Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: a case study in the collapse of modern journalism.

la triste parabola di Ha ha haretz
 
Downfall of a Great Newspaper
 
http://www.thetower.org/article/downfall-of-a-great-newspaper/April
 
23, 2013
 
Slashed budgets, plummeting standards, and political radicalization
have turned Israel’s most respected newspaper into a case study in the
collapse of modern journalism.
 
In early April of this year, the controversial Haaretz reporter Amira
Hass, whose coverage of Palestinian violence over the last decade has
often prompted accusations of bias, caused a major stir when she
published a column called “The Internal Syntax of the Occupation.”
Most provocative was her claim that “throwing stones is the hereditary
right and duty of someone under a foreign power”—words that appeared
only a few days after Adele Biton, a 3-year old Israeli girl, was
critically injured when a Palestinian threw a rock at the car her
mother was driving, causing it to slam into a commercial truck.
 
In a Sunday interview with journalist Kalman Libskind of the radio
station Galei Yisrael, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken set out to
defend Hass’s article. Growing flustered, however, Schocken ended up
saying that moving to a settlement was a form of deliberately
endangering the welfare of one’s children, something that in another
context would trigger the intervention of social services. As for
Hass’s sympathy for rock-throwers, Schocken refused to distance
himself. “Sometimes,” he concluded, “you have to fight violence with
violence.”
 
The method Amos Schocken chose to defend Hass’s article, and his
defense of editor-in-chief Aluf Benn’s decision to publish the piece
in full, sheds some light on the recent changes at the once-venerable
Israeli daily. In a series of interviews conducted with current and
former Haaretz employees, some of whom held high-level positions at
the paper and most of whom still hold it close to their hearts, a
consensus emerged to the effect that the paper is undergoing a process
of major change that has led to a dramatic reduction in staff, a
precipitous decline in journalistic standards, and a willful
radicalization of its politics in pursuit of Internet traffic.
 
As Israel’s longstanding newspaper of record, these developments have
raised important questions about the future of print journalism,
especially in a country where a free and dynamic press has always been
at the center of Israel’s democratic discourse.
 
For decades, Israelis have associated Haaretz with journalistic quality
—or, rather, they’ve associated journalistic quality with Haaretz. The
paper was known for its scrupulous editorship and for articles,
reviews and columns issued in a Hebrew so highly styled and written in
such a lofty register that it bordered on the literary—something that
comes as no surprise considering the paper’s pedigree. Salman
Schocken, grandfather of Amos and patriarch of the family that
controlled the paper for decades, transforming it from an official
administrative paper of the British colonial authority into a cultural
institution, was also the founder of one of the world’s most
distinguished publishing houses—Schocken Books, which published Kafka,
Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and other literary luminaries of pre-
war Germany.
 
The Amira Hass affair was a red flag not just for the Israeli public,
but for many on the Haaretz staff as well.
 
Though it literally means “the land,” the Hebrew word haaretz is
understood to refer to the nation, the country, and the State of
Israel all wrapped up into one. And for three-quarters of a century,
Haaretz in many ways was all that. It was Israel’s unrivalled national
stage, and what played out in its news articles and opinion pages was
Israeli public life itself. In this sense, it could be thought of as
Israel’s New York Times—the difference being that the centrality of
Haaretz to Israeli life was far greater than that of the Gray Lady in
America, where a number of other stalwart dailies were able to
successfully vie for readership and influence over the years. But
although its circulation never approached that of the popular dailies
Maariv and Yediot Aharonot, Haaretz had nothing that could be
seriously spoken of as competition.
 
However, Haaretz has gone through excruciating times of late, much
like the rest of Israel’s print-media industry. Recent months have
seen major staff cuts, reports of a crisis between management and
employees, the closure or downsizing of major supplements, and an
oftentimes-inelegant shift in emphasis from print to digital.
 
But according to the employees interviewed for this article, all of
whom refused to be identified out of fear of the impact on their
careers in Israel’s small and insular media environment, the Amira
Hass affair was a red flag not only for the Israeli public, but also
for many on the Haaretz staff. As one former editor at the news desk
put it:
 
Amira Hass’s article must be seen as the result of a conscious
decision to radicalize the paper, to make it something shallow,
sensationalist, and shocking, and to give it the image of a paper—
really, a website—that is courageous and groundbreaking. At the end of
the day, there is only one goal: To generate traffic. It doesn’t
matter if the piece is good or bad, what matters is that it leads to
website traffic.
 
