“Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.”
—Michael Prescott, former political editor of the Sunday Times who served as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Internal Standards Committee, in a leaked memo that claimed that the BBC repeatedly published misinformation about Israel.
“I want to ask you a difficult question. There’ll be some people looking in, and they’ll go, look at what happened in Gaza and of course something was coming, what would you say to them?”
—BBC journalist Nick Robinson, interviewing a Jewish family in north London after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack and suggesting that attacks on Jews around the world were to be expected because of Gaza.
If anti-Jewish reports in mainstream media were a toxic flood before October 7, afterward they became a virulent tsunami. Much of that was anti-Israel lies that teetered well over the boundary between inaccurate reporting and into anti-Jewish propaganda. But there were also plenty of articles putting Jews around the world in a harsh light, blaming them for attacks carried out against them or using token “as a Jews” to cast the rest of the Jewish community as evil.
Is there any end in sight?
Buying the media and changing it
One major change that happened this past year was the acquisition of the media company Paramount Global by David Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The Ellisons, a pro-Israel Jewish family, immediately made changes at CBS, a Paramount subsidiary. Most importantly, they put Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of the centrist and pro-Israel Free Press, in charge of the news division at CBS, one of the three major non-cable TV news channels in the US.
That has already led to controversy. Weiss delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes investigative report about the Trump administration’s use of the CECOT prison in El Salvador to hold deportees. The 60 Minutes show is the flagship news program at CBS, and insiders accused Weiss of both being a shill for the Trump administration (the Ellisons have a close relationship with Trump) and being incompetent in the field of journalism.
The outcome of that kerfuffle may show whether Weiss will be able to permanently change the tenor and focus of a major news channel in the US.
(One concerning issue that has come up, however, is the suggestion that the Ellisons might bring Saudi and Qatari government investment funds into their proposed acquisition of Warner Discovery, which might give the Saudis and Qataris sway over CNN.)
Another major change may have been the way that light has been shed on nasty practices at the BBC. As Ami has previously reported, a leaked memorandum from Michael Prescott, who had been serving as part of an internal standards review at the BBC, showed that there were numerous failures of reporting—seemingly to the point of clear bias—on a number of issues. One of those focused on by Prescott was Israel, with him pointing out that the BBC had slanted its coverage against Israel in many ways, especially in its Arab-language service.
While the usual suspects complained about the memo, British members of Parliament called for changes. If anything comes of that, it may change the way one of the most prominent and widespread news outlets does its reporting.
Social media, in any case
One question about the few possible changes to media outlets is whether it matters anymore. Young people aren’t getting their news directly from these outlets one way or the other. Instead, they’re turning to the even worse world of social media.
According to a poll by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab taken at the end of 2024, three out of four US college students at 181 institutions said that social media is their main source of news. About half of the students said that their second-most used source of news was word of mouth. Only one out of five students said that they regularly turned to newspapers, whether digital or print, for news.
And this wasn’t because students thought that newspapers were less reliable. In fact, they mostly believed that they were more reliable than what they were seeing on social media or from influencers. That didn’t matter.
And even when they want to check up more about a story, they are more likely to end up reading about it in an AI-generated response from Google than in a primary news source.
Gil Hoffman is the executive director of HonestReporting, which reports and responds to anti-Jewish media bias
I understand that you’re using a new tool called BiasBreaker. Can you explain what that is?
For more than 25 years, HonestReporting has been looking for media bias in articles. There are eight categories of media bias that we have been using throughout that time.
We have been using humans to look for those eight categories for more than 25 years. After October 7, that became challenging, because so much was being written that it was like drinking from a firehose. So we started training an AI tool, which we now call BiasBreaker, in looking for those eight categories of media bias.
People will remember that they used to write a letter to the editor. They took a long time writing a beautiful letter by hand. If they made a mistake, they used Wite-Out. Then they’d find an envelope and put it in a box, and a man would take it from a box to a newspaper, where it would go to an intern, who would bring up the ma
il to an editor smoking a cigar, who would then decide whether to put it on page 12 or 13. And it would be printed with no context whatsoever.
Now, we can have the AI detect one of these eight categories of media bias and send us an alert, and we can be in contact with that media outlet and get things changed within five minutes, before anyone really saw it.
So it’s helping you not just quantify and identify these stories but actually change them.
Absolutely. Right now it’s just us, but in the future, the public and the media outlets will have access to this, as well. Perhaps they’ll even read the articles and make sure they aren’t biased before sending them in.
It’s based on a large-learning-model platform [like ChatGPT]?
Yes. At the same time, we’re helping people learn what to do with their own LLM. If they’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Grok, they need to learn how to train them.
We’re Jews. We’re good at arguing. We argue with our mothers-in-law; why don’t we argue with our LLM? People think that what they say is Torah Misinai, and it’s not true. It’s a child, and it needs to be taught.
Are you referring to the bias that we’re seeing out of those platforms?
