Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Rich people who own newspapers can shift elections. Israel shows how.

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Related:

ABC News In-depth

ABC is an Australian public broadcast service. Wikipedia ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation?wprov=yicw1

91,305 views Apr 27, 2024 If You're Listening | ABC News In-depth
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
He is doing everything he can to stay in office, because if he holds office, he can’t be thrown in jail.
Sound familiar? It’s a bit like Donald Trump’s situation in the United States.
But Netanyahu’s case has an old-school flavour. It’s a fierce battle between media
tycoons, and it even involves Australian media nepo baby James Packer.
It’s a rollicking tale, but with a military campaign against Gaza and tensions
with Iran rising, it could also change the fate of the war in the Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VRUVQz-Dlw
Subscribe: https://ab.co/3yqPOZ5
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Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper moved Israeli voters to the right. Could a similar newspaper shift votes in a U.S. swing state?

Analysis by Nikita Lalwani
December 6, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST


Benjamin Netanyahu arrives for the swearing-in ceremony of Israeli lawmakers at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem last month.

“Can the ultrarich shape electoral results by controlling media outlets that openly propagate their political interests?” That is the question political scientists Guy Grossman, Yotam Margalit and Tamar Mitts pose in their new paper .. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719415 .. in the Journal of Politics. Using conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s ownership (while he was alive) of the free Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom as a case study, they conclude that the answer is yes. The newspaper “exerted significant electoral influence,” they find, by increasing support for right-wing party Likud and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister-designate .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/israel-netanyahu-election-democracy/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2 .. after the Israeli election Nov. 1.

In the following interview, which has been edited and condensed, Grossman, Margalit and Mitts discuss how they measured IH’s right-wing bias, under what conditions other publications would be able to replicate its influence, and whether their study has any implications for Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

NL: Sheldon Adelson launched IH in 2007. How does IH fit into Israel’s broader media landscape?

Guy Grossman: When Adelson launched the newspaper, the market in Israel was concentrated among two major newspapers, Yediot Ahronot and Maariv, both of which were considered relatively mainstream and centrist.

But just as a mainstream or centrist publication in the United States can be seen by some as very lefty, there was a sense among some people on the right in Israel that the media landscape was tilted to the left.

So when Adelson launched IH, at the behest of Netanyahu, his goal was to create a newspaper that would be widely distributed and represent right-wing positions that were supposedly being neglected by mainstream media.

NL: You characterize IH as having a right-wing bias. How does one measure that?

Tamar Mitts: We first identified language that would be associated with the right and with the left. To take one example in the Israeli context, to talk about the West Bank, people on the right might talk about “Judea and Samaria,” while people on the left might use the phrase “occupied territories.” We quantified terms that appeared in IH by how left or right-wing they were — words were considered more right wing if they tended to appear in party manifestos for parties on the right, and left wing if they tended to appear in manifestos on the left. We then did the same for the language in a mainstream newspaper, so we were able to say how much more IH was slanted as compared to what people considered a middle-of-the-road publication.

We also looked at the kinds of topics the newspaper covered, including the images on the front page. If you cover more security-related news or if you have images that emphasize terrorism, that can move people to the right as well.

NL: You find that exposure to IH had a significant impact on vote share for the right bloc in Israel. Was this primarily
by increasing turnout, persuading people of the merits of right-wing positions, or some combination of both?

Yotam Margalit: The effect comes primarily from persuasion rather than mobilization. Readers of IH changed their views on specific issues and improved their view of Netanyahu and his leadership. This was in line with the strategy behind IH, which involved a concerted effort to reach a broad segment of the population. Unlike publications that are targeted to very narrow segments of the population and designed to mobilize like-minded voters, IH sought to reach not just conservatives but also centrists and people on the left.

[ The World Cup of Democracy might look like this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/04/world-cup-2022-democracy-soccer-fifa/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_20 ]

NL: How was IH able to reach those groups?

YM: First, Adelson was willing to invest large sums of money into IH without any guarantee of a return on that investment, which allowed him to create a product of sufficient quality that people on all sides would be willing to consume. He also invested in a successful distribution strategy, placing IH in train stations and other central areas throughout the country.

