Secretary of State John Kerry recently gave a speech highly critical of the Israeli government. Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were outraged; critics, on the other hand, were gratified. And then, just about everyone picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and turned their attention to Kerry’s designated successor, Rex Tillerson.
Everyone, that is, except Peter Baker, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. Baker examined the story’s coverage in Israel’s two principal newspapers, the right-leaning Jerusalem Post and the left-leaning Haaretz, and discovered—OMG—that they had conspicuously different reactions to Kerry’s words: The Jerusalem Post declared that “Kerry exits locked into failed assumptions” while Haaretz hailed “a very Zionist, pro-Israel speech.” At which point, Baker had an epiphany: “In Israel,” he wrote, “the reaction to the events of recent days . . . made it clear that Israelis are just as polarized as Americans.” And it gets worse:
It seems that as far as the Times is concerned, the worst thing any correspondent can say about a foreign country is that it resembles, or is on its way to resembling, the United States.
The problem, of course, is that the New York Times is a curious place to complain about newspaper readers who “cling to their own facts, retreat to their own media outlets,” who shun the people who disagree with them about politics. The Times daily indulges in what might charitably be called a certain uniformity of opinion, a studied indifference, if not to say hostility, to dissenters.
The other, perhaps more astonishing, problem is Peter Baker’s evident inexperience of the world. Yes, Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post appeal to different political segments of Israeli society, just as the Wall Street Journal differs from the Washington Post. But this state of affairs is hardly confined to America and Israel, as Baker suggests; and is, in fact, characteristic of most democratic societies that value debate and boast a lively free press.
In Great Britain, a socialist is apt to read the Guardian while a Tory takes the Daily Telegraph. In France, readers of Le Figaro (right) tend to view the world differently from readers of Le Monde (left). In Germany, there’s not much common political ground between the man who reads Neues Deutschland (left) and the woman who buys Die Welt (right). And so on.
Indeed, why would anyone assume otherwise? You’d have to live in a world where people “cling to their own facts, retreat to their own media outlets, advance their own narratives, and basically just talk with people who think like they do.”
Now, who might that be?
