Key Takeaways:
- The AP doesn’t just cover the region; it sets the boundaries of the coverage, and it made decisions that shaped what readers could understand, without ever disclosing them. And it wasn’t one rogue bureau; a herd instinct shapes coverage, which is precisely why a reader seeing the same story from the AP, Reuters, New York Times, CNN and the BBC concludes it must be true.
- Once journalists became activists, the story needed a villain, and the West already had one picked out because it plugged into something far older: “There’s a very old instinct that basically explains evil in the world with a story about Jews. And if you’re on the left and what you care about is colonialism and racism, the most egregious example available is a country called Israel.”
- Social media changed the game, and the one durable advantage the legacy press had was to become a refuge from the blizzard of disinformation on feeds. Instead, legacy media chose to join the circus instead of rising above it; in doing so, they sacrificed their authority.
When Matti Friedman joined the Associated Press’s Jerusalem bureau in 2006, he wasn’t looking for a fight with the media. He came in, by his own description, from the left side of the Israeli political spectrum with “no particular critique” of the press. When people complained about the coverage in his first couple of years, he’d tell them that some stories break one way and some break another, but the totality added up to “something resembling reality.”
It took him about two years to conclude that it didn’t.
The first thing that struck him wasn’t ideology. It was arithmetic.
“At the time that I was there, we had about 40 full-time staffers covering this story,” Friedman told me. “Israel is one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world. We had more reporters here than we had in China at that time, which has 1.3 billion people. We had more reporters here than we had in all of sub-Saharan Africa, which is fifty-something countries.”
This was the biggest international bureau of the world’s biggest news organization (the wire service feeds approximately ten thousand outlets downstream) pointed at a country the size of New Jersey. Whatever that staffing chart measured, it wasn’t news value. It was a decision, made before a single story was filed, about what the most important story on Earth was going to be.
The Script Comes First
What that army of reporters produced, Friedman argued, wasn’t coverage so much as casting. “In an activist story, you need a villain, and you need a victim,” he said. “And here it’s obvious that the victim you’re supposed to sympathize with is the Palestinians, and the villain is Israel, whose actions, if you’re a consumer of mainstream media, are almost impossible to understand.”
The proof isn’t just in the stories that ran. It’s in the ones that didn’t.
In 2008, two AP reporters had the story of Ehud Olmert’s peace offer to Mahmoud Abbas. One of them had seen a map: it was a far-reaching, two-state proposal with a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank and an international sharing arrangement for Jerusalem. The Palestinians walked away from it. If your coverage is built around the peace process, an offer that delineates exactly what Israel would give and what the Palestinians would not accept is an enormous story.
It never ran.
“The problem is that this story would have subverted the entire narrative that we were pushing, which is that Israel is uncooperative and uninterested in a resolution of the conflict, Israel is increasingly extreme, and the Palestinians are moderate,” Friedman said. “So the two reporters were ordered to drop the story.” One of those reporters, Mark Lavie, later came forward and called the decision the worst journalistic scandal of his fifty years in journalism.
Friedman’s summary of the mechanism is essentially his thesis: “The stories are meant to make a political case. Stories that don’t make the case will be played down or ignored. Stories that do make the case will be inflated and sometimes invented.”
He was careful to add this problem wasn’t exclusive to AP. “The AP isn’t a particularly extreme case,” he said. “It’s just a company that was unfortunate enough to hire me, which is why I know how it works on the inside.” The same thing, he said, was going on at Reuters, the New York Times, and every other Jerusalem bureau. “It’s an industry-wide breakdown that happens at more or less the same time.”
The Herd Mentality
I put it to him that the spiked Olmert story sounded like catch-and-kill — the move a tabloid makes when it buys an exclusive in order to bury it. And if the AP did it, what about Reuters, what about the rest of the wires? It sounded almost coordinated.
His answer was more unsettling than a conspiracy would have been.
“It’s not coordinated in that no one’s sitting in a room deciding what story to cover and not to cover,” Friedman said. “But there is very much a herd instinct in the press, and in the social world of which the press is a part.” That last distinction is the one that does the work, because the world he means is much larger than journalism: it includes large parts of academia, the NGO sector, and the UN. “The press doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They exist as part of an informal alliance.” So the loop closes on itself. Amnesty publishes a report; the AP cites it credulously; the UN picks up the AP; the report is now a fact with three sources.
