The Left has an incitement problem.
Left-wing media outlets habitually stir up outrage and polarization, and then act dumbfounded when it produces real-world consequences like violence, shootings, and death.
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The news of yet another shooting at an event with U.S. President Donald Trump in attendance should’ve been shocking.
It wasn’t.
Sadly, the shooting was a natural consequence of years of Left-wing media incitement. The Left-wing media has become a propaganda machine for anything anti-Right. They use “Right-wing” as a slur. They reduce millions of everyday people into caricatures — dangerous, ignorant, extremist — and then act surprised when someone eventually takes that rhetoric seriously.
This doesn’t mean Right-wing media or movements are beyond criticism or even condemnation. They aren’t. But invoking “the other side” in this moment isn’t nuance. It’s evasion. It shifts the focus from the issue at hand to a familiar, comfortable symmetry, and in doing so, avoids the harder task of confronting what’s directly in front of us.
Israel (and Jews by extension) were among the first culprits of the modern Left-wing media’s war against truth, fact-finding, and intellectual honesty. No matter what Israel does or doesn’t do, it is virtually always the “aggressor,” the “occupier,” the “colonizer,” and the primary source of escalation — its actions interpreted through a presumption of guilt rather than a contest of facts.
When Israel does something right, it is downplayed or outright ignored; when it does something wrong (or perceived to be wrong), the claim is amplified, stripped of context, and disproportionately scrutinized. That is not serious journalism; it is propaganda with a nice logo.
The consequences of these actions are incitement, which directly leads to violence and death. The number of antisemitic attacks in recent years is not coincidental; it is unequivocally tied to Left-wing media outlets casting the Jewish state, time and again, as the world’s almighty evil guilty of every possible crime against humanity.
This is not just my opinion or observation. One of Israel’s leading journalists and authors, Matti Friedman, has often talked about how the media has become less a reporter of Israel and more of a supporting actor in it, “a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.”1
There is an obvious difference between sporadic problems with media coverage and systematic distortion. They say reporters hurry to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle. These are realities that can explain minor errors and mishaps like poor headline choices. Some say inflations and omissions are the inevitable results of an honest attempt to cover events in a challenging and occasionally dangerous reporting environment.
But such excuses can’t explain why the same inflations and omissions occur so often, why they are common to so many news outlets, and why the international media’s “Israel story” is so foreign to people aware of the historical and regional context of events in this place.
To make sense of most Left-wing “journalism” about Israel, it is important to first understand that the news tells us far less about Israel — and far more about the people conveying the news.
“Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress,” according to Friedman. “These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that, though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.”
The media wants us to think that they are what’s known in America as the “fourth estate” — the “good guys” courageously stepping in to act as a crucial watchdog that holds government and institutions accountable in a democracy. That may be true in my journalism textbook from university, but it is nowhere near reality.
The media is, in truth, a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not in that it accepts bribes; corrupt in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.
The news media is entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, myth-making, and self-interest. Journalists are incentivized to dramatize news because it justifies their jobs and makes them feel far more important than they actually are. Too often, the crises are not really crises, but fabrications.
The media is “so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that [it is] unable to tell the public what is true,” according to Peter Vanderwicken, a former journalist at Time, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.2
This symbiotic web is very much present in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and where international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees.
“In my time in the press corps,” wrote Friedman, “I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends — fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps; and foreign reporters.”
In these circles, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice — and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies, but a belief that, to some extent, the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills.
This idea, much like “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” is quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading across the Left, including among journalists at Left-wing media outlets like the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and The New York Times.
“Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics,” according to James Bennet, a former editor at the Times. “The paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial — and this misleads them about their country’s center of political and cultural gravity.”3
This directly translates into a theatre of the absurd, such as sympathetic reporting about terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the brutal Iranian regime, becoming more common. Influential Left-wing columnists and editors coax reporters into interviewing terrorists and come away suckered into thinking there is something else besides genocidal ideology that could explain their perversions.
It’s all part of the Left-wing media’s way of doing business: stirring up outrage and polarization, and then acting dumbfounded when that produces real-world consequences like violence, shootings, and death.
I’m reminded of the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre last December. I vividly recall an Australian woman at the scene asking an Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporter, “Will you cut out the biased reporting? Please, stop with the biased reporting.” Hours later, a high-profile ABC journalist named Laura Tingle claimed that the targeted attack on a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach has “got nothing to do with religion.”
This is the Left-wing media in a nutshell: blatantly ignorant of facts, unwilling to see reality for what it is, only interested in stories and viewpoints that confirm their deep-seated biases.
Hence why the news media has created a charade that serves their own interests, but misleads the public. Journalists dutifully report fabrications and omit facts that do not support their ideology. What has emerged, according to Paul Weaver — author of “News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works” — is a “culture of lying.”
But even that doesn’t fully capture the shift. The issue is no longer just misinformation; it’s the role that misinformation plays in intensifying division and legitimizing hostility. When coverage consistently frames topics in extreme and dehumanizing terms, it creates an environment where escalation becomes more likely.
As Bill Britt, editor-in-chief at the Alabama Political Reporter, wrote:
“The health of our democracy depends on whether we still have the courage to tell the truth, to demand it, and to punish those who betray it. The truth doesn’t need spin or strategy. It just needs defenders — and we must be among them.”4
“What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel.” The Atlantic.
“Why the News Is Not the Truth.” Harvard Business Review.
“When the New York Times lost its way.” The Economist.
“Opinion | Truth dies when voters reward liars—democracy depends on accountability.” Alabama Political Reporter.
You’ve nailed it again Joshua. Wish the people that need to read this would.
Absolutely right. The left wing press has an axe to grind against the Jewish people