Media’s economic model exploits existing prejudices to maximize engagement and profit

By Julio Levit Koldorf

The recent affair on which the BBC came under fire after featuring a child narrator in its latest documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone for having indisputable ties to Hamas, has only lifted the curtain on an even more sinister spectacle.

Even before October 7 ever happened, in July of 2023, BBC journalist Anjana Gadgil was reprimanded after she claimed in the former Israeli Prime Minister’s face, Naftali Bennett, that Israelis were “delighted to murdering Palestinian children.”

Each year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center—one of the world’s most respected institutions for monitoring antisemitism—publishes a report highlighting the nations and organizations that propagate it. Consecutively, the annual report places the UK multimedia BBC in third place in the ranking, right after the Islamic Republic of Iran and the terrorist organization Hamas.

But this is nothing more than the latest iteration of an alarming tendency that has been brewing for years now.

Regularly the same trend of unscrupulous bias is seen in major media outlets around the world in which, all too frequently, Israel’s role from defender to attacker is reversed.

And we are solely referring to western media like the BBC, CNN or DW, without even delving into those with dubious journalistic integrity -promoted by questionable democracies or directly Islamic monarchies- such as Russia Today (RT) or Al Jazeera.

While criticism of Israeli policies can theoretically be disentangled from antisemitism, empirical studies reveal a troubling correlation: extreme anti-Israel views often harbor antisemitic beliefs. This suggests that anti-Zionism, while ostensibly political, serves as a socially acceptable vehicle for expressing anti-Jewish prejudice.

And media dramatically helps to spread, radicalize and normalize falsehoods, reinforcing anti-Jewish stereotypes, also among sectors of the intelligentsia.

Such moral selectivity seems to be connected to a deeper and darker equation:

Media communication products are not just a set of texts and images specially extracted from reality, cut, edited and reassembled to later be presented to consumers as an informative fast food; rather they operate as a commodity. How to make a compound of words and images to automatically generate profit, just as a commodity would? Through polemic and controversy.

That is why antisemitism is profitable. Media that produces this type of content use prejudices and latent intuitions in society to generate polemic through their controversial content. In this way they achieve an infinite amount of clicks and reproductions of their media products, making them go viral; and thus, the machine, the communication commodity, gets automated.

It is a dark equation that plays with the social psyche through blatant defamations by turning it into a business. A sacrificial strategy where big media corporations are willing to abandon ethical and factual integrity in pursuit of financial revenue.

This fairly unsophisticated but potent game of lies and defamations has, over the years, penetrated so deeply into the collective psyche, that has managed to institute false premises as absolute truths even in the highest bodies of global lawmaking and diplomacy. Establishing an illusionary relationship that falls on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where what the scientific and academic community has established as reality, is completely inconsequential in the face of a narrative that can be televised, published and ‘viralized’ without owing historical or moral correspondence, nor explanations to anyone.

The dark equation has not only succeeded establishing in the collective unconscious the inverted proposition that Jews are invaders, colonialists and murderers who came to deprive the ancient Palestinian people of their ancestral land; rather, it seems to have caused a sort of global amnesia, where the wars of 1948, 1967, 1973 and the subsequent intifadas never existed.

A reality that seems to have eradicated the genocidal antisemitic goal of pan-Arabism to eliminate the Jewish state from the face of the earth.

Therefore, it is very common today to hear, in the highest spheres of culture, that the Jewish state is the only global player responsible for the Palestinians’ situation. And Zionism—the political movement that synthetizes the millennia-old collective aspiration of Jewish people for self-determination in their ancestral homeland—is cast as a neo-Hitlerian genocidal force responsible not only for the Arab-Israeli conflict, but as the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East and beyond.

A distorted historical inversion, akin to blaming the Allies for the dire conditions of Germans during World War II or holding South Koreans responsible for the suffering of North Koreans.

In recent years, the European Union has conducted multiple surveys to assess the state of antisemitism in Europe from the perspective of Jewish communities themselves. One of the shocking novel results, was the perception of the influence of media in the exponential increase of antisemitism.

The dark equation proposes that much of the responsibility for the horrendous reality against the most persecuted minority in world history is the result of certain corporative interests in generating revenue through the production of controversial content that can go viral.

Content that persuades due to its hyper-simplification of history, seduces beyond pleasure by producing equality in pleasing the perceived oppressed, and generates a series of fixed ideas which manages social paranoia. All of this authorizes hatred, disinhibits aggression and opens the door to the Freudian death drive and appetite for destruction.

Julio Levit Koldorf is a scholar specializing in communication and politics, with a focus on political antisemitism. He holds a double PhD in these fields and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia, University of Zaragoza and Oxford University. He has lectured across Europe and provided briefings on antisemitism to Spain’s Ministry of Justice and the European Commission. He contributes to various international publications where he addresses issues related to antisemitism and global politics.