Haaretz's Descent Into Clickbait
TheTower.org is emerging as an indispensable new English-language source on Israel and the Middle East.
Today's post on the descent of Israel's once-eminent Haaretz newspaper into a click-seeking sensationalist website is another must read:
On October 23, 2012, an article by Haaretz’s notoriously scandal-prone columnist, Gideon Levy, was published as the main story on the front page of the newspaper with the outrage-provoking headline, “Most Israelis Support Apartheid Regime in Israel.”
Yet a careful look at the survey on which the article was based revealed that neither the headline nor Levy’s analysis were supported in any way by the poll’s actual data. Following public criticism, Haaretz was forced to publish an apology five days later, as well as a correction, in small letters tucked away at the bottom of a page, that read:
Clarification: The wording of the main headline, “Most Israelis Support Apartheid Regime in Israel” (Haaretz, Oct. 23), did not precisely reflect the findings of the Dialog poll. The question to which a majority of respondents answered in the negative did not relate to any current state of affairs, but to a hypothetical future one: “If Israel were to annex the territories of Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank], would you support granting 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote in Knesset elections?”
In fact, Levy’s article almost entirely misrepresented the actual results of the poll, according to independent analysts. According to numerous polls conducted over the past decade, most Israelis in fact support the creation of two states for two peoples and preserving the voting rights of Arab citizens of Israel.
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Erez Tadmor concludes that declining revenues have pushed Haaretz to "a dramatic reduction in staff, a precipitous decline in journalistic standards, and a willful radicalization of its politics in pursuit of Internet traffic."
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