TEL AVIV — Israel is a country of just seven million people. More than 80 percent of its adults read Hebrew. They have many newspapers in Hebrew to choose from. So why do more and more English news publications keep appearing?
The Times of Israel’s home page on Tuesday.Fifteen years ago, English-speaking Israelis and tourists had only the Jerusalem Post to read. In 1997, they got Haaretz. Then over the past decade Ynetnews.com and Arutz Sheva and Israel Hayom popped up online. English-language journalism is now a very crowded field in Israel — especially if you count all the blogs and all the Israeli outcrops of American-Jewish Web sites. Still, just last week appeared the first issue of the Web-based Times of Israel. It promises to be “the one-stop site for Israel, the region and the Jewish world.”
You’d think this would be a cause for celebration for people like me who live off Israeli journalism. But there’s a disheartening side to this story. One or two or three publications aren’t enough
to make Israelis believe the news is properly covered. They need more choices and more voices, more checks and balances, more ways of comparing and contrasting the many nuances of reporting. The people of the book
don’t trust the printed word anymore.
In its March 5-12 issue, the Nation features a lengthy article about +972, a young Israeli webzine of the far left that’s
not aimed at readers on Israel’s far left. “The vast majority of its readers are outside Israel,” the article explains. This is also true of Israel’s other English publications. Very
few Israelis read them; they are published for consumption abroad, especially by Americans. According to the Jerusalem Post, 65 percent of the readers who visit the paper’s Web site are located in North America.
Do Jewish readers account for the trend? There are just under eight million Jews outside Israel, and many do read news about Israel. But according to the 2010 J Street National Survey (pdf) of American Jews, most of them get their news about Israel from their local television station or local newspaper: 21 percent of respondents said they read the New York Times for Israel coverage, and 10 percent the Jerusalem Post. And so while it is quite likely that most readers of Israeli English-language news are American Jews, the English-language publications that keep appearing in Israel don’t serve outsiders’ huge appetite for news from Israel so much as the need of Israelis to serve their homemade news-pie.
“I’m sure all the Israel-based English sites feel that they add something unique to the mix — a particular agenda perhaps, or a specific focus,” David Horovitz, the editor of the Times of Israel and formerly the editor of the Jerusalem Post, told me last week. In this era of news à la carte, Horovitz’s Times seems to be eyeing a spot between the rightward-tilted Post and the far-left-tilted Haaretz, between the Netanyahu-can-do-no-right hecklers at +972 and the Netanyahu-can-do-no-wrong apologists of Israel Hayom (which is owned by Netanyahu’s and Newt Gingrich’s benefactor, Sheldon Adelson).
News from Israel hardly is ideology-free: every nuance of every expression, every angle of every story is highly controversial. Horovitz’s promise to “offer fair-minded news coverage” could be read simply as an assurance of the Times of Israel’s level-headedness. But I also take it as an implicit criticism of the reliability of the publication’s competitors, foreign and domestic alike. Israelis don’t trust the foreign media to report on Israel accurately, and they don’t trust the domestic media to report on Israel impartially.
This is why the proliferation of English news sources in Israel is a bittersweet trend. It doesn’t reflect a belief that there are enough readers to support so many publications; it reflects a disbelief in the ability of even this many publications to adequately inform the few readers who care about news from Israel. The spread in Israel of English media outlets that are narrowly tailored to every reader’s taste may be a boon to journalists and readers. But it is also a symptom of the growing difficulty of reading a story about Israel without questioning its biases.