M
m hart
Guest
Weiss, who is Jewish, is pretty honest about this but as to
its consequences he sticks to how it affects the way the
media reports about Israel. That's fine as far as it goes
but it doesn't tell the much broader story of how Jews in
media support things like political correctness, multi-
culturalism, mass immigration, affirmative action etc
that the majority of Americans do not.
February 17, 2008
Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?
by Philip Weiss
At least a half dozen times in recent months, the suggestion has come
from serious people that Jews predominate in the American media--that
if we are not dominant, we are a major bloc. In a Yivo event on Jews
in journalism I've blogged about, a questioner said that Jews' outsize
proportion in the media has granted us "a large influence over power."
In his groundbreaking paper on the New York Times's role in shaping
American policy toward Israel, Jerome Slater spoke of "religious
beliefs and identifications" that affected the Times, and cited former
executive editor Max Frankel's admission in his memoir (one also cited
by Walt and Mearsheimer): "I was much more deeply devoted to Israel
than I dared to assert."
Lately broadcast reporter John Hockenberry related that he wanted to
do a piece on the hijackers' motivation after 9/11 but that NBC
executive Jeff Zucker scotched the notion:
"Maybe," Zucker said, "we ought to do a series of specials on
firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show
Cops, only with firefighters."... [H]e could make room in the prime-
time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in
effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with
jihadists raging about Palestine. [Weiss's emphasis]
Then last month at a forum at the Nixon Center, former Bushie Dov
Zackheim said, Jews don't dominate the policy-making process, but the
media is a different story...
I don't know that anyone has visited the simple question raised by
these statements: Do Jews dominate the media? This is something I know
about personally. I've worked in print journalism for more than 30
years. I've worked for many magazines and newspapers, and for a time
my whole social circle was editors and writers in New York. I don't
know television. I don't know Washington journalism well. I don't know
the west coast. My sample is surely skewed by the fact that I'm Jewish
and have always felt great comfort with other Jews. But in my
experience, Jews have made up the majority of the important positions
in the publications I worked for, a majority of the writers I've known
at these place, and the majority of the owners who have paid me. Yes
my own sample may be skewed, but I think it shows that Jews make up a
significant proportion of power positions in media, half, if not more.
Before considering what this means, let me make my experience
concrete:
My serious journalism began at the Harvard Crimson in the 70s. A
friend said the paper was a Jewish boys club; it was dominated by
middle class Jews-- as apparently today there are a lot of Asians.
Many of these Jews are now powerful presences in the media. Zucker is
one of them. My first paying job was in Minneapolis. Five Harvard guys
started a weekly; four of them were Jewish, including the publisher
paying our meager salaries. I remember our editor walking the halls
parodying the jingle we had on the radio. The jingle went: "We've got
the news, we've got the sports." He sang it as "We've got the Jews,
we've got the sports." Funny.
I was hired by a Jewish editor at my next job, the Philadelphia Daily
News in 1978, and when I started freelancing in 1981, Jewish Harvard
friends got me work at the Columbia Journalism Review and the
Washington Monthly. A gentile brought me in at Harper's and the New
Republic. It was at the New Republic, a launching pad for any number
of highly-successful journalists, that I briefly associated with Marty
Peretz, and did a story for him mocking the United Nations, whose
judgment he seeks at every turn to nullify because the U.N. is
critical of Israel.
Fast forward. In New York, I have worked for a dozen magazines. Most
of my editors have been Jewish. Both my book publishers were Jewish.
At one point at one publishing house, the editor, his boss, and her
boss were all Jewish, and so was the lawyer vetting the work-I
remember her saying she would never travel to Malaysia because of the
anti-Semitic Prime minister. Oh--and the assistant editor was half-
Jewish.
