Matti Friedman. Photo: HonestReporting.com.

Matti Friedman

Journalist

As the Gaza War raged last summer, a number of wider dramas connected to the war, not least in the media, came under a glaring public spotlight. Unquestionably the most important of these was a Tablet magazine feature on the media’s flawed coverage of Israel by Matti Friedman, a former reporter with The Associated Press in Jerusalem. Friedman’s article will be cited for years to come by Israel’s supporters, not just because of the firestorm it created, but because of its enduring value in understanding the prejudices accumulated by many journalists covering the region. In the piece, Friedman wrote of “an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” Those obsessives, Friedman continued, were “to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.”