As college basketball’s March Madness tournament winds down and the baseball season begins, it’s an important time to remember that the only thing more annoying than a sore loser is a sore winner.
If your team wins a game, you don’t get to kvetch about the referee or umpire who blew a call or two. As a sports fan from Chicago, a city whose teams don’t win much, my advice is to just be happy you won the game and shut up.
But that rule doesn’t apply when it comes to the fight for Israel on the court of international public opinion. When it’s not a game but a matter of life and death, every nuance matters, every mistake must be highlighted, and every lesson learned.
A very good case in point is this week’s episode of 60 Minutes. Anyone pro-Israel should be overjoyed that star anchor Leslie Stahl came to Israel and interviewed released hostages Yarden Bibas, Tal Shoham, and Keith and Aviva Siegel.
Stahl showed their homes from where they were kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, empathized with them, and let them talk about the hostages still suffering in Gaza, whose faces were on the shirts they wore.
The segment was produced by 60 Minutes producer Shachar Bar-On, who has degrees from Hebrew University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. The veteran producer has worked for 18 years at the program, which was called “one of the most esteemed news magazines on American television” by The New York Times, and he took heat from anti-Israel activists on social media for producing Stahl’s interviews with former Mossad officials three months ago regarding the beeper operation in Lebanon.
Everything good in the show should be applauded. CBS hasn’t earned a very good reputation for its coverage of this war, and exceptions should be appreciated.
But what was either blatantly or subtly wrong needs to be singled out so the educated audience that watches the show will not be given incorrect impressions. Bibas deserves credit for giving his first ever interview to a top-tier US outlet and not the Israeli press because he recognized that it would maximize his impact with American decision-makers.
Framed Questions
SO THE former hostages must have been dumbfounded by Stahl’s questions about their captors.
“Do you think they starved you or they just didn’t have food?” she asked Keith Siegel.
“No, I think they starved me,” he responded calmly and politely, without raising eyebrows in shock. (He missed out on Eylon Levy.) “They would often eat in front of me and not offer me food.”
What does it say about how effective Hamas’s propaganda campaign must be if even an educated American like Stahl actually thinks that Hamas terrorists were hungry?
In a recent briefing, official Israeli government spokesperson for the foreign press David Mencer went overboard in warning that Hamas is on the verge of an “obesity epidemic” due to the aid they have stolen from ordinary Gazans. He even sarcastically asked a reporter if he thinks Israel should continue to make them sandwiches.
Stahl said the hostages were “resourceful, coming up with odd ways to win favors.” For instance, she explained, they discovered that one of the guards liked back rubs.
“We did an exchange,” Shoham told them. “The exchange was that he will get a massage every day and he will bring us some more food. And different food, like a can of meat… a can of tuna or sardines.”
Stahl called this “bartering.” Wouldn’t “abuse” be a better word, Leslie?
She distastefully egged on the recently bereaved Bibas to criticize both US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He didn’t give in and praised the president.
“I’m here because of Trump,” he said. “I’m here only because of him. I think he’s the only one who can stop this war again.”
This would have been the time for Stahl to point out that actually, Hamas could end the war immediately by releasing the hostages.
Media Bias
IN HER opening remarks, Stahl referenced the 24 live hostages but not the rest of the 59. She blamed the prime minister, saying “Netanyahu resumed the bombing of Gaza, breaking a fragile ceasefire that was exceedingly popular with Israelis.”
The seasoned television journalist neglected to say that the ceasefire had ended weeks earlier when Hamas refused to release more hostages and that the terror group tried to bomb several buses, which would have exploded in central Israel and resulted in another massacre if they had set their timers right.
To contend with the evolution of anti-Israel narratives, this week the watchdog HonestReporting unveiled its new artificial intelligence tool which checks articles for five categories of media bias:
- Delegitimizing of Israel’s sovereignty
- Justifying and legitimizing violence against Israel, Israelis and Jews
- Denying violence against Israel, Israelis and Jews
- Deflecting and shifting blame to Israel
- Fabricating and distorting facts, including atrocity propaganda.
While the 60 Minutes segment does not explicitly put the onus on Israel, its framing choices and selective narrative emphasis shifts emotional blame, despite Hamas being the perpetrator of the crisis. This leads viewers to feel that Israel may be prolonging the war unnecessarily, even though Hamas is the one holding hostages and continuing hostilities.
No Israeli military or policy voices were presented to explain the rationale for continued operations in Gaza. These subtle narrative-framing choices may contribute to distorted public perceptions.
This is even more dangerous in a show that made a rare effort to show Israeli victims and suffering in a media climate that is heavily biased to show only Palestinian suffering.
In the court of international public opinion, the journalists and their producers are the umpires and referees. Criticizing them and pointing out what they get wrong does not make you a sore loser or winner.
It makes you the educated news consumer you should be.
The writer is the executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.