I should point out that I have worked with many gentile editors and
writers, and I have never been aware of any employment discrimination
against them (though I may not be the best source). In fact, at Spy,
the three top editors were all non-Jews and when I used the epithet
WASP it was removed from my copy. But that is the exception. Generally
it's been Jews Jews Jews. When I hear NPR do a piece with its top
political team and both are Jews... when a Jewish friend calls me and
gossips about lunches with two top news execs at major publications
who are both Jewish and who I've known for 20 years... when a Jewish
editor friend tells me that Si Newhouse would be disturbed if Vanity
Fair editor Graydon Carter-- who has done such courageous work against
the Iraq war-- did anything to expose the Israel lobby... and when I
say that my income has been derived overwhelmingly from Jewish-owned
publications for years-this is simply the ordinary culture of the
magazine business as I know it.
I have some ideas why Jews have predominated, but that's not the
purpose of this posting. Last year Senator Russ Feingold, buttonholed
on CSPAN about why so many speakers on air were Jewish, said, "Well,
we're good at talking." That'll do for now.
The real issue is, Does it matter? Most of my life I felt it didn't.
It's just the way it is, at this point in history. It will change (as
Clyde Haberman pointed out at that Yivo event). Jews are the latest
flavor of the establishment. In his landmark book, The Jewish Century,
Slezkine reports that Jews were the majority of journalists in Berlin
and Vienna and Prague, too, in the late 1800s, if I remember
correctly.
Now I think it does matter, for two reasons. Elitist establishment
culture, and Israel. As to elitism, I worry when any affluent group
has power and little sense of what the common man is experiencing. I
feel the same discomfort with my prestige-oriented "caste" that E.
Digby Baltzell did with his calcified caste, the WASPs--when he called
for an end to discrimination against Jews in the early '60s. The
values of my cohort sometimes seem narrow: globalism, prosperity,
professionalism. In Israel the values are a lot broader. None of my
cohort has served in the military, myself included. A lot of our
fathers did; but I bet none of our kids do. Military service is for
losers--or for Israelis.
So we are way overrepresented in the chattering classes, and way
underrepresented in the battering classes. Not a great recipe for
leadership, especially in wartime.
Then there's Israel. Support for Israel is an element of Jewish
religious practice and more important, part of the Jewish cultural
experience. Even if you're a secular Jewish professional who prides
himself on his objectivity, there is a ton of cultural pressure on you
to support Israel or at least not to betray Israel. We are talking
about a religion, after all, and the pressures faced by Jews who are
critical of Israel are not that different from what Muslim women who
want greater freedom undergo psychically or by evangelical Christians
who want to support gay rights. It is worth noting that great Jewish
heretics on the Israel question suffer anger or even ostracism inside
their own families. Henry Siegman talked about this on Charlie Rose
once, I recall--that even close family were not speaking to him over
Israel. And I have seen this for myself on numerous occasions. There
is not a lot of bandwidth on this issue. Conversations about Israel
even inside the liberal Jewish community are emotionally loaded, and
result in people not speaking to one another. I lost this blog at a
mainstream publication because the editor was Jewish and conservative
on Israel and so was the new owner, and the publisher had worked for
AIPAC. And all of them would likely call themselves liberal Democrats.
As former CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer has said, "We, as Jews,
must understand that we come with a certain bias ...We believe in the
Israeli narrative of history. We support the values that we as
Americans, Westerners, and Jews espouse. Thus, we see news reporting
through our own prism."
There are many American Jewish journalists who have done great
independent work re Israel/Palestine. Richard Ben Cramer and the late
Robbie Friedman leap to mind. But both these guys are exceptional, and
had to overcome/ignore a ton of pressure that most of us would quail
under. They had to step outside the Jewish family to do their work...
The result is that Americans are not getting the full story re
Israel/Palestine. Slater says this dramatically in his paper--that the
Times has deprived American leadership of reporting on the
moral/political crisis that Israel is undergoing, one that Haaretz has
covered unstintingly. At Columbia the other night, Jew, Arab and
gentile on a panel about the human-rights crisis in Gaza all said that
Americans are not getting the full story. Ilan Pappe has marveled in
his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the Nakba is all but
unmentioned in the U.S.--while Haaretz has sought at times to document
it, for instance a former officer saying in 2004 that if he had not
helped to destroy 200 villages in southern Israel in '48, there would
be another million Palestinians in Israel. To repeat Scherzer's
admission: "We believe in the Israeli narrative of history..."
