HonestReporting’s Gil Hoffman makes a stop in Pittsburgh
Discusses ‘Israel and the Media Landscape’
Gil Hoffman is clear on what motivated him to join HonestReporting.
“I got a chance to fight for Israel on the media battlefield,” he said, before noting, “I had no idea how serious it would become.”
Before his time as executive director at HonestReporting, Hoffman worked for nearly a quarter century at The Jerusalem Post, where he covered politics. He also hosted the podcasts “Inside Israel Today” and “Voice of Israel.”
It was a comfortable position for the journalist.
“I really liked my job,” he said. “I watched history as it happened. I had my name on a chair in the front row of the gallery of Knesset. We got to know our presidents and prime ministers. I could have done it forever.”
HonestReporting is a digital media company that, according to its website, “analyzes stories, articles, opinion pieces and images that appear in the media’s coverage of Israel, exposing and responding to inaccuracies or bias.”
For Hoffman, the company is the modern version of how one used to respond to biased reporting.
“We used to take out a typewriter and some Wite-Out, write a letter to the editor, put it in an envelope and then in a box and hope a pigeon would take it to a newsroom somewhere, where an intern would bring it to an editor smoking a cigar, and he’d decide whether to put it on page 12 or 13, with no context whatsoever,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that anymore.”
HonestReporting, Hoffman explained, has eight categories of media bias for which it searches: misleading terminology, imbalanced reporting, opinions disguised as news, lack of context, selective omission, using true facts to draw false conclusions, distortion of facts and lack of transparency.
Rather than a team of intrepid reporters reading, watching and listening to various news sites to find those eight categories of bias, HonestReporting is operating firmly in the 21st century.
“We’ve trained AI to find these automatically,” Hoffman explained, “which flags it for us, and then we can get it changed online within minutes before anyone has a chance to see it.”
The AI was developed by a company in Tel Aviv.
Of course, sometimes, a sledgehammer rather than a laser is needed, in which case, he said, “We shame them on social media or write a longer-form article to educate people.”
As an example of HonestReporting’s work, Hoffman cited an incident when NBC was talking about Palestinian terrorists detained by Israel. The network called them “captives.”
“I called up someone I knew at NBC in New York, he got it, and we were able to have it changed within 15 minutes of it being online,” he said.
Hoffman said that in today’s world, speed has become more important than accuracy, all in the name of SEO, search engine optimization, or increasing a website’s visibility and clicks.
“It used to be that we’d go to a press conference at 10 in the morning with a print deadline of 8 at night,” he said.
“Nowadays, you go to a 10 a.m. press conference and you better have the story online by the time the press conference is over. You’re live tweeting the entire press conference and taking photos for Instagram and videos for TikTok.”
Ironically, Hoffman said that often it’s the case that “the more inaccurate your article is, the more likely it is that it will be read.”
SEO, he said, is important, especially as organizations like Al Jazeera become more sophisticated and imbedded on sites like Reddit and Wikipedia.
Hoffman is quick to say that Al Jazeera should be treated like a media source controlled by Vladimir Putin in Russia or Iranian television.
“Al Jazeera is a propaganda tool of Qatar,” he said. “People shouldn’t go to Al Jazeera. They don’t know what they’re getting. It’s very, very dangerous. Qatar was very much involved in the war on both the military and media battlefields, and people don’t realize the harm they’re doing.”
Instead, Hoffman urged consumers to watch news with a critical eye. Those same eight biases, he said, can be used to determine what sources are trustworthy and which aren’t in the “new media” landscape — TikTok, Twitter and other social media companies that platform individuals with little or no media training.
Too often, Hoffman said, media sources are reporting lies about the Jewish communities.
“It’s a modern-day blood libel no more truthful than saying Jews killed Christians to get their blood for Passover, and yet they’re believed by reasonable people who have been misguided, and it’s spinning out of control,” he said.
In the end, Hoffman proffered, as Israel’s war with Gaza winds down, the narratives will continue, and one will win — either Israel will “become an anathema, like apartheid South Africa,” or the war will be remembered as the time “Israel saved the world from genocidal terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists with nuclear weapons.”
If it’s the former, he said, antisemitism will continue to spin out of control, United States college campuses will become “very difficult for Jews,” Israelis will no longer be able to travel and terror will grow around the world, even to places where there are no Jews.
“If the world realizes the truth, Israel will face a post-war economic boom compounded by being post-pandemic, antisemitism and terror will go down in the United States, and the world will be a safer place,” he said.
Hoffman was in Pittsburgh for a series of events sponsored by StandWithUs. He spoke at Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh, did an interview with StandWithUs Kenneth Leventhal High School Intern Sam Stavchansky for the Taylor Allderdice High School newspaper and presented a collaborative community event — Israel and the Media: Is the World Against Us? — at Community Day School, presented in cooperation with CDS, Classrooms Without Borders, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Shaare Torah.
StandWithUs Mid-Atlantic Regional Director Julie Paris said that with his deep expertise and leadership at HonestReporting, Hoffman showed those that attended the different events that combatting lies in the media landscape isn’t about arguing but “mastering the algorithm, holding media outlets accountable and ensuring the truth isn’t drowned out by a biased narrative.”
She urged community members to be active participants in the fight and said StandWithUs is working to provide the “literacy to dismantle bias.”
Bringing Hoffman to Pittsburgh was part of that work, she noted.
“We are incredibly grateful Gil came to Pittsburgh to share his expertise,” she said. “Having someone with his deep background in both journalism and advocacy was a rare opportunity for our community to learn from one of the best in the field.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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