Like most of the people we spoke with, the editor does not identify
with the political Right in Israel. Yet he felt a need to add the
following: “Amira Hass’s article fits Aluf Benn and Amos Schocken like
a glove. She wrote shocking things. Any editor with a minimum of
discretion would have said that it wasn’t suitable for publication.
But here? The more provocative you are—to the Left, of course—the
better the editorial staff thinks it is.”
 
Another former employee at the news desk described an incident that
reflects what he sees as a significant deterioration in journalistic
norms. On January 30, 2012, Haaretz’s diplomatic correspondent Barak
Ravid published a post on his blog “Diplomania,” titled “The Red
Telephone Between Ross and Obama,” which revealed that Dennis Ross—who
has served as Middle East envoy for several U.S. presidents—continued
to be involved in government even after leaving his official post at
the White House for a private think-tank. As Ravid reported:
 
Apparently, soon after Ross left his position as president Obama’s
advisor on Iran and the Middle East, the White House took the unusual
step of installing a secure telephone line in Ross’ office at the
Washington Institute for Near East Studies. This is what many in
Israel know from their military service as a ‘red telephone,’ on which
it is possible to speak about classified information without fear of
eavesdropping.
 
The news was hugely exciting for the American media, which began to
investigate immediately. But the report quickly proved false. Jeffrey
Goldberg, whom Haaretz often describes as a close confidant of
President Obama, published a stinging post at the Atlantic titled
“State Department: Dennis Ross Does Not Have a Bat Phone,” in which he
derided Ravid’s “breathless” conspiratorial report. “If the President,
or his national security adviser, wanted to talk to Dennis Ross about
sensitive information (as they would, and should), why wouldn’t they
just invite him over?” Goldberg asked, noting that “the Washington
Institute’s offices are about five blocks from the White House.”
 
But what happened next, the former Haaretz news desk staffer told us,
was even more bizarre. Rather than apologize for the error, Haaretz
ran a follow-up piece by Ravid, in which he assailed Dennis Ross and
other critics, accusing them of being people who “love Israel but love
Israelis somewhat less. Even if they don’t say it in public, they see
Israelis as boorish Levantines. In their eyes, Israeli journalism is
inferior to the Tablets of the Law that the journalistic establishment
in the United States writes every day. Incidentally, in the circles
surrounding Prime Minister Netanyahu there are those who hold the same
view.”
 
But in publishing his attack, Ravid had inadvertently revealed that
the decline in Haaretz’s journalistic standards has not been lost on
many prominent people in Israel and the United States—in journalism
and politics, and even among government. Worse still, instead of
simply offering a sincere apology for his mistake and the
embarrassment it caused his employers, Ravid doubled down, blaming the
Americans for being arrogant enough to expose his failure.
 
“Haaretz is losing its standing and value,” the former news desk
employee concluded. “When you look at the handling of the Ravid affair
and the red telephone, you understand why.”
 
The employees who agreed to interview for this piece often disagreed
to the precise causes for the decline of Haaretz’s journalistic
standards. Yet they unanimously agreed that there has been a serious
drop in quality at Haaretz over the past two years. The high number of
layoffs and reductions at Haaretz are not a secret. Reportedly,
Haaretz and its popular financial supplement, The Marker, will
ultimately lay off 70-100 employees, or 20 percent of its workforce.
In addition, employees who have not been laid off face deep salary
cuts. Our sources spoke of a 15-35 percent cut in salaries, numbers
that have yet to be confirmed and testify to the size of the financial
sinkhole that has taken the floor out from under what was, until
recently, Israel’s most respected paper. Published reports have also
spoken of cuts of up to 20 percent in the budget for freelance
writers, as well as cuts in the graphics and photography departments.
 
Haaretz’s new blend of sensationalism and radical politics has made
the newspaper risk-prone and strikingly unable to self correct, even
in the most clear cut of cases.
 
Haaretz has also cut or scaled back multiple departments of its print
edition. In August 2012, the prestigious political supplement Hashavua
(“The Week”) was discontinued, and employees were informed that its
traditional content would now be folded into the weekend edition. Over
the past year and a half, it was decided to merge the sports
supplement into to the paper’s news section. Last month, the leisure
and culture supplement Achbar Ha’ir (“The City Mouse”) was also
discontinued. This followed the closure more than two years ago of the
Schocken group’s largest local newspaper, Tel Aviv’s Ha’ir (“The
City”).
 
Predictably, the severe cutbacks have shifted the work previously done
by a well-staffed newsroom to a skeleton crew of remaining editors and
reporters. The increased emphasis on the newspaper’s website, which
with its faster news cycle requires a larger volume of stories, has
only compounded the problem. “Today there are fewer and fewer writers
and editors writing and editing more and more articles,” says one
former writer. “You’re burning the candle at both ends, and the
inevitable result is a serious drop in standards.”
 
