On Friday, January 30, I went to the all-day “Independent Journalism Conference: The Struggle for Truth in the Age of Social Media” held at Beit Ariella, the main Tel Aviv municipal library. I thought I would just stay for a while, but in the end stayed for all of the plenaries from 9 a.m till 2 p.m. because they were so interesting and relevant to the challenges we are all facing today. They included sessions on “The battle for truth in social media: How do we agree about the facts in a reality of polarization and incitement? ” (which dealt with the problem of the proliferation of “fake news”), “Is the Israeli media still the watchdog over Israeli democracy?”, “Behind the scenes of the Qatargate Scandal” and “The problem of self-censorship: How did the Israeli media cover Israel’s longest war?”

Panelists dealt with the fact that the Israeli government is trying to limit freedom of the press and to control it in the spirit of Likud Minister Miri Regev’s comment about how “it’s inconceivable that we’ll establish a corporation (for public TV and radio) that we won’t control. What’s the point?”, along with the attempt to arrange for friendly oligarchs to gain control of most of the electronic and print media. The playbook is clearly what Hungarian Prime Minister Orban has done in Hungary, and what President Trump is doing in the US Netanyahu is trying to gain control over the Israeli media in the same way. That is one of the topics that his ongoing trial........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)