Overcovered bridges and Radisson counting

When viewing the Hebrew media landscape, there is a general idea that while both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom are tabloids, they are not entirely cut from the same cloth. Yedioth, despite all its populist chintz, is still regarded as a fairly serious newspaper, with fairly serious writers and reporters, and not beholden to a specific ideology, beyond hatred for all things Netanyahu and favorable coverage to whomever can line publisher Arnon Mozes’s pockets.

Israel Hayom, on the other hand, can’t be bought (both literally and figuratively) and is seen as something more of a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud lackeys, US President Donald Trump, and — lately — anyone who will cotton to the right-wing worldview, specifically Education Minister Naftali Bennett. If the news of the day was unfriendly to Netanyahu, it would ignore it, and attack the rest of the media for reporting on it. In many ways, the paper’s place as mainly a vehicle for an agenda was personified in the unabashed way foreign correspondent Boaz Bismuth would insert himself into each story with pictures of himself in different places, a practice that has mostly disappeared since he became editor in chief several months ago.

While all that remains true, in the August heat of cucumber season, Yedioth’s yellow glint is shining even brighter, even as Israel Hayom seems to be trying its hand at serious reporting.

Taking the adage “if it bleeds it leads” to an extreme it was never meant to reach, Yedioth fills nearly all 187 square inches of its front page with a picture of a collapsed pedestrian bridge outside Tel Aviv (the arrest of billionaire Beny Steinmetz in a massive money laundering sting fills out the rest).

The picture is dramatic, the result tragic, with the driver of the truck that hit the bridge killed, but with nobody else hurt, and the bridge not exactly an iconic piece of the Israeli landscape, the treatment overplays it by more than a smidge (and this comes from somebody who focused on transportation infrastructure in graduate school and has walked that bridge dozens of times) — to say nothing of the “Bridge Catastrophe” headline that puts it on the same footing as the 1997 Ayalon Bridge collapse that killed four Australian Maccabiah athletes and injured 60 more.

Perhaps recognizing the true importance of the story, Yedioth shunts its actual coverage to page 14, with more pictures, breathless quotes from eyewitnesses in the vein of “I saw everything right in front of my eyes” (that’s literally the story’s lede) and the kicking off of the Great Israeli Blame Game, in which a road safety investigator tells the paper “there’s no standard bridge height in Israel. There is a standard for engineering bridges, but there’s no standard for maintaining and checking bridges.”

Good to know.

Both Haaretz and Israel Hayom give the collapse substantially less coverage– and neither includes the fact that the driver was killed — with Haaretz possibly underplaying the story by giving it no more than a standalone picture on the bottom of A1 (does anything make this guy happy?).

But both papers fill their top stories with actual news, or at least the whiffs of news in the air. In Israel Hayom’s case, that means an exclusive on former prime minister Ehud Barak, long thought to be making a political comeback — in talks with Labor Party head Avi Gabbay about returning to the fold of the faction he once led and then split asunder.

“According to the plan taking shape, Barak will head the ‘security expert core’ that Gabbay is putting together,” the paper reports, based on unnamed sources “involved in the process.”

“It also seems that Barak will agree to give up on the possibility of running as head of the party, and it’s possible Gabbay will use the one of the spots on the Knesset slate reserved for his use for the former IDF chief. Thus, were Labor to joint the government, Barak would be a candidate for defense minister.”

All that seems fine and dandy, but columnist Mati Tuchfeld reminds readers that Barak, who has become one of Netanyahu’s harshest critics, once tore apart the party to join the prime minister, and wonders if Labor will forget it that easily.

“The same one who absorbed curses and vilification in headlines and TV studios when he decided to join the Netanyahu government has become the standard-bearer for politicians and journalists seeking to see the prime minister fall,” he writes, adding that one only had to watch words used on TV by Barak against the prime minister to realize “how fast his misdeeds were forgotten in order to let him deliver the goods now.”

Perhaps he just wants a bodyguard again. An item in Yedioth points out Barak has started packing heat as he no longer gets Shin Bet protection, a service also denied former prime minister Ehud Olmert, spotted walking alone, though Yair Netanyahu, son of the current prime minister, has protection.

Haaretz’s lead story reports that Israel is in talks with Egypt about getting security arrangements in place to return its diplomats to Cairo, a week after the paper reported that Netanyahu cared little about having envoys in either of his two Arab allies’ capitals.

“There is positive progress in the talks,” an official is quoted saying. “The Egyptians are moving toward approving the requests our security people have made. Now, among other things, we need a final decision by the Shin Bet head and the prime minister that the security arrangements are sufficient. If there’s a decision to return the ambassador to Cairo it will make both sides happy, but only when we see Ambassador [David] Govrin landing in Cairo can we know it’s final.”

The recognition that talk is cheap does not extend to coverage of tensions between the US and North Korea, also known as an excuse for Israeli reporters to head to tropical Guam to cover all the goings on up-close.

Yedioth’s Nahum Barnea, a political columnist who seems to have transitioned into the guy who travels to tropical paradises (he covered the Rio Olympics for the paper), is in Guam, and readers will know this because there is a picture of Barnea standing at the entrance to Andersen Air Force Base on the island to prove it (though I don’t know if he actually stayed at a Radisson).

With boaz bismuth no longer making himself going places part of story, yedioth's Nahum Barnea fills the hole from Guam. datelines r so passe pic.twitter.com/G7AMs9gez4

— Joshua Davidovich (@Josh_Davidovich) August 15, 2017

The use of a picture that would be an automatic swipe left in a Facebook photo album is another sign of the paper’s decline, but Barnea’s writing at least gives some color from an apocalypse-predicting hotel manager, who says the end of the world will come on September 23 2017, though it will start in Jerusalem, not Guam, so at least Barnea won’t have to travel far.

“A priest was here three months ago and he told me it’s true,” she tells him.

As for the diplomatic tensions. he shows himself less adept at predicting the future.

“Something could happen today, tomorrow or sometime in the future: Ruler Kim Jong Un was careful not to commit to a day. But something has to happen, because the sanctions are threatening to choke the North Korean regime, and the advances in nuclear arms threaten to challenge the nuclear umbrella the US extends to its allies in Asia and hurt the financial and security interests of China,” he writes.

Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer has spent his years going to much more dangerous and less tropical war zones, and despite not being dispatched the island’s sandy beaches, still manages to come up with some insights on Trump’s dangerous thinking. Pfeffer writes that Trump’s tweet about the military being “locked and loaded” for confrontation reveals the president to be both ill-informed and rashly impulsive.

“Trump doesn’t understand why America needs its nuclear weapons, and worse, he doesn’t seem to understand why it shouldn’t use them, but we have to hope that even he is not deluded enough to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea without any real intelligence of an imminent attack,” he writes. “If he is, we have to assume (and hope) that the vice president and cabinet are alert and ready to use the 25th Amendment and declare him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”