Daliah Dorner - a 'dictator'

By YISRAEL MEDAD
Here is how the JPost reports on the statement by Justice Daliah Dorner, retired from the Supreme Court and now chairperson of Israel''s Press Council,:-
Dorner: Public opinion should dictate coverage of Schalit
 
Her thinking goes like this:

Public opinion and not legal or political measures should be the factor that forces the media to behave in an ethical way while covering the homecoming of Gilad Schalit over the next few days...official controls on press freedom is not an option.“I would never control the media, but I will say to those who are responsible for the fate of Gilad Schalit that it is up to them to persuade the public that an invasion by the media will cause this boy harm,” she said.“If they are successful, then public opinion itself will control the media, because the media wants to do all it can to keep the public happy.”...she believes that public opinion is one of the natural ways to control the press. "Only those who are very brave can write something that everyone will hate or disagree with,” she said.

Unfortunately, Dorner has it all backwards.
It is the media that controls, quite successfully in most cases, public opinion. They shape it, frame it, manipulate it and actually hide any opinions or actions which do not fit the opinions of the editorial boards and staff.
It is they who dictate and Dorner, obviously willingly blind, deaf and dumb, goes along with the charade that Israel''s democracy is healthy due to the freedom of the press.
Israel''s Media Watch, since March 1995, among others such as Ben-Dror Yemini, Kalman Liebskind, Channie Luz of Tadmit, etc., has proven that that charade exists, that there exists an "axis of upheaval" whereby links between politics-money-media dominate public discourse and Israel''s democracy is under the thumb of media dictate. The press dominates the public, feeds them garbage, entertains and unethically.
In the specific Schalit case, what the media downplayed was a central element of the reality of the family''s campaign:
that while on the one hand, the Schalit family not only used emotional extortion based on their son - which we would accept - but did so also on the fact that Noam''s twin brother, Gilad''s uncle, was killed in the Yom Kippur war.  And so, whereas on the other hand, they are now demanding, basically, that the rest of us do not use the same emotional pressure on the Supreme Court or public opinion, they have acted up until now in an immoral manner and the position they have taken, because it is immoral, it threatening to the rest of us which has nothing to do really with emotion but cold logic.
But that is the development of individualistic Israel which the press feeds and nurtures becuase he makes the public a willing slave to what the media does which is selling us news, selling us opinion.
Dorner, unfortunately, is putty in the hands of the media.  The question is: is she a willing prisoner of their world-view?
^