. In 2023, this discussion can sound a bit archaic, because so many of those news outlets have been just gutted and so much discourse now takes place on social media.
So, we’re talking about the big news organizations, which are I think still the places people go when they want to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. But many people, certainly young people, are nowhere near those organizations anymore.
But, yes, the description that you gave is accurate. I mean, I think often people imagine that news is like an algorithm. So, you have events on planet earth that are run through a computer, and then what you get coming out on the other end is news coverage. And I think even journalists, like, pretend that our profession is a kind of science. So, you have biology, chemistry, journalism, physics–those are the hard sciences.
But what we’re doing is a very human action of taking these very complicated events on planet earth and deciding how to describe them and deciding which events are important and which events are not important. There are many, many events on planet earth–most events on planet earth–which will never be in a Western newspaper. They’ll never be of any interest to Western reporters. So, certain things are of interest to the Western mind and many things are not. There are many, many examples, and I gave some of them in those articles, just comparing the death toll–for example, the murders of women in Pakistan versus the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and why certain things are interesting and certain things are not. And often reporters I think are not honest with themselves about why certain things are interesting and certain things are not interesting.
I think that the Israel story and the just completely disproportionate amount of attention that is paid to it is a good opportunity to think about how the Western consciousness is skewed in many ways, or imperfect, and certainly not scientific.
So, when that news meeting happens, as you describe it in St. Louis or Chicago or New York, what comes to the table are a series of particular interests or a series of preconceived notions, an idea of what in the world is interesting and what isn’t. And what you get at the end of that process is something called news, but I think it would be a mistake to read that as a realistic portrayal of events on planet earth.
Russ Roberts: Now, when you were covering Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab, or just Israel issues or Palestinian issues, you argue in your piece–again, written in 2014–that there was a particular narrative that was on the table at the Associated Press. Israel had a role to play in that narrative, and the Palestinians had a role to play in that narrative. What was that narrative? What was the story that underlay–or overlay maybe is a better phrase–the coverage that was chosen?
Matti Friedman: First of all, the story is presented as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I was at the AP, every day we had to write a story, which was called in the internal parlance of the bureau ‘Is/Pals’–Israelis and Palestinians. It was a story framed as a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; when in fact, most of Israel’s wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel has fought wars unfortunately against Jordanians and Syrians and Iraqis and Lebanese. Israel’s most important enemy for the past few decades has been Iran, and the Iranians are not Palestinians. So, clearly, there is a broader conflict going on here that isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But a news story needs to be simple. A news story functions along the lines of a fairytale. You need a princess and a dragon to make a really good news story. That’s what will engage a reader who is not really going to be able to deal with complicated stories that involve many dozens of actors.
So, a good example of a story that’s been a blockbuster news story over the past year is the Russia-Ukraine story. Why does that story work? Of course, there are many conflicts going on in the world all the time, but the Russia-Ukraine story works in part because the combatants look like people in the West. That’s one of the hidden drivers of Western interests. And, it also works because it’s a princess/dragon story. You have plucky underdogs–the Ukrainians–fighting Darth Vader basically in the form of Vladimir Putin. So, that’s a story that works.
So, a story about complicated factors in the Middle East, and Iranians, and Syrians, and Jordanians, and, you know, a hundred years’ of very complicated history, that’s not really going to be able to grab a reader, to simplify it as an Israeli-Palestinian story. And that’s the story that people know. Even though, if you try to interpret events here using that format, they won’t make sense. If you try to understand what’s going on here as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it doesn’t really add up. You need to understand it regionally. But that’s the framing.
Within that framing, the story is about powerful Israelis and innocent Palestinians, or certainly powerless Palestinians. And the story is set up basically as a parable about power, where the Israelis are made to embody all of the ills of the West as liberal people see them.
And I would certainly place myself in the liberal camp, by the way, just for anyone [?inaudible 00:12:00]. Colonialism, militarism, racism, nationalism, all of these ills are embodied by Israel, and the Palestinians exist in a story largely as a foil. So, you’re not going to read a whole lot about the internal drivers of Palestinian politics. When I was at the AP, we hardly paid any attention to the Palestinians as agents of their own fate or as actors in the story. They exist to be victims of the party that matters, which is Israel.
And in those stories I wrote in 2014, I actually started counting: when I realized the problem at the Bureau, I started counting the number of critical stories we were writing about Israeli society. And I can’t remember now what the number was, but it was a very high number of just this kind of routine of kind of very aggressive criticism of all kinds of aspects of Israeli society. And the comparison to the number of critical stories we’d written about the Palestinians was absurd. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think we wrote more critical stories in a one-month period about Israel than we had about the Palestinians in the preceding three or four years.
So, the party that’s of interest here is Israel. And you can really see it in the current war as well. The coverage is of Israeli actions. There was a coverage, of course, of the initial Hamas attack that started the war. That has now worn off. And now the war is basically portrayed as being a war with one side: It’s just Israel.
So, if there’s going to be a ceasefire, Israel needs to be forced to accept a ceasefire. The description of the campaign in Gaza is described as Israeli actions, and the Palestinians are almost absent as actors in the story.
I think that’s very much part of the way the story has been set up, and it’s part of the reason that it is very hard to understand actual events if you’re trying to do so with a news story.
Russ Roberts: So, you come to this story in 2014–or to the present–with your own set, of course, of biases, perspectives, frameworks. An AP editor criticized your piece. You responded. We’ll put links up to that, also.
But on the surface, it seems a little hard to believe. Longtime listeners will recognize Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics. In that book, which I strongly recommend–it’s a great book–he says, “The difference between Liberals,” well, I’m going to call them Progressives, “[Progressives], conservatives, and libertarians is they use a different lens.” So, Progressives see the world through the lens of the oppressor versus the oppressed.
