Washington DC, May 7 -At some level, you have to feel sorry for the members of the American corporate media reporting on the periodic clashes between Israel and the resistance forces in Gaza. Reporting in any situation of war or civil conflict is a harrowing, high-stake business. You have some amount of fear about your own safety and that of your loved ones. Getting details of a murky, fast-moving story can be really hard. You have to tread numerous super-fine lines of journalistic judgment/ethics in how you gather the news and report it. And meantime, you’re working under pressure of very tight deadlines on a “big”, high-stakes story…
I know about this. I reported on Lebanon’s complex and destructive civil war for several years, in a situation in which I was living in Beirut, was married to a Lebanese person, and had two children with him… all right there, in Beirut. I covered the early months of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88-from the Iraqi side, while my spouse was covering it from the Iranian side. And twice, I was sent to Egypt to cover major instances of potentially revolutionary civil violence there.
So yes, I know about the pressures.
I was recalling these experiences as I followed the reporting these past days on the most recent Israel-Gaza fighting in (especially) the New York Times and the Washington Post. And I concluded that one good way to understand how the reporters on the ground do their work under such pressures is to use the framework provided by Nobel Economics Laureate Daniel Kahneman in his 2013 book Thinking, Fast and Slow .
Kahneman’s thesis is that, for most of people’s daily lives and perhaps especially in high-stress situations, they do not “think through” everything they’re doing in any in-depth, systematic way. Rather, they rely on speedy cognitive shortcuts- “heuristics”, as he calls them-to guide their actions in a way that may seem almost intuitive to them at the time. But then, when they find the heuristics don’t work for them or on other, more deliberately chosen occasions when they’re no longer in the high-stress situation, they do the more in-depth, reflective, and slower thinking that is needed to refine or update their heuristics.
The reporting on the recent Gaza-Israel clashes in both the NYT and the WaPo was almost a textbook example of “fast” and then slightly “slower” thinking in action. The story of those clashes started, fairly slowly, on Friday, May 3. (The story of Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza had of course started 13 years earlier.) But then, the clashes heated up on May 5.
So the reporting those papers’ reporters did on May 5 that appeared in the May 6 print edition of their papers was their first substantial take on this story. You could see their use of Kahneman-style heuristics (aka, anti-Palestinian kneejerk reactions) on full display!
Israel’s military actions as a “response” to something the Palestinians had initiated? Check (for both papers.) Misleading and skewed descriptions of the casualties on each side? Check (for the WaPo-see photo below.) Misleading choice and use of photographs? Check (for the NYT, see their presentation of four photographs in this photo.)
(Actually, I’ve produced a handy 12-point checklist that ambitious young journalists who want to get ahead in US corporate media can use when they’re reporting on Israel-Gaza clashes-and that the rest of us can use to play “Anti-Palestinian Bias Bingo” when we’re reading such reporting. It could become a thing, don’t you think?)
The journalism these reporters and editors produced on May 6, that appeared in the online versions of their papers that day, and then in the print editions today, was noticeably less biased than the work they produced May 5-though still far from fully objective. I surmise that by May 6, the journos were acting under less overall pressure. A de-facto ceasefire had been reached, and thus they had the chance to do some in-depth, “slower” thinking about what they were doing and were less reliant on their kneejerk heuristics.
But how did these reporters develop their deeply anti-Palestinian crisis-reporting heuristics in the first place?
It’s key to note that all this reporting-even that portion that’s performed, possibly at great personal risk, by named Palestinians in Gaza- comes out through Israel , where it is melded into a single composite story with the Jerusalem dateline, by the Jerusalem-based “bureau chief.” That has two implications. First, all reporting that comes out through Israel is subject to Israeli military censorship. Second, the reporting provided by Gaza-based correspondents is edited by the Jerusalem bureau before it is filed back to headquarters; and the people in the Jerusalem bureau generally live and work deeply immersed in the society and the cultural norms of Israel’s Jewish-Israeli elite. (Plus, they are personally vulnerable to Israeli censorship, gag orders or even expulsion orders if they ever transgress too much.)
Then, the editors in these papers’ headquarters in Washington or New York who make all the final decisions are similarly immersed in the society and cultural norms of local elites. These norms may (or may not) currently be changing a little but they have remained strongly pro-Israeli for the past half century. Plus, everyone in these big newsrooms is quite aware of the vigilance and the commercial heft of different parts of the pro-Israeli lobby.
When I was working for the Christian Science Monitor , it was our good fortune that the Christian Science church underwrote the paper’s finances, so it was not reliant on advertisers. (That changed later, when the came to rely more on income from advertising.) Other news outlets have not been not so lucky. They’ve always had to stay aware of the harm that pro-Israeli discourse-suppression outfits like the Boston-based CAMERA could do to them if they failed to toe the official Israeli line.
There are a couple of ironies in all this. Firstly, organizations like CAMERA have always been (and remain) active users and threateners of the use of commercial boycott in their campaign to suppress public discourse they don’t like- even as they and their pro-Israeli colleagues have been working in legislatures all around the country to outlaw the boycott efforts that they don’t like!
Secondly, a headspinning irony about Daniel Kahneman’s expertise. As a “behavioral” economist, he has developed some good ways of explaining how humans think and act in different situations. But the context in which he developed these theories is more than a little troubling. As he says in the introduction to Thinking, Fast and Slow , he developed most of these theories while he and his Israeli colleague Amos Tvirsky were working as consultants to the Israeli Air Force, trying to optimize the training of the IAF’s pilots and gunners.
Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow approach is nonetheless helpful in analyzing the behavior of media workers in Israel and Gaza. It indicates that it will probably be hard to improve these people’s behavior while they are in the midst of covering a “big” story. But there may well be ways outside of that pressure-cooker to get them to undertake some of the more reflective slow thinking that’s needed if they’re going to change their in-action heuristics.
I recall from my time in Lebanon in the 1970s that we faced numerous conundrums over how to do our work informatively, ethically, and to deadline. We all used heuristics (or “rules of thumb”) as we did our reporting. But then, when the situation was calmer, we’d sit around together and try to finetune these rules of thumb. You couldn’t do this clarificatory work while you were in the Reuters bureau, banging out those 20 paras of breaking news at high speed to give to the waiting telex operator. (Back in the day.)
So yes, there are almost certainly ways we can engage with people at all stages of the reporting stream: with the correspondents in the field, the bureau chiefs, and the newsroom editors. The best time to do so is doubtless NOT when they’re in the middle of working on a “big” story. And we could use an inverted version of my tongue-in-cheek “Ambitious young journalists’ checklist” as we do so… We could ask, for example, whether a journalist or editor really thinks that a deceased/killed person on the Israeli side should be given more value and more honor than one on the Palestinian side, and so on.
But the thing about heuristics is that they’re sticky. If they have seemed to work for someone over a period of time, then she or he might find it hard to change them. Thus, the work of challenging or refining them needs to be ongoing.
Plus, in the context of media work, they are “sticky” in a broader context, too, since the way that elite newspapers like these two shape and present their reporting inevitably helps to shape the way that their readers and the broader public see and understand the world over the long term.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to values. Do people in the media see all human lives as equally valuable, all humans as equally endowed with rights, and each person’s suffering as equally harmful? By constantly asking such questions of people working in different roles in the corporate media, we can hope, over time, to improve the heuristics they use in their work.
Originally published at https://mondoweiss.net on May 9, 2019.
