Soon after the transcripts of the police investigation were leaked and aired by Channel 12 News, Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea began his victory lap. Barnea has reached the point in his career where he feels comfortable in Balnibarbi's capital, Lagado. I trust him to know how to find that city on a map but I am not so sure that he would like to be The Engine from "Gulliver's Travels," a device that can automatically generate essays on philosophy and science and even produce poetry, so long as it is properly calibrated at the Academy of Projectors.
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This is what has become of Barnea. Barnea, like that fictional device, can produce permutations according to the input being fed to the nightly news broadcast. If the input includes words such as "Adelson," "Israel Hayom," or "Sara," you can rest assured that the output Barnea will generate will include his usual shtick: wealth and power; deep pockets; personality cults; and of course, the accusation that Israel Hayom is actually "Netanyahu Hayom."
I admit it is not fun to read these accusations when I open Yedioth Ahronoth in the morning, and it is probably unwise to repeat these codewords here. But this time, Barnea's column begged a response, specifically because of another generic accusation he lobbed at us, that "Israel Hayom has never been a paper, not even for a day. Not every printed paper with crossword and Sudoku puzzles should be considered a paper." And this, mind you, was in a 500-word piece. This obsession can be quantified with mathematical accuracy.
Such epithets are supposed to insult, but we at Israel Hayom have every right to wear them as a badge of honor. Because when Barnea, like many in the media, refuses to recognize your newspaper as legitimate, this only goes to show that he considers himself to have the transcendental authority to tell the world what a paper is.
If "not being a paper," according to Barnea, means being different, then Israel Hayom is a success story. Barnea wants to settle scores with a rival paper that came into being 12 years ago, but he is actually feeling a much deeper sense of insult: He is insulted by the fact that someone dared to come up with a different model for a paper; a free, alternative paper that departs from the standard he and his colleagues set.
Barnea's lamentations could be seen within the context of the change of guard among the Israeli elites or the battle over hegemony. This may be true but in the case of Barnea, there is something much more rudimentary: This is the last stand of a guild that has lost its relative advantage; a guild that had exclusive control over our physical and perceptual world until roughly 12 years ago. Netanyahu's rise has ended this monopoly to give others a slice of the pie, and this explains a lot of the hostility toward him. Perhaps the ideological component is only secondary in this story. This is first and foremost a battle over assets.
Barneaism is just a banal social reaction. But there is another dimension to it. There is a clear line connecting Barnea's commentary to the character assassination orchestrated by Omri Maniv in another news channel against a famous rabbi. In both cases, in my opinion at least, we had honest and smart reporters engage in shallow journalism. This has nothing to do with scoops and no one can take away Barnea's record of accomplishments. But it has everything to do with a hunger for cherry-picked stories that reinforce their worldview. This is what I call prejudiced journalism or QED journalism.
Maniv aired only specific portions of a lecture by a rabbi because it fit with what he wanted to prove. And like Maniv, Barnea didn't think about what the transcripts actually said and that if you actually read them, they would prove something else entirely. The big problem is not that he looked for cherry-picked information that could serve his predetermined views but also the systematic decision to ignore what does not fit the narrative. This is a journalistic practice that is known as manipulative silencing.
Maniv and Barnea represent a brand of journalism that seeks proof for the collective thought, the doxa. In that sense, Israel Hayom is truly unorthodox because it does not follow Barnea's teachings; it is akin to Martin Luther's 95 theses that defied the Catholic Church. Israel Hayom is unorthodox not because it has challenged the religious doctrine but because it no longer has trust in the epistemic authority on knowledge that Barnea claims to hold.
Israel Hayom has the gall to represent the growing number of people who no longer share Barnea's worldview, no longer see him and his colleagues as authority figures, and refuse to follow their orders on what to think.
Those rude Israel Hayom readers have even decided they don't need Yedioth Ahronoth to give them the latest political analysis. It turns out, they are doing just fine without having to read the commentary of Yedioth Ahronoth's political pundits. Roland Barthes shocked the world when he wrote "The Death of the Author." Israel Hayom has written the sequel, "The Death of the Pundit," that questions the very analysis offered by the Israeli media. As the French say on alcohol, we should consume our media, but moderately.
Having said all that, the heart goes out to Barnea. Israel Hayom has been a constant reminder that he is not as important as he thinks he is. It turns out he never was that influential, he only cast a long shadow. He used to be a giant, like the Brobdingnagians in "Gulliver's Travels." He is not a Brobdingnagian anymore, and the good news is that you – the readers – are no longer Lilliputians.
