The Biggest Lie of the Century
by Jimmy Carr | May 13, 16:30
TEL AVIV-JAFFA, Israel – “Unbiased journalism is the biggest lie of the century. Nobody is objective. If you’re a human being, you’re not objective,” Noam Sheizaf said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
It’s an unexpected statement, considering that Sheizaf himself is a journalist, blogger, and founding member of one of Israel’s fastest-growing news outlets, 972mag.com.
+972 is a news website run by a team of 15 volunteer writers—four are women, two are Palestinian—that publishes blog posts focusing on Israel and Palestine. The name +972 is taken from the international calling code assigned to both Israeli and Palestinian areas.
It’s a nonpartisan name for an openly partisan website.
“We’re the most lefty news organization out there. There’s no one to the left of us,” Sheizaf said proudly. The site’s “About” page states clearly the site’s support for human rights and freedom of information and, more controversially, its opposition to the Israeli occupation.
“We oppose the military regime imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the dual mechanism of citizenship. We simply oppose the system,” Sheizaf explained. The political situation of the Golan Heights, he said, is “less important” because the area is less populous and not subjected to the same “military regime.
This open statement of political beliefs is perhaps what most sets +972 apart from traditional newspapers. The site features original reporting, expert analysis, and personal opinion—often in the same piece. Political agendas are stated rather than hidden. There are separate sections for news and analysis, but only because the graphics team said the site looked better that way. Sheizaf wanted them combined.
“Activism and digital journalism have become one. I think it’s harder and harder to separate the lines between them,” site contributor Mairav Zonsein said.
Many posts on +972 take the form of a news article. Others read like an op-ed column. Other times the post is simply a YouTube video with English translation and commentary. And, sometimes, the post is a combination of all three.
This glad abandonment of objectivity is relatively unheard of in the American media landscape. But Ilene Prusher, a journalist and writer for Ha’aretz, said that Israeli newspapers “have never had the same reverence for objectivity that American newspapers do.”
“Israel has always been different. It follows the European model more, where newspapers have always affiliated with a political party or movement,” she explained. Ha’aretz, while traditionally identified with the Israeli left, is not formally aligned with specific policies or parties; its journalists strive for objectivity.
Not so at +972. “There is an agenda. But it’s everyone’s individual agenda,” said contributor Zonsein. For her, that means a focus on the South Hebron Hills and Palestinian perspectives.
Despite their unifying position on the occupation, disagreements do occur among the site’s staff. They agree that the occupation should end; they don’t agree how. The most heated debate occurs over whether peace lies in a one-state solution or a two-state solution, according to +972’s Managing Editor Michael Omer-Man.
In Israeli journalism, it seems, everything is political.
“If you’re an Israeli and you choose to start going to the West Bank, then that’s already a very conscious choice to want to be educated about what’s going on there,” Zonsein said. “Your decision to do that in the first place is already a political decision.”
Rather than try to place themselves outside of the story, these journalists simply embrace their personal reactions to stories. Some even claim that this is the only option—that objectivity on any issue is impossible.
“I think this American lip service to neutrality is false. It’s disingenuous. I don’t think anybody’s neutral,” founding member and current contributor Lisa Goldman said. Goldman, based in New York, often covers Israeli-Palestinian issues in America.
Madeline Sanderford, an American student and regular reader of +972, said she knows that the site is biased—but that fact doesn’t mean it’s less valuable to her.
“+972 falls on the side of the law, which happens to be critical of Israel. Why should human rights be liberal?” she asked. “I think you get more information from that side of the aisle than you do from the conservative side of news.”
This approach, according to Ha’aretz writer Ilene Prusher, depends upon an intelligent reader who “should know where the news is coming from. If you’re reading +972, you should know that you’re reading a certain political voice. You’d notice that certain voices are missing, such as a settler or the Israeli military spokesman, which is what's usually done in mainstream journalism.”
Ironically, +972 was founded in mid-2010 with the intention of providing a platform to other “missing voices.”
