Commentary by Dr. Patrick Slattery — The Israeli government paid for large numbers of Jewish journalists to fly to Israel for a conference on whether the journalists first loyalties should be to their professions or their tribe. According to one participant from the Jewish Daily Forward, the Israeli Government’s position was clear: You are a Jew, first, second, and third, and your loyalties to professional ethics come way down the list. This explains the massive disparity between what we see in the media and what we experience in our daily lives. It explains why the same journalists who blatantly lied to us in order to get us to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel are still at their newspapers and networks, and even winning journalistic awards! –ps
What Are You First, Jew or Journalist?
By Jane Eisner
Are you a journalist first? Or a Jew first?
Shmuel Rosner, who writes for The New York Times and the L.A. Jewish Journal, asked the provocative question at the opening panel of the Jewish Media Summit, which brought over a hundred journalists from around the Diaspora to Jerusalem in late June.
Had the conference been sponsored by a media organization or a university, Rosner’s question would have echoed throughout the next three days. Because that’s the central tension we in Jewish media face daily: How do we balance our focus on and connection to Jews and Israel with the journalistic demand to search for the truth and to say what we think it means, however uncomfortable that may be?
