Haaretz: On Israeli TV, Extremism Reigns and the Gaza Horror Is Completely Screened Out

As the war in Gaza and Lebanon rages, Israel's news broadcasters go morally bankrupt: Palestinian victims and the destruction in Gaza are nonexistent, Arab commentators are excluded, and the army spokesperson has almost absolute control over the coverage

The quote "Truth is the first casualty of war" is often attributed to Hiram Johnson, a U.S. senator during World War I. With the October 7 war, which started with so many casualties, it could have been different.

...A soon-to-be-completed study by political media researcher Dr. Ayala Panievsky – with the support of City University of London and the Molad Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy – confirms what we haven't seen in the studios. Panievsky randomly sampled 50 main broadcasts from the first six months of the war on Channel 12 News, the media company with the most viewers.

According to Panievsky, "Of the more than 700 items in the first six months of the war, there were only four mentions of the civilians killed in the Gaza Strip and only two of them included visual images. The most horrible scenes that the world saw 24/7 were hardly seen on Channel 12 News." She believes that the situation on channels 11 and 13 was the same. Channel 12 declined to comment for this article.

Is it possible to cover a war without showing Israelis how civilians on the Palestinian side are affected? "A heartbroken nation is too broken to have a reservoir of empathy for the other, for the enemy," said Channel 12 investigative journalist and anchorwoman Ilana Dayan, an influential liberal voice in Israel. She was speaking with Channel 12 News' chief anchor, Yonit Levi, and British columnist and author Jonathan Freedland in a podcast on the N12 site in December.

..The Daniel Hagari show

The head of the Israel Defense Forces' Spokesperson's Unit, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, has almost absolute control over the Israeli media's coverage of the war. This situation is worsened by the military's preventing of journalists from entering Gaza. TV channels devotedly cover Hagari's press conferences and, as in previous wars, military correspondents have been criticized for allegedly sounding like IDF spokespeople.

..."I was no wiser than anybody," he told the commission. "The relationship between reporters and the IDF, and the fact that we're being called 'IDF spokespeople,' is a question for the media debate and the public debate. Military correspondents, I'm sorry to say, didn't challenge IDF thinking and conceptions enough."

...In August, Yedioth Ahronoth TV critic Einav Schiff hurled an accusation at Channel 12 defense correspondent Nir Dvori. As Schiff put it, "While the hostages were rotting in the tunnels, he was screaming, 'Only military pressure!' And yesterday he was talking about a sense of missed opportunities. Where's the shame?"

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