The editor as demi-god

A recent piece by Ha’aretz’s former editor Hanoch Mamari (“A Fine and Fragile Balance”, April 16th) unintentionally helps explain how much of the Israeli media has become an intolerant ideological mouthpiece for a small and increasingly radical elite.

The role of The Fourth Estate in a democracy should be to provide as much balanced information as possible on which to base public discourse, and to give voice to as many participants as possible, promoting pluralism and defending it. But this does not seem a concern at all to the former Ha’aretz editor.

To explain why he quit Ha’aretz after 16 years, Marmari describes his bitter fight with Ha’aretz’s publisher, Amos Schocken, as a struggle about “the fundamental concepts” of journalism. This is not the whole truth.

Actually, Marmari is obsessed with one concept alone – that of total editorial control by the Editor in Chief. He evinces little interest in, or appreciation for the checks and balances that must limit even an editor’s powers, if certain values that transcend journalistic practice are to be preserved, chiefly freedom of speech, which may often conflict with an editor’s prerogatives, and may even curb his “editorial freedom”. This worship of absolute editorial power may explain why much of the Israeli media reads like the media of “popular democracies”, where an ideological party line dictates both the presentation of information and its interpretation.

Marmari insists that the most important “fundamental concept” bequeathed to him by his mentor, the late Ha’aretz’ owner and editor, Gustav (Gershom) Schocken was that “freedom of expression in a newspaper belongs to the editor and no one else”. Marmari is so enthralled with this perverse concept of “freedom” – a “freedom” that implies the denial of freedom of speech to others – that he does not realize how problematic it is. “The editor of a paper,” Marmari insists, “embodies in his judgment, policy and decisions, the freedom of expression of the paper, and demarcates the scope of expression for the community of journalists, editors and other creative minds which he represents”.

Since, as Marmari candidly admits, he did not get his job through election but through the whim of his publisher-mentor (“no sane public sector hiring committee would have taken on a person with my record” he confesses) it is hard to fathom how he can claim that the absolute powers he thinks he deserves as chief editor – not unlike those of an oriental (or Prussian) potentate – rests on “representation”.

Marmari explains: “A daily paper like Ha’aretz is one orchestra; reporters and editors forgo a certain part of their personal, natural freedom of expression and entrusts it to the editor of the paper”.

“Entrust”? Was anybody consulted? And who is to decide what part of their personal, natural freedom they will have to forgo? Who draws the line on this slippery slope? Who, and what, guarantees that the editor will not abuse his absolute powers? What checks and balances can there be when Marmari insists that the editor in chief must also appoint the editorial board? Editorial boards, like all boards, are heavily dependent on the CEO, namely the editor; but when he picks every one of its members who and what can check his power?

Lest we fail to appreciate what immense authority an editor in chief’s “freedom” demands, Marmari elaborates: “according to this approach, the editor, or those he delegates, can decide what is worthy of publication, and he has the direct power to change or expunge journalistic material on its way to publication, so that it will suit the limits of collective expression as he defines them.”

This clearly implies that the Editor in Chief can do whatever he wishes with material prepared and signed by others, and do so without consultation. An Editor in Chief may arbitrarily overrule the judgment of even his most senior and seasoned colleagues, because he ostensibly represents some mysterious “collective expression” that he alone defines. Is there a better description of an arrogant dictatorship?

Marmari reveals a lot, but he only alludes to the extremely important fact that the struggle in Ha’aretz was not only about power, but about the power to enforce an ideology, to subject not only the presentation of balanced information to ideological strictures, but the paper’s writers and readers too. He remarks – en passant – that “suddenly the publisher became a militant ideologue on certain political issues” (what delicacy!), while he was struggling to maintain a semblance of balance.

But Marmari’s vehement objection to the separation of the economic sector from his jurisdiction seems to have been motivated not only by his fear that this will create -God forefend – a dual system of sources of authority” (which seemingly functions well in the Wall Street Journal), but also by ideological concerns.

Marmari feared, he acknowledges, that the financial website, “TheMarker” with which Ha’aretz’s economic sector was to be merged, would not do enough to promote the voodoo economics peddled by Ha’aretz’s social lobbyists, what Marmari names “public economics a broad field that lies beyond pure economics”. Marmari does not explain why he thinks that the interrelationship between economics and “public policy”, namely politics, lies beyond “pure” economics when James Buchanan won a Nobel prize for work in precisely this area (The Theory of Public Choice). But then one has only to peruse what Marmari lists as the topics for “public economics” – all having to do with the dispensation of government favor without, of course, even alluding to costs or results – to agree that Schocken was right to entrust an economic section to an editor who understands what economics are about. Because while Ha’aretz may not have two lines of authority it does blessedly have two distinct groups of writers, a group of excellent economic writers and a group of obsessive ideologues that won for Ha’aretz its notoriety as an ideological braodsheet.

We owe then Marmari a great debt for candidly describing the mindcast and “value concerns” that makes Ha’aretz what it is, and for his admission that when in comes to practicing what it preaches , the seeking of solutions to disputes “that would be just and proper even partaking of compromise” Ha’aretz is, as could be expected, all utopian ideology with little relationship to reality.