Inside the Israeli media’s ‘shocking self-censorship’ of the horrors of Gaza

Throughout the Gaza war, the tremendous difference between international coverage and Israeli media coverage was obvious to anyone exposed to both. 

In a new report, media scholar Dr. Ayala Panievsky’s research quantifies precisely how pronounced that difference was. On the Haaretz Podcast, she said the silencing of dissent in Israel’s mainstream media was unprecedented. 

“The professional journalists, people who Israelis spend their entire lives trusting to tell them the truth, rallied around the military in many ways – any criticism of what our soldiers were doing was just out of bounds. It wasn't part of the conversation.”

In past coverage of war and conflict, she stressed, “there was no such silencing of any criticism and alternative voices,” attributing the difference to the tremendous amount of pressure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on media outlets in recent years.

"The Netanyahu camp declared war on the media a decade ago. And when the war in Gaza broke, the mainstream media was already very much undermined, intimidated and exhausted.” 

In her conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Panievsky, author of “The New Censorship: How the War on the Media is Taking Us Down,” also discussed how the phenomenon of self-censorship is plaguing journalism worldwide.

In many countries, she said, authoritarian leaders “claim to speak on behalf of democracy” while “doing everything to undermine journalism and its role in society. … This is something very, very confusing, and difficult to tackle.

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