Whose obsession?

The headline of your December 8 editorial, “Press obsession,” is ambiguous.

At first, I thought it might be about the media’s obsession with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal life and the compromises he feels he must make to sustain his coalition. However, it turned out to be the opposite, and was about the prime minister’s obsession with the press.

It is true that the prime minister has shown excessive sensitivity to criticism in the press and elsewhere, and has on occasion maligned fine journalists for doing their job, as your editorial quite correctly points out. But the editorial writer stops there.

Is there not sufficient evidence to demonstrate that much, if not most, of the time, the press has adopted an ideologically slanted view of the Center-Right coalition that Prime Minister Netanyahu has headed quite successfully for a rather long time, and has used him as its punching bag? As an example, the publisher of Haaretz has asserted on a number of occasions that his goal is to use his newspaper not to serve as an “objective watchdog,” which your writer asserts is the function of a responsible press, but rather as an attack dog against this prime minister and his government. And the buck does not stop with Haaretz.

You are entitled to your opinion, but an editorial of this sort simply reinforces the prime minister’s obsession. Perhaps it is time for the press, including the The Jerusalem Post, to look more carefully at its own obsession and biases, just as The New York Times has been doing since recognizing its serious shortcomings in reporting on the recent election in the US.

This, too, is what “a democracy needs to thrive.”

HARVEY LITHWICK Meitar