Israeli Media Became a Wartime Government Propaganda Arm

By Ido David Cohen

The Gaza war is unfolding on Israelis’ various screens via straightforward, unquestioning reporting of the Israeli military’s official accounts, plus a daily press briefing by military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. The coverage meanwhile downplays critical questions that have arisen during the conflict, like how much the ground maneuver endangers the lives of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

The deaths of thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza are ignored, and the Israeli media’s coverage shows images of destroyed buildings without mentioning the possibility of people being buried beneath the rubble. Only a few on-air voices challenge the establishment’s perception, even though the war broke out because of excessive reliance on pre-established concepts.

There is an obsessive repetition that the reports have been approved for publication by military censors. The media also gives too much attention to emotionality at the expense of hard news reports regarding the subject of the hostages. Perhaps more than anything, the media landscape is marked by endless forms of self-censorship.

Journalists and media researchers fear that Israeli broadcasting is returning to bad habits as part of an effort to lift morale and maintain solidarity with soldiers risking their lives in Gaza – and, in doing so, is failing to show the reality in Gaza.

“There are no explicit instructions, but there’s this kind of vibe that allows no place for stories of Gazan victims in the news broadcasts,” says a reporter for a leading new channel. “This is a surrender to the public mood, one that says that after such a great disaster, you shouldn’t ‘give the enemy an opportunity.’

“The problem is that this is detrimental to the role of the journalist because viewers get used to not treating the other side as human beings and then don’t understand why the whole world, which sees the difficult images from Gaza, turns its back on us and treats Israel as the aggressor.”

David Gurevitz, a cultural researcher and lecturer in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Letzion, says that “at first after the war broke out, the broadcast media played a responsible role. Now it’s becoming a propaganda arm of the government, full of populism and fiery patriotism. What motivates the media is the desire to appeal to the public and get high ratings.”

It’s hard to argue with the claim that in the first days after the Hamas massacres, Israeli television showed commendable professionalism at perhaps the most difficult time Israel had ever known. “After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military, gave voice to the cries of the murdered, demanded answers, and served as a platform for traumatized Israelis,” says Gurevitz.

Nurit Canetti, chairwoman of the Union of Journalists in Israel and a presenter of a current affairs program on Army Radio, agrees. “The press understood the burden placed on its shoulders, and fulfilled its role to keep the public informed about what was going on when everyone was in the dark, to give a platform to people who had been abandoned and to illuminate the places where the country failed, did not function or simply crumbled,” she says. “The journalists were the only ones who spoke to the bereaved families and the hostages’ families.”

It was this professional conduct that has led to a flourish of in-depth documentary work, such as stories about the fiascos involving the IDF spotters’ warnings and the hostages in Be’eri. These reports were produced “without waiting for official answers from the state; the media invested resources and presented audiences with stories in all their complexities. On that subject, they still deserve a medal,” Canetti says.

But amid the heavy sense of responsibility in broadcasters, a sense has surfaced of constant fear of offending the families of the hostages or the dead – which has led to self-censorship.

“On the one hand, delving into sensitive issues is our responsibility, but on the other, it’s hard to deal with because of the difficulty the public has,” she says. “So, again we aren’t debating things that clearly will land on the public’s desk in the future. When will we talk about the high number of reservists being killed, about friendly fire and the military accidents that are creating many victims, about the growing violence in the West Bank?

David Gurevitz.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

‘After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military.’

“There’s fear of the public and its reaction, and fear of the politicians because everything is again becoming political, and ‘the poison machine’” – as the network of incendiary, right-wing commentators and broadcasters that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attacks his purported enemies – “is very intense.”

Two and a half months after the outbreak of the war, it’s difficult to avoid the nagging questions that arise. How and why has the news coverage of events declined to the low point to which it has sunk now. Can the media’s current conduct be compared to prior wars? Who benefits from partial and biased reporting? How can the rest of this war be expected to look on the screen?

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A case study on Channel 12

The transformation that Israeli TV has undergone since the beginning of the war can summarized in the case of Channel 12 anchor Danny Kushmaro. In the initial days of the war, there was an outpouring of praise for him over the grief in his eyes, and this newspaper called him “the national libido,” someone who had experienced the shockwaves “and bravely withstood them.”

“He said the right things and when he reported from the field, it looked like were he to start a political party and run for the Knesset, he would have won the election,” says Mordecai Naor, a writer and Israeli history and media researcher.