And you’ve just described that quite well. The oppressor is powerful.
The oppressed is not only oppressed, but it’s totally powerless: has no agency and no real responsibility taken by their situation. “The conservative sees the world as a fight between civilization and barbarism.” There’s nothing redeeming about the barbarians. They have no argument on their side. And it says the conservative, it’s up to the civilized to defend themselves. And the libertarian perspective, which doesn’t apply so well here, but just to finish it up, the taxonomy, the libertarian perspective is to see the world through the lens of coercion versus voluntary, the power of the state versus freedom for the individual.
If you take domestic American issues, this works quite well. Take the minimum wage. The employer is the oppressor, the worker is the oppressed, so we need the minimum wage to help them. The libertarian says the government has no right to interfere in personal freedom between workers and employees, and the conservative sees it as it’s important to maintain–I can’t even remember the conservative story now. I’m going to blank out on it, so we’ll leave that out.
But, my point is that in this particular conflict, the libertarian perspective, although relevant because, in some dimensions, because of, say, the way that war often empowers the state in ways that are dangerous to individual freedom–putting that to the side, that’s an internal issue here in Israel. It’s an internal issue for sure in Gaza.
But, if we think about the Israeli-Gazan, Israeli-Hamas fight, the Progressive-Conservative lenses look very appropriate here. The Progressive lens–oppressor versus oppressed–Israel is strong, Palestinians and Hamas particular are powerless. October 7th was an exception, but now they’re back as being oppressed. So, I wouldn’t say October 7th is forgotten, but it is not usually a perspective that’s spread into the current conversation about the war in general from the media.
Similarly, the Conservatives look at the current war and say: Hamas are barbarians. Look what they did on October 7th. Israel is at the front lines of the fight for civilization against radical Islam, and therefore, Israel is the good guy.
So, the Conservatives tend to side with Israel and are sympathetic to Israel. And I would add: tend not to read anything that suggests the Palestinians have a hard time.
So, the blind spot of the Conservative worldview is that, ‘Well, sometimes barbarians have a moral case to be made. How big it is, what entitles them to do, that’s a different question. But the Conservative tends to say, ‘Look, this is pretty simple. I’m civilized. They’re barbarians. We have to do anything it takes to take care of the problem.’ The Progressive, on the other hand, says, ‘Israel is totally powerful. They can do whatever they want.’ And they don’t look at any news stories either that discomfort their worldview, their lens.
They tend to focus on stories about, say, Israeli bombing in Gaza and the destruction and the deaths of civilians, the death of children, October 7th. Okay, that was then and maybe justified, even–many people, progressives would argue, because, what? can you blame them? They have nothing. They have no alternative.
So, again, the agentless, agency-less, oppressed against the oppressor in the Progressive view–in the Conservative view, the fight for civilization against the hordes at the gate, the barbarians.
And, the point I want to emphasize is that–before we go further–is that how biased our consumption of news is–especially in the world of social media, right?–where I can curate my newsfeed to totally satisfy my worldview and to get outraged at things that violate that worldview.
So, when I’m on Twitter and I’m pro-Israel–I tend to be Conservative on this issue–and I see things that make Israel look bad, I read them cringing. And I don’t want to believe them.
Just to take an example, over the last few days, Israel took a bunch of people out in Gaza, stripped all men, stripped them down to their underwear. And according to the Israeli defenders of civilization, that was necessary because they sometimes wear suicide belts and suicide vests. And they’re dangerous and they’re armed. And so, therefore, that was a legitimate thing to do.
The Progressive side has treated this as a war crime. They write about it on Twitter as if it’s humiliation beyond imagining and that these innocent people cowering in–no, they don’t even have bomb shelters in Gaza because Hamas didn’t build any for whatever–well, we know why they didn’t. But they didn’t.
And so, these poor civilians are cowering and now they’ve been humiliated in front of their wives and children. They’ve been forced to strip naked. And this is a horrible thing.
And both sides are outraged. This tends to be the nature of coverage.
But, to step back from that, to your world of 2014–2010, say–when you were working for the Associated Press, you wrote about it as if the only narrative that could be told in the AP newsroom was the Progressive narrative.
And you give the example of: if you propose writing a story on corruption on the part of Hamas, it just couldn’t fly. And if you talked about how they were building a military infrastructure–you actually mentioned this, tragically. I mean, it’s unbearable to read it today.–underneath a civilian infrastructure, you can’t write about it. So, those stories never got written. Is that really true? And you can comment on what I said before, too, if you want.
Matti Friedman: I think that your analysis of the way things looked generally is unfortunately very true. People are in silos of information that reinforce what they believe and find the world outside their silo to be increasingly incomprehensible, if not infuriating. And it’s very hard to imagine how we’ll be able to run democratic societies in these circumstances. I mean, if you don’t even agree who won an election, then it’s going to be pretty hard to act together for the common good.
And we’re all, I think, in that story: not just where Israel is concerned; it’s a much bigger phenomenon. I think that if there’s a flaw in those essays that I wrote in 2014 and I’m sure there are many, but I was too narrowly focused on Israel. I thought that the press was malfunctioning here. And I’d seen it intimately, and I described what I saw.
From 2023, it’s very clear that this is part of a much broader malfunction where the Press moves from explanatory journalism largely into activism. Where the question about any news story is not ‘Is it accurate or not?’, but does it have the correct political conclusion or not? Will it move our readers in the right direction or not? Does it help the fight for justice or hurt the fight for justice? And, those are very different questions than a journalist would traditionally ask.
And those were the questions that I saw being asked. [More to come, 22:12]