A strange contradiction runs through the Israeli media.
At its best, it sees people whom the authorities have ignored. It gives them a voice, forces officials to answer questions and reminds the public that suffering does not disappear merely because it is inconvenient. Without such reporting, many Israelis would remain alone with injuries, trauma and institutions that have stopped returning their calls.
Consider Ido, the schoolboy whose family says he was catastrophically injured during an unsafe classroom exercise. According to an N12 report, he was left disabled, while his parents were left without meaningful answers from the education system. They now care for a son whose life changed in a classroom where he should have been safe. It is Chelm brought to life, except no one is laughing.
Or consider the 16-year-old Bnei Akiva member from Yavne whose family said that police failed for months to investigate her report of rape. Her father eventually stabbed the alleged assailant and was charged. Police disputed the family’s account, saying that the girl had not cooperated sufficiently for investigators to identify the suspect. Yet Channel 13’s reporting presented a family that experienced the system not as a source of protection, but as another source of anguish.
Then there is the disaster at Gai Beach Water Park on the Sea of Galilee. In July 2024, 26-year-old newlywed Tzachi Alon died after contracting Naegleria fowleri, the rare amoeba commonly described as “brain-eating.” Three weeks later, 10-year-old Roi Zigdon, who had visited the same park, was infected. N12 reported in February 2026 that Roi, now 12, remained in a vegetative state as his family cared for him at home. The investigation asked whether the second infection could have been prevented. The Health Ministry has said that, after the first case, the patient’s several possible exposure sites and initially normal test results did not justify closing the park at that stage.
These cases are not identical, and the competing accounts matter. What connects them is the experience of ordinary families who believe that something terrible happened, that responsibility became blurred and that they had to turn to television before anyone truly listened.
In the United States, comparable cases might quickly become lawsuits for millions of dollars. Israelis often ask for something more basic first: humanity, attention and a sign that the system recognizes what happened to them. Before they sue, they want to believe that someone will investigate, explain and accept responsibility. When that response never arrives, its absence becomes a second injury.
This is why investigative and human-interest journalism matters. It can restore dignity to people whom bureaucracies have reduced to case numbers.
But another, uglier tendency has become impossible to ignore. While some programs expose victims of institutional failure, others offer warm, intimate and sometimes glamorous platforms to figures associated with crime, corruption and public scandal.
Neve Dromi’s i24NEWS interviews often feel less like scrutiny than a salon for figures sympathetic to Netanyahu. Omri Assenheim’s Channel 13 program comes from a different political ecosystem, yet it displays the same weakness. This is not ultimately a left-right problem.
The problem is not that journalists interview disreputable people. They should. Criminals, former officials and people at the center of national scandals may have information the public needs to hear. Nor should a person who has served a sentence be denied the possibility of rehabilitation.
The question is one of framing. Is the guest being examined, or introduced as a celebrity? Are difficult claims tested? Are victims and consequences present in the story? Is remorse explored, or is notoriety itself treated as an achievement?
Omri Assenheim’s Channel 13 program is built around an intimate meal and a personal interview. One episode featured Yossi Harari, whom Channel 13 itself described as the former head of one of Israel’s most powerful criminal organizations and one of the country’s most senior underworld figures. The format offered closeness and confession, but closeness can easily become admiration when it is not matched by sustained challenge.
On i24NEWS, Neve Dromi gave Efi Nave an exclusive platform to “open the Pandora’s box” of the judicial system. Nave is the former head of the Israel Bar Association. He was convicted in 2022 of fraud and unlawful entry and exit offenses connected to border control. He and former judge Eti Kreif were also investigated in the affair commonly called “sex for judicial appointments”; prosecutors closed that case in 2021, saying that the likelihood of conviction was too low despite serious factual findings.
Those distinctions are essential. A closed case is not a conviction, and opinion writers should not pretend otherwise. Yet legal precision does not require journalistic amnesia. When a program presents Nave primarily as a fearless revealer of other people’s corruption, it risks allowing the guest to reverse the moral direction of the interview.
Kreif, who left the bench after the investigation, later received her own intimate Channel 13 profile, promoted as her boldest interview. Once again, the issue is not her right to speak. It is the television grammar surrounding her: intimacy, revelation, dramatic promotion and the promise of access. These techniques can illuminate a subject, but they can also function as rehabilitation without accountability.
The same grammar shaped the renewed attention given to the women in the “pink suitcases” affair. Four young women were convicted after smuggling roughly 14 kilograms of cocaine and ketamine into Israel. After prison and rehabilitation, two became the subjects of a documentary series and a glossy newspaper profile, complete with professional photography and the visual language normally used for entertainers.
Their backgrounds, exploitation and rehabilitation are legitimate subjects for journalism. Compassion is not the problem. The problem arises when aesthetics overwhelm moral proportion—when attractive photography, confessional storytelling and promotional headlines turn serious offenses into a route to fame.
This is not pearl-clutching moralism. It is a question about the social status that media attention creates. A serious interview can help the public understand crime. A flattering profile can teach a different lesson: that infamy is simply another form of celebrity, and that sufficient confidence before a camera can replace contrition.
Commercial pressure explains part of this. Ratings reward recognizable faces, scandal and emotional disclosure. But the pattern crosses channels, newspapers and political camps. It is not only a problem of the pro-Netanyahu media or the anti-Netanyahu media. It is a weakness in an entire culture of attention.
I am no admirer of Kan 11, whose politics I often find doctrinaire and far to my left. Even so, Kan 11 and Channel 12 have repeatedly done indispensable work for Israelis crying out for help. They have exposed neglect, forced public discussion and given genuine victims a microphone. The contradiction is therefore especially stark: one part of the media reveals the damage caused by failing institutions, while another packages some of the people associated with crime or institutional decay as compelling entertainment.
Israel’s political system, judicial system and police have all suffered failures of trust. In such a climate, the media’s responsibility becomes greater, not smaller. Israelis’ appetite for news has become a dependence. The institutions that select the faces, frames and stories on our screens do not merely reflect the public mood; they train it.
They train us in what to remember and what to forget. They can train us to recognize suffering—or to move on from it as soon as a more glamorous story appears.
That may be the deeper tragedy behind the innocence of the victims. They come to a television studio hoping that being seen will finally make the collective protect the individual. In that sense, their appeal resembles the faith Jewish citizens place in the Zionist state: the belief that the national “we” will not abandon the private “I.”
Yet the establishment often helps with one hand while exposing people, with the other, to the same recurring failures. The media did not invent this contradiction. It learned it from a political, educational and bureaucratic culture that too often rewards obedience, deference and a short public memory.
Years from now, historians studying Israeli media archives may be astonished by the contrast: grieving parents begging for an investigation in one broadcast, and convicted or scandal-tainted personalities receiving cinematic makeovers in the next. Those archives will reveal more than poor editorial judgment. They will reveal a society uncertain about the difference between compassion and indulgence, between rehabilitation and glamorization, and between attention and accountability.
After October 7, Israelis showed extraordinary solidarity, courage and moral seriousness. That solidarity should sharpen our demand for accountability, not weaken it. Unity without memory is sentimentality. Compassion without standards is publicity.
Israel does not become “a land that devours its inhabitants” because its journalists report suffering. It becomes one when its institutions consume the innocent—and when the culture tasked with exposing that failure turns the people who benefited from disorder into stars.
