It's often said that Israel has a "free" and "independent" press, a rare thing in the region. With the increasing frequency of military censorship and gag orders -- such as those placed on the recent arrests of Anat Kamm, Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said -- as well as the news blackout on the hijacked Gaza Freedom Flotilla ships -- the pretense of a free press in Israel is becoming increasingly threadbare. But apart from government imposed censorship, there is the voluntary censorship and manipulation offered up by "patriotic" Israeli journalists. Take for example, Yair Lapid, a prominent Israeli journalist and TV news anchor. Writing on Ynet, Lapid excoriates the Israeli government's "amateurish" PR response to the Gaza Flotilla. His assumption, like so many other Israelis, is that there is no inherent problem with Israel's actions -- it is merely a problem of hasbara, literally "explaining." But Lapid goes even further to make an extraordinary proposal for what "good" government PR looks like:
You want an example? Had they [the government] knew [sic] something about it [good PR], the dozens of TV crews who arrived at the Ashdod beach Monday would have encountered, arranged right on the sand, the hundreds of missiles and other weapons we seized in the previous ships that attempted to reach Gaza. And do you know what the foreign TV crews would have done? They would have photographed that! And those would have been the only images aired during the first hours by all global television channels. Why? Because they had nothing else to air and TV stations usually prefer to air an image - any kind of image - than not to air anything.Lapid proposes fabrication and fakery on an even grander scale than Israel already carried out. No weapons found on the Gaza-bound ships? Easy, just bring in weapons from elsewhere and spread them out on the beach! Lapid says -- correctly -- that this would have been the only thing the dozens of TV crews could film, but that is only because Israel banned all media access either to the hijacked ships or the kidnapped passengers including dozens of journalists who were held incommunicado by Israel while it stole their footage and photographs to manipulate for propaganda purposes. Lapid doesn't challenge that blackout, he supports it! His only gripe is that Israel did not fabricate enough damning "evidence" to paint those it murdered and injured as "terrorists." Leading Israeli journalists like Yair Lapid don't need government pressure; they enlist voluntarily in the war on journalists and the truth.