We are all certainly aware that in our current media crazed world it is bad news, tawdry events and dire predictions that sell newspapers and journals. One can read through any of the daily newspapers here in Israel and scarcely find any encouraging word.

 

They are filled with vituperative if not even vicious criticism of everything and everyone that is a public figure here in our lovely little country. I am reminded of Menachem Begin’s quip that the last government in Israel that Haaretz had a good word to say about it was the British Mandate.

 

Now as I gaze out my window at the snow still piled up at my gate and the fallen trees and branches that block the sidewalks throughout Rechavia one week after the end of the storm, I am also hard pressed to think positively about the municipal government’s services to the citizens of Jerusalem. But this is an extraordinary circumstance and my annoyance at the powers that be is bound to be short lived and not a chronic case of depression and foreboding about the future of the Holy City.

 

The tendency to always see the glass as being half empty is a staple of current journalism. There apparently is no end to books and articles written by experts and savants predicting the decline of the West, the impending economic implosion, the destruction of our very planet because of climate change - in short, according to them, we are entering an apocalypse of unprecedented proportions.

 

In reviewing the newspapers and magazines as well as the books of learned experts published between 1950 and 1980 it is obvious that the Soviet Union would triumph in the Cold War and that we should adjust ourselves to living in that brave new world of Marxist paradise. But the experts were wrong, as they oftentimes are.

 

The glass then was half full and not half empty but the media found that viewpoint too bland and naïve to be worthy of publicity or acceptance. Bad news is news; good news and optimism is not worthy of concentrated journalistic attention. We read about dysfunctional families, deranged people, the families of terrorists and the trauma that they suffer.  But, almost nary a word is devoted to the stable family, the volunteer helpers, the honest and hard-working civil servants, the true religious leaders, and to hopes for a brighter future for all of us.

 

 Good tidings are to be ignored or given short shrift by our media experts. The only cheerful news on the radio are the commercial advertisements that guarantee us eternal joy if we will only purchase their advertised products.

 

And when it comes to the State of Israel the news must always be uniformly bad and the predictions regarding its future consistently dire. If Israel doesn’t capitulate to European demands, to Palestinian requests, to UN resolutions, etc. it will somehow be diminished if not even destroyed.

 

Who says so? Why is this narrative never refuted? Great people predicted that the state would not survive fifteen years. Others gave it fifty years. Their predictions were given wide publicity  and wide circulation. But the Lord, so to speak, has obviously thought otherwise. Yet the dire predictions of these scholars are still repeated and held to be true in certain sections of Israeli and world Jewish societies.

 

The Israeli shekel is stronger, again so to speak, than the American dollar. Yet this is always interpreted negatively and not positively. The Jewish population is expanding in Israel yet it is only the demographic threat of the Arabs that is emphasized, this in spite of the decline in the rate of Arab births in the Land of Israel. It is very often here that ideology drives news reporting and not the facts themselves.

 

The Left has never come to terms with its failures and wrongheaded, if well-meaning, ideas and programs. The media therefore prefers to frighten rather than encourage, deny rather than admit error and bias. The spate of negative books just recently published by former Israeli officials about the impending doom facing Israel if their recommendations and advice is not followed is Jeremiah journalism at its worst. The Bible and Jewish tradition is much more optimistic about our future.

 

Shabat shalom

 

Berel Wein