If they’re quoting stats from a source that shouldn’t be trusted, like Hamas or the United Nations, people need to say, “No, give us reputable sources.”
How are you training people to do that?
I go around the United States and speak. We’re having articles published in the Washington Times and the Jerusalem Post. We go to conferences.
We’re HonestReporting, so people think that what we do is correct The New York Times when they write that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel. But we’re a lot more sophisticated now.
Has this new program allowed you to quantify the full extent of the disinformation and misinformation?
More and more, it has been giving us data about which media outlet handled a particular news incident the worst and which media can be trusted better.
We recently found a disturbing trend of Bondi Beach not being referred to as an anti-Semitic incident. We’ll be able to reveal those trends and caution people about them: trends by issue, trends by outlet, trends of a reporter who cannot be trusted.
When we find an incorrect report, there are different ways of handling it. We can quietly, behind the scenes, inform the editor or the writer himself that a mistake was made. We do that all the time. But sometimes highlighting things on social media is helpful to regain deterrence on the media battlefield. Sometimes writing a longer form article is helpful. Each issue has to be handled in the right way.
Are there outlets that people would think of as mainstream that you found to be particularly egregious or resistant to making corrections when you point something out?
Sure. Reuters is particularly bad. The New York Times is quite defensive. Their former correspondent Patrick Kingsley enjoyed yelling at people when they tried to get things corrected. He yelled at us. He yelled at Israeli diplomats. The New York Times is a challenging outlet, because people take what it writes as the word of G-d, and it’s not.
Have you started seeing changes over the period since October 7?
Yes, for the worse. Each day since October 7 has gotten easier for Israel on the seven military fronts. And every day since then, it has cumulatively gotten harder on the media battlefield—and, one could also argue, with regard to anti-Semitism in the United States.
Do you think that those two things are related?
Absolutely. I can give you plenty of examples of dishonest reporting causing violence and death.
I can give you the Rabbi Leo Dee example. In Pesach of 2023, six months before October 7, Pesach, Easter and Ramadan were all at the same time. There were a group of rioters who barricaded themselves inside Al Aqsa Mosque, preparing to attack both Jewish and Muslim worshippers in the morning. The police went in to disarm them and were attacked. Of course, when they were attacked, they defended themselves. Out came the video cameras, and there were headlines around the world: “Israelis attack worshippers in the mosque.” Of course, there were no worshippers in the mosque in the middle of the night; they were there planning to attack people in the morning.
This led to Muslims deciding to attack the first Jew they saw. The first Jew they saw was an Italian tourist in Tel Aviv who was not Jewish and was murdered for the crime of looking Jewish. The next one who attacked someone was the terrorist who murdered Lucy, Maia and Rina Dee on their way to a vacation in Tiberias.
One could say October 7, as well. They said that their operation was due to Jews davening on the Har Habayit. Now we know that they were planning it for 17 years, but they used the dishonest reporting in that case too.
Do you think that it works the other way around, as well—that there is a “permission” for the media to be more dishonest when they feel that the public is more anti-Semitic?
There certainly is peer pressure to follow some sort of narrative about Israel right now. They are both promoting and responding to that anti-Israel, anti-Semitic trend.
Do you see any positive changes at all?
Bari Weiss, obviously, is an example of CBS getting better. They’ve hired some better people, like Matt Gutman [who is becoming the chief correspondent for CBS News], who used to report with me at the Jerusalem Post.
In regard to social media companies, Meta has made strides in making sure that a minority view is presented in the community notes they have on posts.
It’s worthwhile to remember that social media companies are different from AI companies, because social media companies make money and AI companies don’t, yet. Social media companies have a vested interest in keeping you in your bubble and happy so you’ll click more and they’ll make money, which is not true yet of AI. That’s why you can have an impact on AI in a way that you can’t on social media.
But there are things that people with smartphones can do. Sharing Instagram or Facebook posts on WhatsApp, which is also in the same Meta family, will make the algorithm happy. Sharing shows that a [pro-Jewish] post is a good thing, and it will get higher on people’s feeds.
Another thing they can do is watch a pro-Israel video to the end. It is very rare that people watch a video to the end, and that impresses the algorithm. They don’t need to actually watch it; they can go make coffee while it plays to the end.
And on the other side, with regard to the posts and videos of the enemies, don’t share them; take a screenshot. It won’t know that you’re taking a screenshot and sharing it. And don’t let a video play to the end.
I do, from the fact that we’re educating people. The better people are educated, the better things will be, and that is happening all the time.
I also don’t think that, in general, journalists want to get things wrong. There are obviously some who are biased to their cores. But many are just working fast and getting things wrong, and in this day and age, SEO rewards people who get their story up first. So the more inaccurate a story is, the more people will read it, because it’s higher up in Google. I would like to think that we can get journalists to become more careful. People can send us examples of media bias so that we can reach out to the journalists and outlets. ●
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