conflict & communication online, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2021
www.cco.regener-online.de
ISSN 1618-0747

Benyamin Neuberger & Keren-Miriam Adam
Journalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and democracy in Israel

Based on interviews with 32 leading Israeli journalists, this paper intends to probe the discourse of Israeli journalists reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on Israeli democracy.
The main outcome of the study is a major gap between what the journalists said had been written and broadcasted and what they said should have been written and broadcasted. This gap implies that a significant segment of the media was actually only “tactically” critical of the government and lacked any deeper “strategic” analysis of the pandemic and its related political crisis ‑ including the fragility of Israel’s democracy. What follows, in our view, from this gap is that Israel’s democracy has reached a dangerous crossroads.

The authors:
Benyamin Neuberger holds a PhD degree in political science from Columbia University/New York. He is professor emeritus of political science at the Open University of Israel, and currently teaches at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He has held visiting appointments in teaching and research at the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Cape Town. He has published widely on Israeli and African politics, nationalism and ethnicity, religion and state, and democratic theory and politics.
eMail: belinan@netvision.net.il

Keren-Miriam Adam holds a PhD in journalism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Her PhD dealt with the journalistic routines in conflict situations, with the focus on Israeli-Arab relations (1948–2008). Dr Adam has lived and taught in Germany in a number of academic institutes since 2011. She is currently teaching intercultural conflict management at Harz University of Applied Sciences in Wernigerode.
eMail:   kadam@hs-harz.de