“We had very modest goals,” Goldman said. “It was just bringing together the voices of liberal bloggers who write in English from Israel on one platform. We didn’t set out to challenge or to compete with any other media outlet.”
Several English-language blogs critical of the Israeli government sprang up during and after the 2006 Lebanon War. These privately-run sites offered something new: independent political commentary backed by fresh reporting and social media aggregation. The bloggers—“Israeli activist-journalists” as Goldman thinks of them—gained an international following. +972 followed this model to success.
The site breaks journalistic convention in less controversial ways, as well. Stories are not assigned. Managing Editor Michael Omer-Man—the site’s only full-time, paid employee—can suggest stories, but since contributors work on a volunteer basis, he can’t force anyone to write about specific issues. Some of the site’s “regular writers” publish once every few weeks.
“Sometimes there are stories that I think are crucial, but I just don’t have anybody to write about them, and that’s extremely frustrating,” he said. “But, it’s one of the things that comes with the model.”
With the exception of calling for boycotts of Israel—a move that is prohibited by Israeli law—+972 contributors have the right to cover any story and say anything. They also have a right to ignore anything.
“If we’re going to an incident next to a settlement, we’re not necessarily interested in covering all aspects of that story. We’re not going to go to the IDF [Israeli military] and the settler and the Palestinian. We’re going to cover what we’re interested in covering,” Zonsein explained.
When Samer Issawi, a Palestinian imprisoned in Israel, began to hunger strike nine months ago, Omer-Man pushed his colleagues to follow the lead. But, with full-time jobs—and, in some cases, families—no one on the team had time to do the reporting. Omer-Man ended up writing the story himself.
The writers work independently of each other, with coverage sometimes overlapping. Stories are checked for grammar and accuracy, but not for objectivity or balance—a format that has both advantages and disadvantages.
“There’s no gatekeeper—no editor telling me what I can and cannot write. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in having that control,” Goldman said. Based in New York, Goldman chooses to write about American reactions to events in Israel. Others have focused on topics such as Syria or domestic Israeli politics.
As a volunteer site, however, +972’s writers must find paid work elsewhere. Most work as freelance journalists, writers, and editors for major Israeli newspapers. “The only thing I wish is that more people could make a living off it,” Sheizaf explained.
The site also doesn’t have an office. Instead, writers work from home or in one of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s many cafés. Friends in a local art collective offer larger meeting spaces, when necessary.
“Our environment is the Internet,” Sheizaf said. “We work through Skype. We work through Google lists. An online environment is actually way better than cubicles.”
The team does meet in person once or twice a year, however, to discuss the site’s direction and vote on decisions, such as whether or not to accept a new contributor. Each writer and editor casts a single, equal vote. “In our animal farm, no animals are more equal than the others,” Goldman said, in a droll Orwellian reference.
It’s an approach that, so far, is working. Israeli contributor Haggai Matar received the 2012 Anna Lindh Mediterranean Journalist Award for his +972 series on the separation wall. Palestinian contributor Omar Rahman attended the 2013 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, where he received one of their 2013 Scholarships.
That kind of publicity has also attracted financial support. So far in 2013, the site has received $65,500 in grants from American and Israeli philanthropies via 972 – Advancement of Citizen Journalism, the non-profit organization founded to represent the website.
Additional donations come from readers who, Zonsein said, seem willing to support +972 in the years to come.
“It’s clear to us that if we continue to do this, we can grow more and more. People are thirsty and looking for this kind of reporting,” Zonsein said.
Not everyone’s thirsty for more. +972 has managed to upset groups across the political spectrum. The conservative group NGO Monitor labeled the site anti-Semitic for its use of the term “apartheid” in reference to Israeli policies in the West Bank. Alternatively, liberal Israeli activists working in Palestinian areas have denounced their stories for not being critical enough of Israeli actions.
It’s criticism that the writers simply ignore; they follow no one’s agenda but their own.
“+972 doesn’t have a political mission. We don’t have a political end goal,” Omer-Man said. Sheizaf, however, could think of one goal: “Well, if the occupation stopped tomorrow, +972 would take a tiny, tiny bit of credit.”
