Public Media's Shameful Bias

As the old saying goes, if it bleeds it leads.

We can't turn away from tragedy because our Darwinian brains are genetically programmed to pay extra attention to potential threats and dangers, even to exaggerate them. It's not just morbid fascination. Social media takes advantage of this with their algorithms to keep us watching and sell us things. If we accept that it's in our genes to be drawn to danger, and I think it's undeniable, people can't be held entirely responsible for their difficulty in resisting this tendency. But the purveyors of information certainly can.

I'm talking about this because I'm disgusted by the mainstream media's coverage of Israel's current military actions in Lebanon. Especially disappointed by public broadcasters such as PBS, BBC and CBC, who I typically prefer to watch. They've interviewed citizens on the streets of Beirut and emergency room physicians treating the injured. They've shown the destruction of homes and buildings in Southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is embedded, and from where they have been launching rockets at the communities of northern Israel for decades, but particularly since October 8th. What they haven't shown are the abandoned towns of northern Israel, because there's not much to see. They haven't shown the damage done by the thousands of rockets fired into Israel, because frankly, there hasn't been that much (although there has been some). Israel has spent decades and billions of dollars building the Iron Dome missile defense system and it has proven extremely effective. That's a great story, but protection against destruction (as opposed to actual destruction) isn't terribly exciting. 

The mainstream profit-driven media can be forgiven for their morbid obsession with covering tragedy and destruction, but not public broadcasters. If money isn't the reason, then why the obvious bias? The answer is found in the mission of taxpayer-funded media, which typically centers on telling the stories of the marginalized, the under-represented and minorities. In some ways this makes public media even more susceptible to a certain kind of oversimplification, one that characterizes some people as victims and others as victimizers. It's quite astonishing to witness how readily public broadcasting has fallen into the trap of creating a moral equivalence between the State of Israel and terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas. One side a democratic state accountable to its citizens and the rule of law, the other side outlaw non-state actors accountable only to their patron. One side whose mission is to protect its constituents from harm, the other who exploit their constituents by promoting harm to them. The country defending itself against terrorism is thus portrayed as the aggressor and the homicidal/suicidal terrorists are depicted as aggrieved. It would be absurd if it wasn't so shameful.    

The consistent media bias against Israel, I don't believe, is due to systematic anti-Semitism, and I'm very wary of calling everything and anything anti-Semitism. There are plenty of stories about Jewish people that are fair and positive. The bias of public media against Israel is more closely related to the impetus of publicly-funded agencies (whether in Canada, the UK or the US) to apologize for being associated with power. It's about having guilt for regrettable historical injustices, and wanting to makes amends by acting as an agent of contemporary social change. The result is the predominance of stories that elevate perceived victims. In Canada it's noticeable in the way stories about our indigenous minorities feature so heavily in public media. These are stories that implicitly romanticize the aggrieved and portray them as inherently righteous. But so much of the truth gets glossed over and whitewashed in the narrative. 

And so it is with Israel. Because Israel has an army dedicated to the defense of its citizens and borders, and because it is effective, it is seen as the aggressor, and the terrorists that use innocents as human shields and embeds in civillian communities are seen as victims. The latter is the war crime, not the former. The latter is genocidal, not the former. It's mindboggling that public media can't or refuses to figure this out.