Netanya-who? The Media’s Short Attention Span on Israel

18 months after the press covered his speech to Congress like it was World War III, the media largely ignored his U.N. address. 

September 23, 2016

Poynter - Irrelevance takes hold so quickly among the press. Only Fox News went live to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the U.N. Thursday. CNN and MSNBC opted for a North Carolina district attorney's press conference. So much for the single biggest foreign policy mess the U.S. confronts, the Middle East.

Remember his speech to Congress, which everybody covered as if it was World War III? Perpetually tanned, cigarette-sneaking, golf-loving John Boehner was Speaker of the House. That was a very long 18 months ago.

Yes, some did acknowledge Bibi was in New York Thursday to speak to the entire world.

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress on Tuesday laid out, in the starkest terms yet, his differences with the Obama administration on how to deal with the threat of Iran's nuclear program." (Los Angeles Times) Very proper.

There was the U.N.'s own sanitized version. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been about settlements, or about establishing a Palestinian state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly today, saying 'It’s always been about the existence of a Jewish State […] in any boundary.” (U.N.)

But it's the Israeli press that was most instructive and displayed its counterpart to the Fox vs. Huffington Post contrasts when it comes to coverage of President Obama in the U.S.

There was the marshmallow-soft right-of-center Jerusalem Post: "This time there were no props — like a cartoon of a bomb — and no gimmicks, such as a 45-second pause to ram home a point, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday." (Jerusalem Post)

But then came Haaretz, the left-of-center newspaper. Its headline was short on ambiguity: "Netanyahu does his usual schtick before U.N. audience with zero expectations."

"Usual schtick?"

Ah, yes: "It’s true, however, that Netanyahu had good reason to be smug this year, and the best evidence of that was, in fact, the scores of U.N. diplomats who abandoned their seats in favor of a lunch at some posh East Side restaurant or solid schmoozing over a sandwich outside in the hall. They didn’t leave because of anti-Semitism, God forbid, but to prevent themselves from falling asleep in their seats. Netanyahu, in a surprising collaborative effort with Abbas, has managed to exhaust just about everyone." (Haaretz)