“The matter of holding the government accountable was very uncharacteristic of Channel 12, and they did it because they felt that they were speaking on behalf of the public,” says Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “The criticism of the government was an expression of patriotism.”

That was followed by Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip and a new version of Danny Kushmaro, who brought a plastic rifle from the battlefield and waved it around in the studio. Gurevitz, the cultural researcher, was less enamored with the news anchor at that point.

“He became one of the prominent representatives of the hardline rhetoric, an example of a man who had quit his journalistic role of reporting, criticizing, and looking at things in a complex manner, instead speaking all the time about ‘the human animals’ [of Hamas] from a self-righteous standpoint.”

It should be noted that, at least for the time being, Channel 12’s Friday evening Ulpan Shishi news program doesn’t currently have a panelist to fill the role that Boaz Bismuth played as the resident Netanyahu supporter. After Bismuth, now a Knesset member, left the show to enter politics, he was replaced on the show by Danielle Roth-Avneri. She has not been on air since the war began.

Freed from official messaging, the show has taken a relatively critical line against the government and, in recent weeks, has seen its ratings jump to levels it hadn’t seen since the first COVID lockdown – more than 17 percent of the entire population in the first two weeks of December.

And yet, there’s a sense that the general tone at the station has changed. “Guy Peleg has his regular segment on Friday evening in which he says that Netanyahu is a danger to the country. That doesn’t represent the broadcasts during the course of the week,” Gurevitz says.

Last month, Peleg, the channel’s legal commentator, expressed concern on Ulpan Shishi over the Israeli media’s commitment to maintaining national morale during a report on efforts in the Prime Minister’s Office to gather evidence against the military over its conduct leading up to the war, against protocol.

Referring to the franchise holder at Channel 12, Peleg said: “Keshet, our employer, can conduct a campaign about unity and people can hang flags the length and breadth of the country, but the prime minister is fragmenting us.”

Despite Netanyahu’s low level of support and trust from the public, every wartime statement he makes to the media has been broadcast live. But with all due respect to Kushmaro (or Netanyahu), the most prominent figure who must be examined to understand the coverage of the war is IDF Spokesman Hagari.

Unlike many of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, Hagari is perceived as credible and popular – to such an extent, says Gurevitz, that the public “treat him as though he were sacred, without any criticism, and with endless deference such that we have never seen for an IDF spokesman. There’s total acceptance of him on the news broadcasts.” Hagari’s live daily briefings have become a regular fixture on the evening news as if he were an on-air talent who transcended a single station.

“The formula is fairly fixed,” Gurevitz says, referring to the order of the main 8 P.M. news broadcasts, “with the main news from the battlefield, two commentators, ‘suffering and bravery’ features – the soldiers who have fallen in battle and the hostages’ stories – and the IDF spokesman’s news conference.”

Each evening, Hagari makes sure to note the names of the most recent fallen soldiers and says that the entire military is embracing their families. By contrast, the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children are entirely absent from the news and current affairs coverage.

“From the moment that the army entered Gaza on the ground, we’ve really been spoon-fed by the IDF spokesman,” says Shwartz Altshuler, noting that in the initial days following the October 7 slaughter in border communities, the media managed to find creative ways to report from the ground, even when being at the scene posed a risk.

“But since the [ground entry into Gaza on October 27], the distorted picture of the world that we have been seeing is mainly based on the [IDF] spokesman, and that should not be happening,” she says. “We have to examine what’s broadcast from inside Gaza and what they’re showing on the media abroad and paint a picture that reflects reality.”

Journalist Ben Caspit, considered to be in the political center and as a left-wing counterpoint to Amit Segal on Channel 12 and Yinon Magal on the right-wing Channel 14, described in a tweet the suffering in Gaza being ignored as a moral necessity: “Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]? They’ve earned that hell fairly, and I don’t have a milligram of empathy.”

‘The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn’t any basis for showing anything.’

“Numbers such as 20,000 dead become abstract when you don’t see the difficult images,” Gurevitz warns. “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim on the other side as such, and the media follows suit.”

Naor attributes the Israeli media’s decision to ignore the suffering on the other side to the continued suffering of the 129 hostages abducted from Israel who are still held in Gaza. “The blow that we sustained caused us to harden our hearts and averted interest in the suffering of others,” he says. “Around the world, they’re trying to create a balance between the [two] sides, and we don’t have that privilege because we know exactly what happened to us and still don’t know what will happen down the line with the hostages. It’s a catch-22 because the second the knife is at our throats, we unite around patriotism.”

