We can’t agree; they must be biased

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 21 October 2005

I’m due to give a talk at Maidenhead synagogue in November, as a guest of Rabbi Jonathan Romain. He emailed me last week, asking for a title. “Or perhaps,” he suggested, “we should go for something timeless, like ‘The Jewish problem.’” He was only half-joking. Like the Israeli diplomat who agrees to give a lecture in five years’ time. Asked for a title, he nominates: “The current crisis in the Middle East.” No matter what events may throw at us, we know that certain truths will remain true.

One of them is that the British Jewish community will always get hot under its collective collar about media coverage of Israel. Which made the story that led the JC at the end of last month interesting, but no surprise. The paper reported “Huge support for Israel PR drive,” citing an opinion poll which found that 92 per cent of British Jews believe the media is biased against Israel — and 87 per cent reckon the community “should run an advertising and publicity campaign” to tackle the problem. By any reckoning, those were landslide margins.

The survey was commissioned by StandUp4Israel, a group of advertising bigwigs eager to mount just such a high-calibre PR campaign for Israel. Being smart marketing folk, they wanted a survey which would show there was overwhelming demand for their proposed product.

So what they commissioned was not exactly a traditional opinion poll, in which random members of the Anglo-Jewish public were asked their views, but something closer to a petition drive. Publicity, which only appeared in the JC, urged people to “vote now.” It was rather like those “You the Jury” phone-polls The Sun occasionally runs, which tend to find that 95 per cent of Britons want to leave the European Union or bring back hanging.

The clue was in the JC story which featured a disclaimer put out by YouGov, the organisation which ran the survey. Since the sample was “self-selecting,” You-Gov stressed their findings could not be seen as “representative of any particular group.” In other words, they had established not the views of British Jews but of those JC readers motivated enough to vote in an online ballot.

StandUp4Israel (SU4I) is, understandably, pretty ann-oyed at YouGov pouring cold water on their result like this — not least because the organisation, on its own initiative, also put the same set of questions in its regular poll of the British population, discovering that just 14 per cent of the British public reckoned the media was anti-Israel. (YouGov’s pollster told me they did this because they found SU4I’s questions “biased” and wanted to “cover our back” with some genuine, scientific polling.)

If you ask me, YouGov should not have taken on the work in the first place if they didn’t think it was sound, and they certainly should not have tried to make up for that initial decision by taking action that was bound to undermine their own client. Still, you can’t get away from the key point here, which is that SU4I were less interested in discovering the true temper of British Jewry on this topic than in getting a shot of PR rocket-fuel for their campaign. That’s no crime: these guys are admen not social scientists. But it does reveal why a campaign of the kind advocated by SU4I could well come unstuck.

Put simply, if they were to try a similar tactic in a future PR offensive for Israel, they would get found out. This is not soap-powder, but international politics. Any move to promote Israel will be subject to hard media scrutiny. If SU4I put out a series of posters with information as partial as last month’s poll numbers, they’d be torn to shreds.

Marc Cave, an acclaimed figure in the ad industry and the prime mover behind the group, told me he was frustrated with Israel’s case always being filtered by the national media, whether it be letters to the editor or piec-es on the comment pages. The beauty of paid-for adverts is “no bugger can interfere with it.” It would give Israel’s defenders, says Cave, “true freedom of expression.”

I can sympathise with that desire, but I fear it would not solve the problem. The painful reality is that Israel’s advocates cannot flee to the cosy shelter of newspaper ads they wholly control, the equivalent of a debating chamber where the other side sits in silence. This is an argument and it has to be fought as such. That means taking on the opposition and defeating them in the public square — on television, on radio and in the papers. You can’t buy your way out of this debate: you have to win it.

What’s more, as the admen might say, we have to look at the product. When Israel gets a bad press, some of it may be down to PR failings and heavily accented spokesmen. But mainly it’s down to the reality of the situation they have to sell. The opposite is true, too. Right now, in the afterglow of Gaza disengagement, Israel is getting a rather good press. Of course there are some exceptions, but when Israel appears to be striving for peace, the coverage always improves. It was that way in the Barak years, and under Peres and Rabin, too. But not in the first phase of Sharon or Netanyahu. If Sharon stages further withdrawals from occupied territory, the media gaze will be kindly again.

So my message to the admen is: why not devote your energy and talent to altering the Israeli reality for the better? Get the product right and the image will take care of itself.

Posted on October 21, 2005 08:07 PM

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