Then he described how it actually works at desk level, and it is almost mundane. Three in the afternoon in Jerusalem is when editors in New York wake up, read the Times on the subway in from Brooklyn, glance at the Reuters wire — and the pings start landing in the bureau. Match this story. Why don’t we have this? Why is Reuters reporting this and we’re not?
“And then by the end of the day, you’d see that most of the news herd had evened out on the same story.”
No one had to be instructed, because everyone already knew the rules. “Everyone knows what’s politically acceptable and unacceptable.” Different companies, different countries, editors who have no reason to know each other — the Reuters editor in London, the AP editor in New York — and by the end of the day they have converged on what the storyline is going to be for June 11th, or any other day you’d care to pick.
Which is precisely why the coverage is so persuasive. The convergence doesn’t read as groupthink from the outside. It reads as corroboration.
“A reader is going to see a story coming from the Washington Post, coming from the New York Times, coming from AP, Reuters, CNN, BBC — and they’re going to say, okay, this must be true. It’s coming at me from so many different angles.”
“And if you’re here in Jerusalem and you’re seeing how the sausage is getting made, of course it’s not true. It’s just a bunch of people who agree with each other.”
The Editor’s Note That Never Was
The most damning story Friedman told me was one where he was holding the pen.
It was late 2008, during Operation Cast Lead. The AP’s correspondent in Gaza, a Palestinian reporter Friedman respected, called in reporting that civilians were being counted in the death toll and that Hamas fighters were dressing as civilians. Friedman, writing the story from Jerusalem, put those details in, and the story went out.
“I got a call from him not long after that. He sounded worried. He’d clearly been spoken to by someone. And he said, ‘Matti, listen, you have to take that detail out of the story,’ which I did, because I wasn’t going to get anyone hurt for a news story.” The bureau chief at the time, Steve Gutkin, later said the reporter’s life had been threatened.
Friedman understood the removal. What he couldn’t accept was the silence that followed. When the Israeli military censor touches a story, usually something involving the nuclear program, the AP appends an editor’s note telling readers the story was complying with IDF censorship rules. Friedman suggested doing exactly the same for Hamas.
He was overruled.
“From that moment, AP readers were never told that we were conforming with Hamas censorship, even though that has been the case since 2008.”
It ran deeper than one story. He shared that cameramen outside Shifa Hospital were encouraged to film incoming civilian casualties, but when Hamas military casualties would arrive, a minder standing next to the camera would signal for the camera to turn off.
Friedman has since shared stages with Western correspondents who, in his words, “played dumb about all of this,” even though anyone sentient understands how it shapes the coverage.
A World of Information in Their Own Image
How does a bureau full of professionals produce this? Friedman calls it a bubble effect.
Start with the basics: “My bureau chief at the AP didn’t speak Hebrew,” he said. “If you were covering America without speaking English, Americans would think that was ridiculous. But that’s standard for Western journalism.” But, Friedman warned that it goes deeper than a language barrier. It’s as fundamental as the worldview they arrive with, and the understanding they have of a journalist’s role.
“They have a different perception of their job.” A generation absorbed the ideas of post-colonialism and Western guilt in the classroom, then moved into the newsrooms, the NGOs, the congressional staff. “They end up creating this world of information in their own image.”
Inside that world, the spiked Olmert story and the missing editor’s note make sense, and the selective storytelling doesn’t cost them professional integrity.
The Familiar Villain
The cultural ramifications run far beyond the pages of news sites and have spread onto bookshelves.
Earlier this year, Friedman walked into a bookstore in Washington, D.C., and noticed an explosion of titles about Gaza. Most of them were not reportage, and most of them by writers who had never been near the place. He read five of them and wrote the resulting essay “Introduction to Gazology” for The Free Press. What he found wasn’t a failure of journalism, rather a literary genre being born, with its own rules and tropes, in which Gaza functions as the lens for looking at evil in general.
“There are books about Gaza and feminism, and Gaza and the climate,” he said. The climate one is real: a Swedish Marxist academic’s book titled The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, which argues there is a deep link between the Jewish national movement and the advent of coal and steam.
“None of it makes sense,” Friedman said. “But he deeply feels this, and he’s been allowed to write a book about it, which is carried in bookstores.” He noted, drily, that Greta Thunberg has made the same migration, from climate activist to anti-Zionist activist.
