The following is not a normal GetReligion post.
It is not a critique of the powerful religion ghost that is haunting the coverage of the crisis in Israel and Gaza in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks. Julia Duin has already written that post: “Important religion-news angles are everywhere, as Hamas triggers war with Israel.”
No, this post is about the lens through which people in Israel were forced to view the hellish opening hours of that crisis, a digital lens so clouded by blood and the fog of war that the people caught in the middle of the chaos could SEE pieces of what was going on, but had no NEWS they could trust.
In other words, this post is about what happens when a major event in the real world is seen through social-media ALONE. Also, a hat tip to former GetReligion colleague Ira Rifkin for sending me this stunning Haaretz essay — it’s more like a scream of pain — by Yonatan Englender. Let’s start with the long, angry double-decker headline:
How Telegram and Twitter beat TV to cover the Hamas-Israel war as it happened
An hour after Israelis understood they were under attack, it was clear the news knew nothing. On TV, they reported sirens in central Israel and reports of Hamas militants crossing from Gaza. Reports? On social media I already saw them riding around in Jeeps
In a way, this Haartz essay is a depressing update on my recent piece for Religion & Liberty: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism,” which focused on how digital technology is changing both the content of our news, the business model that produces it and, of course, the audience for all of that.
But I was writing about “normal” life, as in ordinary chatter about politics, politics, politics and the other related subjects that matter to most journalists. Early in the piece, I wrote:
Politicians, parents, pastors, and plenty of other people are struggling to understand what is happening in their lives while turning to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Parler, BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social. And there are darker corners of this world, such as 4chan and the “Dark Web.” And never forget this crucial journalism reality: Opinion writing is cheap, while hard-news content is expensive.
Oh, and in a war zone, hard-news content is dangerous.
At the very end, I offered this #SIGH of grief, as an old-school journalist. When reading this, substitute “citizens of the world” for the reference to “Americans.”
The sobering bottom line: When seeking journalism they can trust, perhaps even news that offers balanced, accurate coverage of views other than their own, American citizens are on their own as they search the World Wide Web. God help them.
What happens when you apply these concepts to the Hamas raid?
Here is the Englender overture:
It couldn’t be true. When the sirens sounded in the area of Israel adjacent to Gaza, as well as in central cities Rishon Letzion, Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv at 6:30 A.M., the feeling was a sense that it couldn’t be real. It’s a mistake, an exercise, perhaps the tail end of a dream you woke up with.
But it wasn’t. You shut yourself in your protected room or go down to your building’s bomb shelter, wait for a positive boom (“the Iron Dome got it”) or a negative one ("Hmmm, that sounded close”). In the meantime, start looking for news alerts on your phone.
But the headlines don’t really help: “Sirens sounded in the Gaza Strip.” Dad calls to reassure mom. We’ve seen this before. It'll be over in a few hours.
On social media, posts were telling a different story. In videos filmed from behind curtains, armed and masked militants from Gaza are seen roaming freely in Israeli communities near the border. In another, a Palestinian paraglides across the border like a bird. Residents tweet that they can hear gunshots and conversations in Arabic outside their windows.
Again, tall those omnipresent smartphones can provide narrow, blurry images of reality, without any context.
It reminded me of a day when I was caught, along with my journalism students, in the middle of a frantic, post 9/11 evacuation of the U.S. Capitol grounds. I could see what is happening. I was there. But I had to call a friend in Florida to find out — conventional news could handle that specific story — what I was seeing.
Let’s move forward, a bit, in the nightmare vision from Haartz:
About an hour after most of the country realized that Israel was under extraordinary attack, news channels caught up with events. Almog Boker was dispatched to the field. Hadas Greenberg put on her bullet-proof vest. Danny Kushmaro finished doing his makeup. You tune in and quickly understand that they know nothing. They inform us that alarms sounded in central Israel and that there are reports of terrorists infiltrating Israeli territory from Gaza. You frown and ask yourself, reports? I've already seen video clips of them breaking through the border fence, riding around on Jeeps and climbing onto rooftops — tell me something I don’t know.
In the absence of any real information, the anchors make do with superatives: unprecedented, an unforgettable morning, images we've never seen before. On Channel 14, the screen flashes a message “Today is Simchat Torah” and that the broadcast will resume after the holiday. The war can wait.
The news came in bits and pieces, but from every direction, like an ambush. By 10 A.M., Channel 12 was reporting that fighting was underway at 14 locations. Channel 13 news was talking about dozens of casualties. On X (formerly Twitter), some posted, “I’m in the middle of a battlefield with my two-year-old daughter and my six-month-old son.” Someone else tweeted, “My friend is dead, my friend is dead.” WhatsApp filled with reports of widespread cyberattacks and calls for blood donations.
Let’s jump ahead again:
The events of Saturday — to which have been affixed two strong and courageous words by way of naming the war “Iron Swords” — illustrate the dashed illusions that the mass and new media face, from the heads of television brodcast channels to those tweeting what they see from their balconies. There is more information than ever before; it comes fast and is available to all. But the result is no information.
On X there are 15 dead and on Telegram there are 30 dead, while television broadcasts cite “reports” of 10 killed and the radio mentions five casualties. A video distributed by Hamas is posted on Facebook by someone you don’t know (who knows if it’s genuine) in which an armed man stands next to an elderly woman, an “Israeli hostage,” who doesn’t look scared. It’s fake, you say.
Finally, the bottom line:
… I saw more videos, tweets, and newscasts than I normally see in a week or even a month, and I still don’t know what happened. As of the time of writing, the shock is not due only to Hamas' attack, but to the ungraspable, unreliable and unending onslaught of information.
But something worse in coming, in terms of journalism. The mechanisms of modern journalism will now divide this story — along with almost everything else in daily life — along political lines, because that is “reality.” That’s the news.
Who is to blame for the Hamas attack? What now? Choose sides and let the next election campaign begin.
Oh, and the masses will move on.
Here in America, that looks like the headline editors at USA Today put, in the news-you-can-use email summary that I received this morning, right under updates from the Gaza war zone. Wait. For. It.
“Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift holding hands.”
In other words, “And now this.”
FIRST IMAGE: The basic .GIF from “The Matrix.”