Open debate

On March 18, 2015, Israel awoke to a surprise. After a contentious campaign, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked many in the media and bucked predictions polls to handily defeat Labor’s Isaac Herzog and ensure a fourth prime ministerial term.

If in the weeks before the election you had turned on the television and radio news programs, and read most of the country’s newspapers, this was not supposed to have happened. Netanyahu, according to the conventional wisdom, was finished.

Fast forward a year and a half and travel an ocean away. In November 2016, after an unprecedentedly ugly US election campaign, Donald Trump defeated Hilary Clinton to become the United States’ 45th president. That too, according to polls and most of the elite media in America, was not supposed to have happened.

Yet it did. And many people woke up asking, “How could this be? How did I not see this coming?”

One main reason is that in both cases much of the media were derelict in a prime responsibility: reporting what is happening on the ground; reflecting reality, not trying to shape it.

Journalism in the 21st century has many important roles, including holding authorities accountable and speaking truth to power. It also has a duty to hold up a mirror to society that accurately shows, to those who dare to look, what people whom they might not ordinarily have contact with are actually doing and thinking.

And neither the Israeli nor American media did that particularly well in the elections of 2015 and 2016. As a result, many were stunned by the election outcome, because the media was overly involved in trying to shape reality – to create a reality that would propel one candidate to victory over the other – rather than give an adequate reflection of what was truly taking place on the ground.

As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote after Trump’s victory: “To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it.”

One would have hoped that the media would have learned its lesson, but the recent furor over an op-ed written by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton in the New York Times illustrates that this is not the case.

The piece, headlined “Send in the Troops,” argued that the US military should be used to deal with the protests on America’s streets. The piece caused a furor inside the newsroom, and eventually the paper apologized for ever running it – and the editor of its opinion pages resigned.

While perhaps a controversial opinion, Cotton’s piece should hardly have been beyond the pale for a newspaper that has in the past run op-eds far more incendiary from far less savory figures. Just four months ago it ran a piece by the deputy head of the Taliban, a clear enemy of the United States.

This incident is just the most recent manifestation of a pernicious trend creeping its way into liberal sanctuaries: that opinions which may not be politically correct, that go against “enlightened” thought, are shut down. Pro-Israel speakers shouted down or banned from speaking on some American campuses are but just one example of this phenomenon.

Certainly, newspapers have the right to draw a line as to what opinions are legitimate, and which are beyond the pale. But reason and common sense needs to be used in drawing that line.

Certainly an op-ed piece by a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan extolling the actions of the cop who killed George Floyd should not be printed. But also the words of a respected US senator – a man who has been whispered as a possible presidential candidate in the future and who certainly was expressing a sentiment felt by a good number of law abiding Americans?

When people close their ears to ideas or arguments because they don’t like them, those ideas and arguments are not just going to disappear. They are still there – and to be exposed to them is to be able to get a more accurate read on reality.

Ultimately, that is the role of the media – to present the public with these different viewpoints. We don’t have to agree, but we should not be afraid to be challenged.