A prominent member of the American Jewish population in the last century, writer Elie Wiesel once remarked: “Whenever I want to feel better, I turn to the Israeli items in The New York Times.” The reason why engaging with those items would make one feel better is not entirely clear, of course, but the mere fact that they could ought to amaze us. The notion that a news item is not only a source of information but can also inspire a preferred emotion is truly amazing, given the common understanding of what newspapers are meant to be.
And what did those news items look like in 1973 that made Wiesel feel so much better? One would think they did not resemble anything like the audio recording recently published by The Washington Post. Though they potentially could, considering that one of the most fanatical cheerleaders of the genocide in Gaza, and a former spokesperson for the Israeli government, Eylon Levy, shared it as if it were something that would make him feel better. In that recording, a Mossad operative was telling Iranian generals to flee the country to avoid the murder of their wives and children, along with themselves. It appears as though Levy found it brilliant on the part of the Mossad operative to warn those generals beforehand, supposedly out of benevolence and compassion, so that they could prevent their wives and children from suffering the same horrible fate as those women and children massacred by Israel in Gaza.
Indeed, Wiesel’s source of “better feelings” was markedly different from Levy’s. The news items the former was referring to elevated the state of Israel to the status of a religion, assigning it the special function of purifying the soul, as it were. In this way, reliable information and serious analysis were simply ruled out as the core function of the news. Perhaps, in the manner of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Wiesel might have declared further: “It is precisely reading which helps me to recover from my seriousness.” Recovering from his seriousness, thus purifying his soul through “the religion of Israel.”
It would be a minor abuse of professionalism, or the abandonment of customary seriousness, at most, if such news items remained simply a source of preferable emotion for a certain sector of the population. It becomes a major problem, however, when they are curated to influence policy decisions, as we have witnessed over the past couple of weeks concerning developments in Israel and Iran. Or perhaps these amount to the same, in that, for example, the neocons of the world could feel better only if they engage with news items that have the distinction of influencing policy decisions as well.
In fact, a satisfactory answer to the question of how the news serves that function would likely provide us with access to reliable information and serious analysis once again, though indirectly this time. Take Levy’s reaction to The Washington Post’s recording, for example. The insight we can glean from this news item comes not from its actual content, but from how people like Levy read it. In other words, the information is not so much contained in the recording itself as in the revelation of the mindset of those who could genuinely think that warning someone beforehand that you will kill their family unless they behave is something to applaud.
In the end, we are left with a conundrum: The distortion of the news into a source of preferable emotion, or of some form of emotional relief to be precise, for certain people may be what reveals the most about the current state of the world. If the truth no longer lies in what is reported, but in how it is received, then the task of interpretation falls less on the journalist and editor, and more on the reader. Thus, the reader must learn to read not only the facts, if there are indeed verifiable facts, but also the omissions, euphemisms, applause and so on. Only then might we reclaim a sense of seriousness to which no amount of reading can pose any harm – and this not in spite of “better feelings,” but beyond them.
