Mark Levin, the conservative Jewish American radio broadcaster with more than 14 million daily listeners, has a gloomy forecast for the future of American media coverage of the United States, of Israel and of ties between the two countries.
Ahead of the launch of the Hebrew-language edition of his bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press, Levin tells Israel Hayom that to understand the nature and depth of the danger that the U.S. media poses to democracy in America, you have to understand the way that the U.S. media treats Israel.
“I think the American people — forget about the elites — I think the American people and the Israeli people have such a connection, and such a love for each other,” he says.
“We get in this country from our media … that Israel is an apartheid society; it’s a racist society. It’s the same things they say about our country, they say about Israel. So it’s kind of hard to write a book — what I called Unfreedom of the Press — and ignore what’s going on in Israel.”
“It’s also hard to ignore it as a Jew,” he adds. “I see the overlays. I see the animus towards Israel, the animus towards the United States.”
For decades, Israelis and Israel’s supporters in America complained about the anti-Israel bias of the U.S. media. But in Unfreedom of the Press, Levin explains that the problem is far worse than mere bias.
The vast majority of media outlets in the U.S., including all the major television networks aside from Fox News, are fully mobilized to advance a radical ideological agenda that is deeply hostile both to Israel and to the United States. And since his book was first published in 2018, the situation has only grown worse in terms of the media’s hatred of Israel and its supporters, and their rejection of core American values, including freedom of expression, freedom of religion and liberty itself.
Levin explains that to advance their anti-American agenda, the media work to silence, censor and block conservative voices — from former President Donald Trump to the last of his supporters.
Deeply concerned about the future of democracy in the U.S., Levin worries that the widening censorship in the U.S. will be copied by the Israeli media — which Levin argues is even more ideologically uniform and uniformly radical than the American media.
He argues that the way to fight against distortions and false claims, and to counter the media censors, is take a page from the anti-Israel activists’ playbook.
“We need to BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] them. We need to have a BDS movement against big tech. And if not big tech, then their advertisers.
“We need to BDS these major television networks, just like the left does.”
Levin warns Israelis that the Biden administration is deeply hostile to Israel. Biden’s foreign-policy team is comprised of the most hostile officials from the Obama administration “and then some.” Israel, he says, must be prepared for the storm in relations that is blowing its way from Washington.
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