The Israel-Hamas War Shows Just How Critical The Global News Media is in Wartime

Many people know that Israel is a major global hub of technological innovation, indeed top-three by some accounts. Fewer know that its news media is also comparatively superb. Yet in the current conflict with Hamas it has become largely a cheerleader for its side.

Of course, this is understandable in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 invasion and massacre by Hamas, whose terrorists murdered about 1,200 people, the vast majority civilians, with a butchery that almost defies human understanding and which I will not detail here. Most of Israel’s media are commercial enterprises that must take the audience’s preference into account, and the audience in Israel overwhelmingly has no patience at present for anything but a victim narrative.

The result is that most of the Israeli audience has not benefitted from a necessary discussion of the devastating consequences of Israel’s response to the massacre, which has been a ground invasion of the northern half of the Gaza Strip and a massive bombardment campaign.

The purpose of that operation has wide support in the world. The result has been many thousands of Palestinians killed (15,000 by one count which Israel does not strenuously deny) – and that does not. There are moral, strategic and political aspects of the war as Israel is conducting it – including the practical concern that massive global pressure may cause the effort to be aborted with Hamas still intact.

Instead, most of the media has thrown itself headfirst into the melodrama of the hostage release stage, which indeed involves eye-popping scenes of infants and babies and octogenarians and Thai and Filipino workers crossing back into Israel –  heartbreaking, heartrending and absurd in equal measure.

Moreover, there is a wider discussion to be had about how current tragedy relates to Israel’s decades of oppression of the Palestinians – largely in the West Bank, which remains essentially occupied with islands of limited autonomy for the Palestinian Authority. Israel has not had a government willing to negotiate a true peace deal since 2009, it has continued to encroach on disputed land with settlements, and the ultranationalist government of Benjamin Netanyahu has allowed fanatical and violent settlers to run amok, with sometimes deadly results.

One does not need to be a Hamas apologist to wonder whether the group is emboldened by the Palestinians’ desperation. The group is a vile jihadist nightmare whose victims include the Palestinians themselves; it is committed to the destruction of Israel and the prevention of a peace deal with its moderate compatriots, and Israel can no longer be expected to tolerate it. Yet the group has broad support still, and there is a reason.

There are some exceptions, of course. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper and website is a small miracle of decency and sophistication, in Hebrew and English. But its unforgiving paywall reveals a brutal reality: it read by the country’s more prosperous moderates and liberals – not the masses who need education in the complex reality it describes.

The Arab media is a mirror image of this, of course. Even though the region’s leaders (undemocratic and illiberal as they mostly may be) revile Hamas, the coverage has focused almost exclusively on the suffering of the Palestinians, and has tended to exaggerate the damage caused by Israel. Al Jazeera, which is the relative cream of the broadcast crop, regularly allows speakers to refer unchallenged to “genocide,” or to refer to the war as the “aggression” launched by Israel.

There is almost no conceding that the blockade by Israel (and Egypt) on Gaza is purely the result of Hamas rule there since 2007; never mentioned are statehood offers the Palestinian Authority managed to squander (in 2001 and 2008, involving almost all the land it sought).

Since the Arab world is generally speaking not democratic, the Arab media’s myopia and un-seriousness is no surprise. But the Israeli side is more instructive, because its standards are Western. While no reporters can ever claim to be fully objective – that is a never-ending debate in media circles – it is certainly a failure to be fully subjective.

This is not really a question of any particular country’s media. Every country’s media becomes a little provincial at times of a national trauma. In the aftermath of 9/11 there was little patience in the US-based media for anything other than stories about that attack.

Indeed, the US media is provincial at the best of times. Baseball analogies, comparing sizes of other countries to US states, seeking out Americans who blundered upon scenes of foreign disaster, and never forgetting to mention their hometown. My pet peeve is the ascribing to Americans qualities that are wider or universal (“Americans are starting to gear up for the winter!”).

The solution lies not in any country’s media but in the quality global media. The only place to truly get both sides of the story, or however many sides there are, is the short list of global media that fulfill a few critical conditions:

1. They consider their audience to be global and therefore cover the world;
2. they do so in a serious manner and are either present where news occurs or somehow get there when they must;
3. they do not overtly have an agenda, ideological or geopolitical;
4. and they have high standards, such that the information reaches the minimal threshold of credibility.

It is amazing how short this list is. It includes Reuters and the Associated Press (where I toiled for a quarter century or so), Bloomberg News (which has an emphasis on market moving news but is present almost everywhere), CNN, the BBC, AFP, the New York Times and the Economist (whose focus is analysis, and which does so brilliantly but with a strongly liberal position – in the correct global and not twisted American meaning of the word).

After that, you get all manner of has-beens and pretenders who usually use the wires. If you want to pad the list you might include EFE, which serves the Spanish world and does try on occasion. Others like Die Welt and Le Monde have some freelancers hither and yon, and perhaps their effort at desk-bound analysis might count. But I would certainly reject the Chinese agency Xinhua or any others who toil for dictatorships.

These international news organizations are seen and read in countries in conflict. In Ukraine and Russia (despite impediments), in Israel and Palestine, in Azerbaijan and Armenia. They sometimes earn the ire (sometimes rightly, in my view) of people in those and similar places. But that’s fine; you cannot please everyone, and adjustments are always possible.

None of the organizations I mentioned are beyond reproach. But they are nonetheless a godsend for anyone interested in the rough draft of history. And they are most valuable to those who happen to be where rough history is being drafted.

Dan Perry was the top AP editor in Europe and Africa, in the Middle East and in the Caribbean. He was chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem. He writes frequently on world affairs, technology and media, is the author of two books on the Middle East and is managing partner of the communications consultancy Thunder11. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.