The news reporter who spoke with Haaretz said, “The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn’t any basis for showing anything. It’s a complicated situation. I’m conscious of the role that we have in maintaining national morale. I’m not saying that we need to show [things as] 50-50 but can’t at least 20 percent of the coverage be about [casualties in Gaza]? Ten percent? Even that’s not happening.”

Yinon Magal interviews Israeli soldiers on the right-wing Channel 14.Credit: Screenshot

Shwartz Altshuler’s assessment is that the main motive for the Israeli coverage of Gaza isn’t actually a lack of empathy for the Palestinians living there but rather the relationship with the IDF spokesman and a lack of access to content that isn’t suspected of being biased in favor of the Palestinians. Unlike in prior wars, the IDF has been largely preventing foreign reporters from entering Gaza.

“It’s a complicated story of contact with sources and wheeling and dealing over information, ‘what the IDF spokesman gives me,’ Shwartz Altshuler says. “I like the IDF spokesman, but the assumption that everything that he provides is the absolute truth is unreasonable. A journalist who takes information from the IDF spokesman and transmits it ‘as is’ is betraying their job.”

The nonexistent babies

Yishai Cohen, the political editor of the ultra-Orthodox news website Kikar Hashabbat, who is also a guest commentator for Channel 12, has experience in this regard. On November 28, he tweeted a short promo for an interview with Lt. Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila of the IDF’s Gaza Division in which Buskila claimed that on October 7, he saw babies “hanging in a row on a clothesline” at Kfar Azza, which had been invaded by Hamas terrorists.

The story hadn’t been reported earlier, and for good reason. No babies had been killed at Kfar Azza, as Haaretz reporter Amir Tibon quickly pointed out to Cohen.

“[I] admit that I hadn’t thought I need to check the veracity of a story coming from a lieutenant colonel,” Cohen replied in explaining why he deleted the tweet just a few minutes after posting it. “I made a mistake.”

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler.

The interview with Buskila, who is the director of operations at the Israel Defense and Security Forum nonprofit, which is identified with the right wing, had been offered to Cohen by the IDF spokesman. A representative of the spokesman’s office was present at the interview.

Following Buskila’s statement about the babies, the spokesman’s office is no longer offering press interviews or meetings. In a statement from the spokesman’s office in response to a request for comment, the office said, “An investigation was conducted, and the necessary lessons were drawn.”

A related issue is the narrow range of views presented on media outlets’ various panel discussions. Most of the commentators– including large numbers of reporters and people previously in positions of authority who have crowded the studios since the outbreak of the war – use the same source, Shwartz Altshuler says.

“So how exactly will there be multiple views and perspectives regarding reality?” She asks. “For example, Tamir Hayman, the former head of Military Intelligence, who is a commentator on Channel 12 News, is a member of a limited team of advisers to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the war.

“What’s the difference between him and Jacob Bardugo?” she asks, referring to a close associate of Netanyahu who has worked in radio. “I don’t think Hayman represents Gallant, but he does represent the defense establishment.”

The issue, she says, is not just who appears on the air, but also who doesn’t. Shwartz Altshuler cites revelations in the media about IDF border post spotters and an officer in Military Intelligence’s Unit 8200 who had expressed concern about indications that Hamas was planning an attack before October 7. The Israel Democracy Institute fellow also asked why the channels didn’t take the opportunity to feature more female commentators.

“Unlike men, they weren’t part of the [mistaken] doctrine and the system that failed. Instead, again they’re bringing in women to talk about psychology and men about defense,” she says.

On December 4, the journalists’ issued a letter calling on the directors of the TV news outlets to change the model and have at least half of the panel participants be women. But even more glaringly than the absence of women, the voices of Arab citizens of Israel have become a rarity on news broadcasts, even by the usual Israeli standards (unless their name happens to Yoseph Haddad, a high-profile pro-Israel advocate).

“The Arab community has been entirely excluded from the discourse, and therefore the public impression has been created that it doesn’t exist at all in connection with these events,” says Kholod Idres, the co-director of the Department for a Shared Society at the Sikkuy Association for the Advancement of Equal Opportunity nonprofit.

“The clearest example of that is that the hostages from the Arab community were totally ignored at the beginning of the war. For more than a week, with the exception of Army Radio, the main media outlets in Israel didn’t mention the fact that among the hundreds of Israelis who were abducted to Gaza, there were also Arab citizens. On Channel 12, the first reference to the subject only came on October 20.”