Another employee spoke to us at length and described the drop in
standards that resulted from the cuts. “There are cuts in manpower, in
the amount of time editors and writers can dedicate to each item, and
in the number of edits an article goes through before publication. You
can feel the decline in quality. Management understood that the
product would be inferior, despite the fact that they also knew that
if you wanted people to pay for it, they’d need to offer a better
product. The situation is bad any way you look at it. Things were
getting worse for more than a year and a half before they [the
management] responded. There was a drop in advertising income, and
they failed to conduct prompt negotiations with employees. Because of
this, they were forced to make sudden and brutal cuts… As a result,
there were a lot of blunders at the paper and they’re getting a lot of
criticism. People at the paper are exhausted. Right now, they’re
basically going along to get along, in order to survive.”
 
Alongside the financial crisis and the wide-ranging cuts in staff and
salaries, many Haaretz employees believe there is an additional reason
for the paper’s decline in quality: A strategic decision by editor-in-
chief Aluf Benn to refocus the elite paper to reach a much wider
audience in order to maximize traffic, and the attendant advertizing
income. “Aluf Benn’s managerial strategy,” says another source inside
Haaretz, “is that the paper, and the website in particular, should
publish stories that are as bold and provocative as possible. Everyone
knows that publications like Yediot Aharonot or YNet [Yediot’s online
edition] do this, but in the past Haaretz had different norms.” In the
source’s view, the publication of the controversial Amira Hass piece
was a deliberate attempt to draw traffic through sensational
reporting.
 
To back up his claim, the source cites a letter Haaretz sent to
advertisers as part of its marketing for the new version of its Musaf
Haaretz weekend supplement, which was leaked to the media. The letter
includes the following passage:
 
Life has started moving more quickly, we have no spare time, and if
I’m going to read a newspaper over the weekend, give me something
livelier, that I don’t need to work too hard for, something fun to
read. So we made a decision. To create a new Saturday supplement. To
make a drastic change. To take into account changing consumption
habits, and to reinvent the wheel.
 
This may sound reasonable on its own; but when expressed in the form
of increasingly alienating politics, one may begin to question the
business logic behind it. Perhaps the most glaring example of the
crisis of confidence surrounded the “apartheid poll” affair.
 
On October 23, 2012, an article by Haaretz’s notoriously scandal-prone
columnist, Gideon Levy, was published as the main story on the front
page of the newspaper with the outrage-provoking headline, “Most
Israelis Support Apartheid Regime in Israel.” Yet a careful look at
the survey on which the article was based revealed that neither the
headline nor Levy’s analysis were supported in any way by the poll’s
actual data. Following public criticism, Haaretz was forced to publish
an apology five days later, as well as a correction, in small letters
tucked away at the bottom of a page, that read:
 
Clarification: The wording of the main headline, “Most Israelis
Support Apartheid Regime in Israel” (Haaretz, Oct. 23), did not
precisely reflect the findings of the Dialog poll. The question to
which a majority of respondents answered in the negative did not
relate to any current state of affairs, but to a hypothetical future
one: “If Israel were to annex the territories of Judea and Samaria
[i.e., the West Bank], would you support granting 2.5 million
Palestinians the right to vote in Knesset elections?”
 
In fact, Levy’s article almost entirely misrepresented the actual
results of the poll, according to independent analysts. According to
numerous polls conducted over the past decade, most Israelis in fact
support the creation of two states for two peoples and preserving the
voting rights of Arab citizens of Israel.
 
“Regarding the article on the apartheid poll, which never existed, a
normal editor would call the writer and suspend him until further
notice,” says the news-desk editor cited earlier. “That’s how it works
at a normal paper when a journalist almost deliberately does something
very wrong. In some cases, the editor that gave Gideon Levy the
assignment to write about a poll like this would also be sent home.
It’s like leaving a wolf to guard the hens. And then, to make matters
worse, after the hubbub around the issue, they tried to use it to show
how Haaretz was a shining example of press freedom.”
 
In our interview, that editor described the apartheid poll affair as
indicative of a broader problem. He cited additional examples of
unprofessional decisions which, he believes, have harmed both
Haaretz’s reputation and the high journalistic standards it set and
adhered to in the past. Perhaps not surprisingly, Amira Hass stars in
many of them. “Amira Hass receives priority for any nonsense she
writes, including nonsense irrelevant to any self-respecting paper…
She published a document that allegedly recorded a government
discussion on how to prevent a famine in the territories in case of an
Israeli siege. The document showed precisely the opposite of what was
reported in the paper. Instead of reporting that Israel held a
completely theoretical discussion of how to prevent a famine in Gaza,
the paper portrayed it as if Israel were allocating such and such many
grams and calories per person. It’s another example of how there is no
responsible hand on the steering wheel.”
 
