“Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.”
—Michael Prescott, former political editor of the Sunday Times who served as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Internal Standards Committee, in a leaked memo that claimed that the BBC repeatedly published misinformation about Israel.

“I want to ask you a difficult question. There’ll be some people looking in, and they’ll go, look at what happened in Gaza and of course something was coming, what would you say to them?”
—BBC journalist Nick Robinson, interviewing a Jewish family in north London after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack and suggesting that attacks on Jews around the world were to be expected because of Gaza.

If anti-Jewish reports in mainstream media were a toxic flood before October 7, afterward they became a virulent tsunami. Much of that was anti-Israel lies that teetered well over the boundary between inaccurate reporting and into anti-Jewish propaganda. But there were also plenty of articles putting Jews around the world in a harsh light, blaming them for attacks carried out against them or using token “as a Jews” to cast the rest of the Jewish community as evil.
Is there any end in sight?

Buying the media and changing it
One major change that happened this past year was the acquisition of the media company Paramount Global by David Ellison, backed by his father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The Ellisons, a pro-Israel Jewish family, immediately made changes at CBS, a Paramount subsidiary. Most importantly, they put Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of the centrist and pro-Israel Free Press, in charge of the news division at CBS, one of the three major non-cable TV news channels in the US.
That has already led to controversy. Weiss delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes investigative report about the Trump administration’s use of the CECOT prison in El Salvador to hold deportees. The 60 Minutes show is the flagship news program at CBS, and insiders accused Weiss of both being a shill for the Trump administration (the Ellisons have a close relationship with Trump) and being incompetent in the field of journalism.
The outcome of that kerfuffle may show whether Weiss will be able to permanently change the tenor and focus of a major news channel in the US.
(One concerning issue that has come up, however, is the suggestion that the Ellisons might bring Saudi and Qatari government investment funds into their proposed acquisition of Warner Discovery, which might give the Saudis and Qataris sway over CNN.)
Another major change may have been the way that light has been shed on nasty practices at the BBC. As Ami has previously reported, a leaked memorandum from Michael Prescott, who had been serving as part of an internal standards review at the BBC, showed that there were numerous failures of reporting—seemingly to the point of clear bias—on a number of issues. One of those focused on by Prescott was Israel, with him pointing out that the BBC had slanted its coverage against Israel in many ways, especially in its Arab-language service.
While the usual suspects complained about the memo, British members of Parliament called for changes. If anything comes of that, it may change the way one of the most prominent and widespread news outlets does its reporting.

Social media, in any case
One question about the few possible changes to media outlets is whether it matters anymore. Young people aren’t getting their news directly from these outlets one way or the other. Instead, they’re turning to the even worse world of social media.
According to a poll by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab taken at the end of 2024, three out of four US college students at 181 institutions said that social media is their main source of news. About half of the students said that their second-most used source of news was word of mouth. Only one out of five students said that they regularly turned to newspapers, whether digital or print, for news.
And this wasn’t because students thought that newspapers were less reliable. In fact, they mostly believed that they were more reliable than what they were seeing on social media or from influencers. That didn’t matter.
And even when they want to check up more about a story, they are more likely to end up reading about it in an AI-generated response from Google than in a primary news source.

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