One entity that has emerged from its usual shadows is the military censor. Israeli news outlets have been highlighting the fact that various diplomatic and military news reports have been approved by the censor, even though they are not required to note it. An effort at calming the public? Not necessarily.

“[It] shows how much the media is currying favor with the audience and the establishment and wants to be embraced,” Gurevitz says. “We’re only broadcasting what’s good for morale. We want a censor. We’re not opening our mouths.”

But Naor has another explanation: “I think the reporters want to convey that they’re in a predicament, that is, ‘we could have said more.’ It’s a wink and a nod. After all, no one likes to be censored.”

Filling the vacuum

The full picture of the war isn’t being shown, and the tours of Gaza that the IDF Spokesman’s Office arranges for reporters don’t really fill it out, but the media’s quest for “an image of victory” explains at least some of the media’s conduct.

“We’ll see it more and more strongly in the coming weeks as the war begins to wane,” Shwartz Altshuler predicts. The desire to portray the end of the war as a victory papering over the war’s declared goal of completely defeating Hamas is mainly financial, she says, not ideological.

“The media can’t indicate to the public that ‘we’ve lost’ and still sell advertising,” she says. “It needs the government to create the drama and the government needs it to create the narrative.”

The initial signs of the trend were seen in the emotional images of the return of the hostages to Israel. “It was a total reality show,” Shwartz Altshuler says. “Content to fill a vacuum, without news value but infringing on the privacy of the hostages who have returned.”

The releases were documented even though the hostages’ privacy has been respected in Israeli media coverage of hostage videos released by Hamas. Also absent from the Israeli coverage are pictures from foreign media news of Palestinian prisoners whom Israel released in exchange for the hostages and their reunion with their families.

A more recent example is the images of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, handcuffed and in their underwear – broadcast despite the assessment (reported in Haaretz) that only about 10 to 15 percent of them were actually active in Hamas or identified with the organization. (A similar photo was released in the 2014 Gaza war.)

Enlisting the media during wartime is hardly a new concept, but Gurevitz has the feeling that this time, it’s more pronounced than before: “The media is now reflecting our traumatic situation and the legitimization of acting in an extreme fashion because of it, and reflects a public thirst for revenge,” he says. “Revenge is something that obviously motivates armies, but it doesn’t really solve problems. The harsh rhetoric and sense of hysteria don’t project Israeli strength, but rather despair and a desire to see pictures of surrender at any price.”

Naor, who was deputy commander of Army Radio during the 1973 Yom Kippur War (and later became commander, the equivalent of station director), thinks that even the most determined form of patriotism ultimately exhausts itself. More than any other conflict, the current war reminds him of the First Lebanon War in 1982. “Then for the first time, we saw the involvement of politics during the period of the war. Two weeks after it started, there was a media revolt against the establishment.”

Naor mentions journalist Dan Shilon, who posed a question on Army Radio during the first stages of that war: “How do we get out of this entanglement?” The defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, tried unsuccessfully to remove Shilon from reserve duty at the station. When the IDF looked into the controversy, it concluded that Shilon was not being critical of going to war.

The massacres at Sabra and Shatila by Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies were committed three months later, and Israelis took to the streets in what was dubbed “the 400,000 protest” in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. This time, too, Naor casts doubt over the argument that criticism of a war shouldn’t be voiced while it is being fought (“quiet, we’re shooting,” as the saying goes in Hebrew). Such an approach, he says, cannot last for long.

You can’t discount the shock that the events of October 7 have caused, but if anyone had hope that they would produce positive changes in the conduct of the Israeli media, they’re bound to be disappointed. “Catastrophes don’t create a change of reality. That requires genuine processes,” Shwartz Altshuler says, pointing out that even amid the current fighting, the Israeli government hasn’t stopped trying to intervene with the media for its own ends – pressing for concessions, for example, to Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu station, and to regional radio stations.

“Why isn’t anyone in television saying that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is exploiting ‘quiet, we’re shooting’ to alter the television market?” she asks. No positive process will be possible, she says, without comprehensive soul-searching, which cannot wait until the war is over.

“Nowhere is a genuine discussion being held regarding questions involving media responsibility,” she says. “People are busy pounding the politicians’ chests, but what about when you were bolstering the paradigm that has collapsed, when you were eating whatever they fed you? When we return to the practices of ‘the day before the war,’ it’s really painful.”

Channel 12 declined to provide a response to this article. Via Haaretz

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