Cutting, distorting and being shocked: how public discourse became a polarization machine
Public discourse is flooded with half-sentences taken out of context to turn political rivals into extremists, liars, or people without restraint. The culture of outrage may generate headlines and traffic, but its price is the deepening of the rift, the pushing aside of serious discussion, and damage to the ability to cooperate and reach compromises.
More and more Israelis believe that their rivals are crazy people and that there is no way to cooperate. Every two days, a new storm hits the public discourse, centered on a public figure, journalist, or activist who allegedly said something terrible that no decent person would say.
However, almost always after a few hours of heated discourse, it turns out that the storm was terribly biased, cut where it shouldn't have been, or taken out of context. The multitude of examples has long since crossed the line of good taste. This weekend, for example, the editor-in-chief of "Makor Rishon", Kalman Liebskind, was accused of being part of a malicious campaign because he does not want people currently living abroad to vote in the elections—even though it was clear he was talking about a specific group that does not intend to return. Earlier, Yair Golan was accused that "his true face was revealed" and that he is not interested in drafting Haredim into the army, even though in his full remarks he emphasized that the draft must be carried out as a process.
Gadi Eisenkot was accused of not seeing a difference between Abbas and Yosef Haddad because they are both Arabs, even though he was answering a question regarding the fact that potential right-wing voters might have an aversion to Arabs as such. In close proximity, David Zini was accused of wanting to destroy the judicial system based on leaked recordings, even though when listening to the full remarks, one hears that Zini insisted that a state cannot be democratic or functioning without an independent and significant judicial system.
Half-sentences, which are sometimes forgotten and sometimes absorbed as a self-evident truth—like the half-sentence "Hamas is an asset" by Bezalel Smotrich that was taken out of context, and the alleged statement by Amichai Eliyahu that dropping a bomb on Gaza is a real possibility.
We see very few serious reports, discussions, and debates. Most of the time we encounter half-sentences taken out of context to present the speaker as a liar, villain, or extremist. As a rule, many interviewers try to make the interviewee fail to produce a juicy headline, and countless content creators on the networks cut interviews in a biased and false way with the goal of getting traffic and likes.
The trick works time and time again; no one is willing to invest time and effort to hear the full remarks to discover that, well, they were lied to. Again.
And the results are cruel: the deepening of the social and political rift by turning political rivals into monsters; flooding the political discourse with gossip that has no practical benefit while pushing existential threats to Israel to the side; and finally, the collapse of democracy—which is composed at its base of the ability to form coalitions that are capable of cooperating and reaching compromises.
Before we can demand seriousness from politicians, journalists, and content creators, we must be serious ourselves and stop being tempted to be part of the culture of outrage over half-sentences that never tell the truth, even when the focus is on a person or opinion that we really do not like.