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/02/do-jews-dominat.html
its consequences he sticks to how it affects the way the
media reports about Israel. That's fine as far as it goes
but it doesn't tell the much broader story of how Jews in
media support things like political correctness, multi-
culturalism, mass immigration, affirmative action etc
that the majority of Americans do not.
February 17, 2008
Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?
by Philip Weiss
At least a half dozen times in recent months, the suggestion has come
from serious people that Jews predominate in the American media--that
if we are not dominant, we are a major bloc. In a Yivo event on Jews
in journalism I've blogged about, a questioner said that Jews' outsize
proportion in the media has granted us "a large influence over power."
In his groundbreaking paper on the New York Times's role in shaping
American policy toward Israel, Jerome Slater spoke of "religious
beliefs and identifications" that affected the Times, and cited former
executive editor Max Frankel's admission in his memoir (one also cited
by Walt and Mearsheimer): "I was much more deeply devoted to Israel
than I dared to assert."
Lately broadcast reporter John Hockenberry related that he wanted to
do a piece on the hijackers' motivation after 9/11 but that NBC
executive Jeff Zucker scotched the notion:
"Maybe," Zucker said, "we ought to do a series of specials on
firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show
Cops, only with firefighters."... [H]e could make room in the prime-
time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in
effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with
jihadists raging about Palestine. [Weiss's emphasis]
Then last month at a forum at the Nixon Center, former Bushie Dov
Zackheim said, Jews don't dominate the policy-making process, but the
media is a different story...
I don't know that anyone has visited the simple question raised by
these statements: Do Jews dominate the media? This is something I know
about personally. I've worked in print journalism for more than 30
years. I've worked for many magazines and newspapers, and for a time
my whole social circle was editors and writers in New York. I don't
know television. I don't know Washington journalism well. I don't know
the west coast. My sample is surely skewed by the fact that I'm Jewish
and have always felt great comfort with other Jews. But in my
experience, Jews have made up the majority of the important positions
in the publications I worked for, a majority of the writers I've known
at these place, and the majority of the owners who have paid me. Yes
my own sample may be skewed, but I think it shows that Jews make up a
significant proportion of power positions in media, half, if not more.
Before considering what this means, let me make my experience
concrete:
My serious journalism began at the Harvard Crimson in the 70s. A
friend said the paper was a Jewish boys club; it was dominated by
middle class Jews-- as apparently today there are a lot of Asians.
Many of these Jews are now powerful presences in the media. Zucker is
one of them. My first paying job was in Minneapolis. Five Harvard guys
started a weekly; four of them were Jewish, including the publisher
paying our meager salaries. I remember our editor walking the halls
parodying the jingle we had on the radio. The jingle went: "We've got
the news, we've got the sports." He sang it as "We've got the Jews,
we've got the sports." Funny.
I was hired by a Jewish editor at my next job, the Philadelphia Daily
News in 1978, and when I started freelancing in 1981, Jewish Harvard
friends got me work at the Columbia Journalism Review and the
Washington Monthly. A gentile brought me in at Harper's and the New
Republic. It was at the New Republic, a launching pad for any number
of highly-successful journalists, that I briefly associated with Marty
Peretz, and did a story for him mocking the United Nations, whose
judgment he seeks at every turn to nullify because the U.N. is
critical of Israel.
Fast forward. In New York, I have worked for a dozen magazines. Most
of my editors have been Jewish. Both my book publishers were Jewish.
At one point at one publishing house, the editor, his boss, and her
boss were all Jewish, and so was the lawyer vetting the work-I
remember her saying she would never travel to Malaysia because of the
anti-Semitic Prime minister. Oh--and the assistant editor was half-
Jewish.
I should point out that I have worked with many gentile editors and
writers, and I have never been aware of any employment discrimination
against them (though I may not be the best source). In fact, at Spy,
the three top editors were all non-Jews and when I used the epithet
WASP it was removed from my copy. But that is the exception. Generally
it's been Jews Jews Jews. When I hear NPR do a piece with its top
political team and both are Jews... when a Jewish friend calls me and
gossips about lunches with two top news execs at major publications
who are both Jewish and who I've known for 20 years... when a Jewish
editor friend tells me that Si Newhouse would be disturbed if Vanity
Fair editor Graydon Carter-- who has done such courageous work against
the Iraq war-- did anything to expose the Israel lobby... and when I
say that my income has been derived overwhelmingly from Jewish-owned
publications for years-this is simply the ordinary culture of the
magazine business as I know it.