An even more pointed criticism of the editors’ objectivity came from
another staffer familiar with the news desk. “There is almost no one
who is not on the radical Left, or more precisely, who hasn’t
accommodated themselves to it and suddenly become a Leftist. Except
for Amos Harel and Haim Levinson, there are almost no journalists I
would allow myself to call trustworthy. The rest are sycophants who
suddenly joined the extreme Left. Israel Harel is the token Rightist
in the opinion section, but if you look at the section in its
entirety, it’s obviously getting systematically worse.” The same staff
member also took issue with Benn’s decision to dedicate time to giving
public lectures and writing opinion pieces for the paper.
 
Of course, Haaretz is not the only newspaper in Israel facing hard
times. While the Israeli public has grown increasingly unwilling to
pay for print, the pace of innovation in digital media—and the
willingness of the public to adopt new ways of consuming news—has
progressed haltingly at best. While other papers have turned to
populism and fluff to sell digital ads as a supplement to falling
print revenues, Haaretz’s new blend of sensationalism and radical
politics has made the newspaper risk prone and strikingly unable to
self correct, even in the most clear cut of cases.
 
Though the newspaper has always taken a progressive political line,
even its ideological detractors once recognized the benefit that a
newspaper rooted in quality journalism and rigorous about its
standards provided Israeli society. As Hanoch Marmari, who served as
the paper’s editor-in-chief for close to 50 years after being
appointed by Amos Schocken’s father, Gershom, put it: “Today Haaretz
is not in the playing field. Rather, it is morphed from a player to a
spectator in the bleachers. When you are a distant observer you do not
necessarily see the complicated dynamics of the game—and you
definitely exert less influence.”
 
 Haaretz always seeks to reach new audiences, whether in print or
through digital channels. According to statistics from the Internet
Rating Commission, the Haaretz website enjoyed a substantial growth in
traffic in 2012. This year, at the beginning of March, we instituted
paid subscriptions for our digital journalism. Thousands of readers
have already signed up. These accomplishments are the result of
efforts made by our staff to learn the language of digital journalism,
as well as a reorganization of our news desk and our Hebrew and
English websites. Not only have our professional standards not been
harmed, but our reporters must be even more careful today because of
the constraints of digital media, which updates continuously. There is
no doubt that this is a difficult change for some journalists, but it
is positive for any media outlet that wants to flourish in the digital
age.
 
Amira Hass was and is one of the best journalists I have ever met in
my 27-year career. I am happy to discover that, to many of her former
colleagues, including those with extensive knowledge of the issues she
covers, she has not lost her relevance and her writing continues to
arouse a great deal of interest and bring us new readers.
 
Sadly, we parted from around a hundred of our friends this year. They
resigned or were laid off because of cuts forced upon us by the
precipitous drop in our advertising budget. In certain cases,
employees stayed on staff at a reduced salary. Not only have these
cuts not hurt the quality of the paper, but the opposite is the case:
They have forced us to develop and renew ourselves, first and foremost
through the publication of the new “Musaf”—the best journalistic
publication in Israel, as well as the redesign of the daily and Friday
“Galleria” supplement, the publication of “Haaretz Ha’Shavua,” whose
contents were previously split between two supplements, and an
upgrading of our digital content.
 
At Haaretz, we sometimes make mistakes, and when we do, we correct
them. The headline given the apartheid poll article was a mistake, and
when the issue was clarified we published a correction. In the article
on Dennis Ross, there was a mistake in a marginal and unimportant
detail. Unfortunately, those who complained about the mistake chose to
insult and slander a Haaretz writer, and I was not and am not prepared
to accept rhetorical violence against our reporters as a basis for
discussion. In spite of this, we published a front-page interview with
Ross conducted by Natasha Mozgovia (our former Washington
correspondent), in which it was made clear that there is no secure
telephone in his office. The post subsequently published by Barak
Ravid was excellent and put the issue in its correct and appropriate
context.
 
I have not stopped writing political analyses since I became the
editor-in-chief of Haaretz, and there is and does not have to be a
conflict between the two. Writing requires me to “take the pulse” of
things, and this serves as a personal example to other writers. I
sometimes give paid lectures, but this has caused no damage to my work
on the staff, and I have not prevented other journalists from writing
books, lecturing, or teaching alongside their work as writers and
editors.
 
* * *

 la triste parabola di Ha ha haretz
 
è la parabola di Sion. D.o li fa, e poi ogni tanto li fa accoppare
perchè distolgono lo sguardo da Lui.