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[Insert: Bevan above says Adelson's paper was free. Odd that wouldn't have been mentioned here. Hmm, let's see .. ok
Sheldon Adelson Shakes Up Israeli Newspaper Market
October 18, 20123:33 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
By Sheera Frenkel
[...]Israel's newsstands are looking noticeably less crowded these days, as a crisis in the Israeli press threatens several of the country's oldest publications. Media experts in Israel say that market competition and a tendency to buy political influence through media ownership have crippled Israel's once-thriving newspaper market.
P - And many want to put the blame on one man: Sheldon Adelson, the U.S. casino mogul who launched a free newspaper in Israel in 2007 and has close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
P - The effects of Adelson's free paper are being felt acutely by Maariv, one of the country's oldest newspapers.
https://www.npr.org/2012/10/18/162816525/sheldon-adelson-shakes-up-israeli-newspaper-market
NPR came through on the free. That's the outfit Bari Weiss and
the dishonest conservative dick Christopher Rufo attacked. See:
The manifestly dishonest culture war rages on.
[...]The real cancel culture
Judd Legum
[...]
Ironically, as Weiss cashes in on her critique of "cancel culture," The Free Press has become a central part of a sophisticated right-wing ecosystem that seeks to tear down anything and anyone who diverges too far from their ideology.
P - The latest effort began on April 9, 2024, when NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that his employer had "lost America's trust." Using a formula that is typical for The Free Press, Berliner describes himself as fitting the liberal mold — admitting that he was "raised by a lesbian peace activist mother" and "eagerly voted against Trump twice." But Berliner says that NPR has gone too far. NPR, according to Berliner, has abandoned its "open-minded spirit" and is too focused on catering to the left.
P - One of the core pieces of evidence Berliner cited was NPR's coverage of allegations that the "Trump campaign colluded with Russia." Berliner said NPR "hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff." He complained that Schiff was interviewed 25 times and, during those interviews, "alluded to purported evidence of collusion." But an NPR spokesperson told Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple that between January 2017 and December 2019, NPR conducted 900 interviews with congressional lawmakers, including stalwart conservatives like Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). In other words, Schiff did not dominate the coverage. Overall, Wemple describes Berliner's critique of NPR's Russia coverage as a "lazy… feelings-based critique of the sort that passes for media reporting these days."
[... to end .. ]
The incoherence of the argument underscores the reality of the political moment. There is a relentless right-wing operation seeking to inflict pain on their ideological adversaries. Some, like Rufo, are the political equivalent of street brawlers, willing to say or do anything to achieve their objective. Others, like Weiss and The Free Press, give the movement a more journalistic and professional sheen. But no one involved is a supporter of free expression or an opponent of cancel culture. Rather, they are the cultural force aggressively pursuing cancellation.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174409571]
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In just four years, IH became the most circulated newspaper in Israel. That’s stunning. Also, Israel is a small country, so it’s easier to reach a large portion of the population. Having that kind of reach in the United States, for example, might be a struggle. But the U.S. has swing states that are not much bigger than Israel, so you could imagine an investment in a local newspaper in Arizona or Nevada having a similar impact.

NL: Can your study tell us anything about ultrarich control over technology
companies? Can these likewise be tools of political persuasion?

GG: One takeaway from our study is that for the ultrarich to use a media company as a tool of political persuasion, they really need to invest a lot of money into that project, and they have to care more about persuasion than about profit. Musk taking over Twitter might be a similar case.

TM: One important difference is that on social media, the content is being generated by users without editors shaping the output. The closest parallel to editors are content moderation policies, but those are very hard to enforce. So the kind of influence IH was able to exert would probably be very hard to replicate on a platform like Twitter.

[ Do Twitter users want Musk to ban or censure offensive posts?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/02/elon-musk-twitter-policies/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_31 ]

NL: What do you see as fruitful avenues for further research?

GG: Our study focuses on print media, but we’re now in the age of digital media, where marketing and media consumption are quite different, and where social media plays an increasingly important role. How does influence work in this environment? We also focus on only one country, so there are questions about what sorts of conditions need to be met for media in other countries to have the kind of influence that IH has had.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/06/wealth-elections-israel-rightwing/