Newspaper wars and burying the Trump lede

On Tuesday, a slow news day, the tabloids prioritize the stories of a small-town pizza deliveryman’s murder and a rich guy getting busted for not paying taxes. Meanwhile, Haaretz’s top story is a flimsy report about Israel taking part in an American military exercise alongside Pakistani troops, based on a Pakistani newspaper article and “aviation enthusiasts’ forums and websites.” Its request for comment from the IDF was met with a non-statement.

Far more interesting issues make their way into stories behind the top headlines.

In the ongoing coverage of the US election, the papers’ biases are plain as day once again. US President Barack Obama’s comment to reporters that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is “unfit” to serve in the White House is dead center on the front page of Haaretz, which has made its stance against the GOP candidate clear. Israel Hayom, which, like its owner, has come out stridently in favor of the real estate mogul, would be hard pressed to downplay POTUS’s comments, or try to hide Trump calling rival candidate Hillary Clinton “the devil,” any more than it did, sticking the story on Page 27, just before the back-page op-eds. Yedioth Ahronoth, when it gets around to reporting on Trump, cites a New York Times report saying he dodged the draft five times.

Yedioth reports that rapper-turned-right-wing activist Yoav Eliasi (aka The Shadow) officially joined the ruling Likud party. The Shadow, who’s best known for his extremist agitation and appearances on national television with hats sporting the words “Fuck Y’all,” met with Likud MK Oren Hazan (also no stranger to controversy) and signed the papers to join the party. The aim, the report says, is to bring the rapper’s followers into the party fold. The rapper is quoted saying to Hazan that “You give speeches here [at the Knesset], and every word that you say makes me want to throw dollars at you. The Likud is always breaking left, and sometimes I want to vomit on some of those people. The time has come to make a change in the Likud.”

A Border Police officer in Hebron was filmed throwing an 8-year-old Palestinian girl’s bike into some bushes and shooing her away from an area near the city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. The incident caught the attention of the international press, to the embarrassment of Israel, Yedioth reports. The soldier’s actions are either so disgraceful or so inconsequential to the Hebrew press, however, that the papers keep it off the front page and devote only small pieces to it. Israel Hayom hides it on Page 15, hoping readers care more about an air force pilot being dismissed for a sexual liaison with another officer. Yedioth puts it on Page 6, but offers the most severe criticism of the dismissed officer’s behavior, calling it “a disgusting and embarrassing incident that presents Israel to the world in a negative light.”

Haaretz’s Amira Hass writes a scathing op-ed criticizing Border Police officers for the shooting of a Palestinian man in July for apparently no reason. Hass concludes her unchecked rebuke of what she contends was the unjustified murder of an unarmed Palestinian by Border Police on July 13 by writing that “Israel and all its soldiers and fighter pilots are above all guilt, and therefore exempt from all punishment in their own eyes. And also exempt from punishment in the eyes of the democratic West, which rattles off its occasional condemnations and continues to make military and economic deals with us and marvel at our excellence in high-tech and music.”

Haaretz was the main target of American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s tweetstorm on Tuesday, when he said he might stop reading the paper because of the subject matter of its op-eds, but the left-leaning newspaper doesn’t stoop to publishing an article about it. Israel Hayom, on the other hand, is happy to make hay while the Haaretz-bashing sun shines.

It gives a brief rundown of the online war of words between the Atlantic writer and Haaretz reporters and editors, neglecting to mention his hit on The Jerusalem Post and praise for The Times of Israel. Nowhere in his tweetstorm did he mention Israel Hayom, but it’d be interesting to see how he’d weigh in on the eternally pro-Netanyahu paper.

As Goldberg himself put it on Tuesday in response to Times of Israel staffers on Twitter, “To the right I’m a leftist and to the left I’m a rightist,” and his take-down of Haaretz is fodder for Israel Hayom’s denigration of Haaretz in its growing readership’s eyes.

https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/status/760390755508707332

Since the paper wasn’t in the crosshairs at all, it could conveniently place that story higher than Likud minister Miri Regev getting rebuked by the Knesset Ethics Committee for appearing in an ad spot for a pop singer’s TV show, in violation of parliamentary rules.