The through-line is that the subject is interchangeable and the villain is not. “There’s this attempt to use Israel as an example of what’s wrong, no matter what interests you.”
And this, he argued, is where it stops being a media story. A student in a poli-sci department, or maybe an engineering school, or medical school, is going to be encouraged to see evil in the world by looking at Gaza, and to understand, implicitly or explicitly, that the barrier between us and the just world we want is Jews. The Irish novelist Sally Rooney, he pointed out, recently said something close to that outright: that if we could only do something about Israel, the world would be improved in some cosmic way.
“And of course, this is a very old idea.”
Then he laid it out, and it’s worth quoting at length, because the pattern is the argument:
“This is a very old instinct that basically explains evil in the world with a story about Jews. So if you’re a communist and you think capitalism is the problem, then the bankers are Jews. And if you’re a capitalist and you think communism is the threat to world order, then the Bolsheviks are Jews. And if you’re a German in the ’20s and you think racial purity is the most important thing, then the racial pollutant is Jews. And if you’re an American today on the hard right and you don’t like globalization, the globalists are Jews… And if you’re on the left and what you care about is colonialism and racism, then the most egregious example of those ills is a country called Israel and people called Zionists, which happen to be most of the Jews in the world.”
I raised Sartre’s line, that the antisemite creates the Jew. Friedman took it further, into the inversion that makes the whole thing legible: “When the West was popular, people who didn’t like Jews thought Jews were kind of anti-Western. They were too tribal, or too swarthy, or too Oriental. And now that the West is unpopular in the West itself, Israelis are being portrayed as the über-Westerners — the most white, the most capitalist.”
The content flips. The slot doesn’t.
“None of this makes sense as rational analysis,” he said, “but it makes a lot of sense if we inhabit the very deep narrative mechanism through which Western societies have traditionally understood themselves.” For readers who want the long version, he pointed to David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism, the book that lays out the pattern above and deliberately declines to call the thing antisemitism. It traces it as an intellectual through-line running back more than two thousand years, predating Christianity, which then mainstreamed it as a way of answering the question, “Who are we?” with “We are not Jews.” The subtitle is the part Friedman lingered on: The Western Tradition.
“This is the basic narrative tool that many people have always used to explain their world. And it’s being employed again.”
His warning was not directed at Jews. “The emergence of this as an acceptable form of discourse should be making us all very worried. Not just Jewish people, who are of course going to bear the brunt of it. The emergence of these ideas is always a sign of intellectual decline, of an individual or of a society. When people start looking for these kinds of explanations, it’s a symptom of a system that’s failing.”
The Dancing Bears
Friedman was at the AP until the end of 2011, “which now seems like medieval times,” he said. But he insists the foundations of the current landscape were poured in exactly those years, just as social media emerged.
He recalled that early on there was a naive belief that social media would deliver unfiltered news and make everyone a trustworthy journalist. Instead, it became “a playground for ideological actors and commercial propaganda and political propaganda of different kinds.” Legacy media could have leveraged this breakdown. “If the legacy press maintains its job as being trustworthy storytellers, then people will seek refuge from the blizzard of disinformation on social media in legacy media. They’ll come to The New York Times, they’ll come to the AP, looking for something that resembles credible information.”
That would have been the survival strategy; the only one that would have preserved integrity.
“But the reporters didn’t want to cover the circus. They wanted to be in the circus. They wanted to be dancing bears in the circus.”
That’s the line I keep returning the argument to, because it explains the part that the media-bias debate usually misses. The story of the Jerusalem bureau isn’t just that the coverage of Israel went wrong. It’s that the institutions with the most to lose chose activism over authority. And the authority, once forfeited, went to the playground. The blizzard is what’s left.
Matti Friedman is a Canadian-born Israeli journalist and author. He was a reporter and editor in the Associated Press’s Jerusalem bureau from 2006 to 2011, and wrote the widely discussed 2014 Tablet essay “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth”. He is the author of five books, most recently Out of the Sky (Spiegel & Grau, March 24, 2026), the story of the Jewish parachutists who escaped Nazi Europe for British Mandate Palestine and then volunteered to go back in (publisher page). He writes from Jerusalem for The Free Press.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quiz6UdCM2U
The Honest Take podcast: https://podcast.honestreporting.com
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
