In August, in the wake of the most recent Israel-Gaza war, the journalist Matti Friedman sparked a debate over institutionalized media bias against Israel. Friedman had spent several years in the Associated Press’s Jerusalem bureau as a reporter and editor, and wrote an essay for Tablet explaining why the press gets the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so wrong. Friedman has now followed-up with a piece in the Atlantic on the topic, this one focusing on the role of NGOs in media bias.

It’s an important story, because while most of the NGOs that operate in the Middle East are manifestly biased against Israel (see, for example, the recent COMMENTARY story on Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth) and flagrantly dishonest in their work, their role has generally been to facilitate anti-Israel stories instead of being subjected to impartial journalism themselves. Friedman explains why this is so.

He begins with a quote from a 2010 story by Philip Gourevitch in the New Yorker, writing about journalists’ relationships with humanitarian agencies: “Why not seek to keep them honest? Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies?”

Friedman then writes of how this affects the Middle East. Reporters not only see the NGOs as a possible professional destination, but also are in need of guidance when they arrive in a new place with minimal background and language skills and are expected to navigate the contours of a complex geopolitical conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about as complicated as they come, so it’s surely understandable that incoming journalists would seek out contacts and sources they can communicate easily with.

He writes:

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

I recommend reading the whole thing, because there is a great amount of detail culled from Friedman’s personal experience. And personal experience is the key to understanding not only Friedman’s essay but his critics.

Friedman has presented a unique problem for the AP and its likeminded fellow journalistic institutions. Because the media coverage of Israel is so easily picked apart by those who know the basics of the conflict, so obviously filled with the convenient fictions of the left, there is so much criticism of it. And because there is so much of it, individual cases of criticism aren’t generally newsworthy. The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief has decided that criticism of her Israel coverage will be ignored because she regards the possession of knowledge itself to be a disqualifying factor in writing about Israel.

But it’s not so simple when the criticism comes from an insider with firsthand knowledge. After Friedman’s Tablet piece ran, his former bureau chief at the AP wrote an impassioned response insisting Friedman was wrong. But he didn’t rebut any of the specific instances of bias Friedman highlighted, because Friedman had witnessed it, and he was right.

The same was true of Friedman’s latest. The AP pushed back on the accusations to the Washington Free Beacon, but most of it was of the “because I said so” variety. Elsewhere, Friedman’s critics resorted almost immediately to insults. My favorite was probably BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara, who tweeted: “I get why Israeli propagandists would want to weaponize smarm to that extent. I don’t get why any serious outlet would choose to publish it.”

Weaponized smarm. If you’re going to beclown yourself by throwing food at someone who knows infinitely more than you about a given topic, go with the weaponized smarm of “Israeli propagandists.” Without BuzzFeed’s intrepid keyboard warriors, who would reveal to us the extent of the infiltration of Zionist smarm? Perhaps it can be found among purchasers of the invasive Zionist marshmallows, which Brooklynite hipsters tried to ban. The Zionist marshmallows probably arrived here surreptitiously on the backs of the Zionist sharks we are told roam the seas. But neither of those is quite as dangerous as weaponized Israeli smarm, delivered right to your computer. It’s like Stuxnet for those who can’t handle words and facts.

But such silliness is actually quite helpful, because it completes the picture. You can’t really understand just how right Friedman is about the institutionalized anti-Israel bias among the media and NGOs, or the generally unethical behavior of those groups, until you witness the counterarguments (and bitter name calling) directed back at Friedman. If there were a serious defense of the press and NGOs, you’d hear it. That you instead get “weaponize[d] smarm” is a pretty good indication that Friedman has the facts on his side.

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