Matti Friedman is an award-winning author and journalist with a unique perspective on media coverage of Israel and a wicked sense of humor.
So it was no surprise that nearly 150 people packed JEWISHcolorado on February 10 to hear Friedman, the first speaker in the 2025 Israel Speaker Series, sponsored by JEWISHcolorado’s Israel & Overseas Center.
In the wake of October 7th and the many developments during the ensuing months, this speaker series provides a glimpse into “What comes next?” in Israel, and features scholars and authors. Upcoming speakers include Matthew Levitt on “Iran’s New Playbook: Unraveling the Next Wave of Threats to U.S. and Israeli Security,” Dr. Flora Cassen on “Navigating College Campus Life in a Post-October 7th World,” and Rabbi Dr. Joshua Ladon on “Debating Democracy: Challenges in Jewish Unity in America.”
If the first evening with Matti Friedman was any indication, the series will be both informative and thought-provoking. Friedman brought his experience as an Associated Press (AP) journalist in Israel to offer context to what he called the “media malfunction” in news coverage of Israel, a problem that he believes is inflaming global hostility toward Israelis and Jews. The real question, he asked, is how has this happened?
Matti Friedman at JEWISHcolorado
Friedman moved to Israel from Canada 30 years ago for what he thought would be a one-year stay. He has never left, and he now has four children. He went to work for the AP at the Jerusalem Bureau in 2006 thinking it was a mainstream U.S. organization where he did not expect to encounter any political problems. He left, very disillusioned, in 2011.
“Some people in the bureau who were making decisions were much closer to being activists than they were to being journalists,” he told his audience. “They saw journalism as a weapon on the fight for justice and that leads you to choose different stories to cover and to treat reality differently. To advance the cause of justice, certain stories were presented, and it didn’t matter if those stories were true or not. Accuracy was not the primary concern—the primary concern was political.”
Friedman attributed the climate of skewed reality in the coverage of Israel’s news to four factors. The first factor he discussed was “scope,” particularly in staffing. He said that when he was at the AP, there were 40 full-time news staffers covering Israel—a country that he pointed out is really a very small place in the world. This was more staff, he said, than AP had in China, or in India, or in all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
“This gives people the impression that Israel is one of the most important places on the earth,” he says. “So it’s not surprising that there is an unprecedented and authentic emotional involvement in Israel especially on the part of the Jews of the diaspora.”
Friedman wrote in greater length about this issue as it manifested itself after the 2014 Gaza War in an article for “Tablet.”
The second factor Friedman said contributes to the politicization of news coverage is “framing.” He pointed out that every day, journalists were expected to write another story that was called in bureau jargon “Is/Pals”—meaning an article about Israel versus Palestine. This, Friedman said, ignores Israel’s wars against many other peoples, including Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Egyptians.
Further simplifying reality, the demands of journalism meant that articles or TV news spots had to be very short and distill a conflict to the simplest elements, whether accurate or not.
“The stories were not unlike bedtime stories,” he said. “Every story had to have a princess and a dragon, a good guy and a bad guy. And that eliminates context.”
Reporters do not write false statements, Friedman said, but they “frame” a story by zooming in to a single incident because that is an easier way to identify the princess and the dragon.
“Zooming in can draw aggressive criticism of Israelis for perceived crimes,” Friedman said. “Zoom out and you have more context from the big picture.”
According to Friedman, the third factor affecting media coverage and perceptions is the use of short hand terms—like right wing or left wing—to identify political positions.
“In Israel, being left or right does not mean what it means in the U.S.,” he said. “In Israel, those terms are assigned entirely by what you believe about territorial concessions.”
Finally, Friedman turned his attention to Israel’s origin story.
“The North American story we are told about Israel is a very European story,” he said. “But that story does not explain Israel. More than half of Jews in Israel did not come from Europe. We are a Middle Eastern Jewish country, and the main character in our founding story could be a Jew from Morocco, not a Jew from Warsaw.”
Friedman took questions from the audience at the end of his remarks and brought some timely insight into current Israeli politics, particularly as the country continues to grieve and move forward after October 7th.
“For several months after October 7th, the whole country ran on “What’s App,” he said. “What has gotten us through this time is the unbelievable creativity and resilience of Israel.”