I have some ideas why Jews have predominated, but that's not the
purpose of this posting. Last year Senator Russ Feingold, buttonholed
on CSPAN about why so many speakers on air were Jewish, said, "Well,
we're good at talking." That'll do for now.
The real issue is, Does it matter? Most of my life I felt it didn't.
It's just the way it is, at this point in history. It will change (as
Clyde Haberman pointed out at that Yivo event). Jews are the latest
flavor of the establishment. In his landmark book, The Jewish Century,
Slezkine reports that Jews were the majority of journalists in Berlin
and Vienna and Prague, too, in the late 1800s, if I remember
correctly.
Now I think it does matter, for two reasons. Elitist establishment
culture, and Israel. As to elitism, I worry when any affluent group
has power and little sense of what the common man is experiencing. I
feel the same discomfort with my prestige-oriented "caste" that E.
Digby Baltzell did with his calcified caste, the WASPs--when he called
for an end to discrimination against Jews in the early '60s. The
values of my cohort sometimes seem narrow: globalism, prosperity,
professionalism. In Israel the values are a lot broader. None of my
cohort has served in the military, myself included. A lot of our
fathers did; but I bet none of our kids do. Military service is for
losers--or for Israelis.
So we are way overrepresented in the chattering classes, and way
underrepresented in the battering classes. Not a great recipe for
leadership, especially in wartime.
Then there's Israel. Support for Israel is an element of Jewish
religious practice and more important, part of the Jewish cultural
experience. Even if you're a secular Jewish professional who prides
himself on his objectivity, there is a ton of cultural pressure on you
to support Israel or at least not to betray Israel. We are talking
about a religion, after all, and the pressures faced by Jews who are
critical of Israel are not that different from what Muslim women who
want greater freedom undergo psychically or by evangelical Christians
who want to support gay rights. It is worth noting that great Jewish
heretics on the Israel question suffer anger or even ostracism inside
their own families. Henry Siegman talked about this on Charlie Rose
once, I recall--that even close family were not speaking to him over
Israel. And I have seen this for myself on numerous occasions. There
is not a lot of bandwidth on this issue. Conversations about Israel
even inside the liberal Jewish community are emotionally loaded, and
result in people not speaking to one another. I lost this blog at a
mainstream publication because the editor was Jewish and conservative
on Israel and so was the new owner, and the publisher had worked for
AIPAC. And all of them would likely call themselves liberal Democrats.
As former CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer has said, "We, as Jews,
must understand that we come with a certain bias ...We believe in the
Israeli narrative of history. We support the values that we as
Americans, Westerners, and Jews espouse. Thus, we see news reporting
through our own prism."
There are many American Jewish journalists who have done great
independent work re Israel/Palestine. Richard Ben Cramer and the late
Robbie Friedman leap to mind. But both these guys are exceptional, and
had to overcome/ignore a ton of pressure that most of us would quail
under. They had to step outside the Jewish family to do their work...
The result is that Americans are not getting the full story re
Israel/Palestine. Slater says this dramatically in his paper--that the
Times has deprived American leadership of reporting on the
moral/political crisis that Israel is undergoing, one that Haaretz has
covered unstintingly. At Columbia the other night, Jew, Arab and
gentile on a panel about the human-rights crisis in Gaza all said that
Americans are not getting the full story. Ilan Pappe has marveled in
his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the Nakba is all but
unmentioned in the U.S.--while Haaretz has sought at times to document
it, for instance a former officer saying in 2004 that if he had not
helped to destroy 200 villages in southern Israel in '48, there would
be another million Palestinians in Israel. To repeat Scherzer's
admission: "We believe in the Israeli narrative of history..."
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/02/do-jews-dominat.html