By Edo Konrad
From +972 Magazine
Israel’s long-subservient media has spent the past year imbuing the public with a sense of righteousness over the Gaza war. Reversing this indoctrination, says media observer Oren Persico, could take decades.
Halfway into our conversation, Oren Persico makes a startling confession. The veteran Israeli journalist, whose job for the better half of the last two decades has been to monitor his country’s media, doesn’t watch mainstream Israeli news.
“I just can’t do it,” Persico, who has worked as a staff writer for the Israeli media watchdog site The Seventh Eye since 2006, tells me. “It’s depressing and infuriating — it’s propaganda, it’s full of lies. Mostly, it’s a mirror image of the society I live in, and it’s hard for me to break the dissonance between my worldview and my surroundings. I need to maintain my sanity.” Instead of watching, Persico stays abreast by scrolling through news sites, social media, and watching select clips that people send his way.
But even turning off the TV cannot stop the dissonance and despair Persico feels, which have only grown since the Hamas-led massacres on October 7 and the Israeli army’s ensuing year-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip. When the war began, the Israeli media found itself at a critical juncture, navigating the trauma of a nation that was shaken by unprecedented violence and quickly retreated into a deeply-entrenched perception of historical victimhood. News broadcasters responded to this national trauma, Persico notes, by slipping further into the clutches of state-sanctioned propaganda.
As days of brutal violence turned into weeks and months, the Israeli media reverted to familiar patterns: rallying around the flag, amplifying state narratives, and marginalizing any critical coverage of Israel’s brutality in Gaza, let alone showing images or telling stories of human suffering among Palestinians in the Strip.
The path to this moment was paved long ago. Israel’s media landscape, which Persico says has always been subservient to the political and military establishment, has come under relentless pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu over the last decade; the Israeli prime minister has attempted to transform it into a tool for wielding power and ultimately ensuring his own political survival. Commercial media outlets, more interested in maintaining viewers than challenging power, have fallen prey to Netanyahu’s strategy of coercion, self-censorship, and economic pressure.
Recent years have also seen the rapid rise of Now 14 (widely known as Channel 14), Israel’s version of Fox News that has openly aligned itself with Netanyahu, and is now challenging the long-held dominance of Channel 12. It offers viewers not just news, but anti-Palestinian polemics — which are often outwardly genocidal — cooked up as entertainment. Netanyahu’s adept use of propaganda outlets like Channel 14, as well as social media, has helped him mold a devoted following that defends and bolsters him against domestic and international pressure.
In an interview with +972, which has been shortened and edited for clarity, Persico reflects on the media’s historical role in the denial of Israel’s human rights violations, its failure to challenge the political establishment, and the near-complete lack of solidarity for Palestinian journalists under bombardment in Gaza.
Tell me about the media landscape in Israel in the lead-up to October 7.
On Oct. 6, the Israeli media — whether public or private, on television, the radio, or the internet — was weakened and beleaguered following more than a decade of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s persistent struggle to control it. While some media outlets had simply become a tool in Netanyahu’s propaganda war, others gradually submitted to his pressure, platforming the prime minister’s allies and talking points in their broadcasts.
[Just months before Oct. 7,] Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi had announced a bill to reform the media landscape — based on his desire to shut down Israel’s Public Broadcasting Corporation [known colloquially as KAN] and to “take care of” [i.e. assert control over] the private media sector. This was all done under the slogans of “opening up the market” and “removing barriers” — slogans that actually meant easing the path of outlets that serve Netanyahu’s interests while restricting outlets that criticize him.
What steps have Netanyahu and his successive governments taken to suppress the press over the past decades?
Since 1999 [when Netanyahu lost the election after his first term as prime minister], he has marked the media as his rival, and has gradually unified his base in a populist struggle against it. This has been especially true since 2017, when his numerous legal scandals exploded — all of which are directly related to his attempts to control the media.
In the past decade, Netanyahu has tried to shut down Channel 10; sought to eviscerate Yedioth Ahronoth’s dominance in Israeli print media; allegedly promised a media mogul beneficial regulatory changes in exchange for positive coverage of him and his family; and meticulously placed his supporters in every single possible Israeli outlet, from Channel 12 and Israeli Army Radio to i24 and KAN.
And yet, we cannot place all of the blame on the prime minister. Netanyahu is operating in a country where most of the media outlets are privately-owned and where the public is moving to the right. These commercial outlets don’t want to lose viewers and readers. They can’t sell ads if they don’t have an audience, and they can’t keep their audience if they show them things that anger them.
No discussion of the Israeli media today is complete without talking about Channel 14, which has become a tour de force in the landscape, and could yet overtake Channel 12 in its dominance.
Channel 14 grew out of the Jewish Heritage Channel, a small and mostly failed station dedicated to providing religious content that lacked a news broadcasting license. But gradually, Netanyahu and his allies began chipping away at these regulations: eventually it was granted a license to broadcast news and became the full-blown propaganda outfit we know today.
Even though it is now the second most popular channel in Israel, it still receives benefits as if it were the small outfit it started out as. Today, the channel is owned by the son of an oligarch who enjoys close ties to Netanyahu, and who allegedly has connections to Vladimir Putin and other shady figures.