This Sept. 15, 2026, Op-Ed by CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal appeared in The Jerusalem Post.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz. (Itzhak Harari/Knesset Archives via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
“I, God, probe the heart, search the mind” (Jeremiah 17:10) is a resounding theme in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy, underscoring God’s unique access to man’s inner thoughts and true intentions.
Some journalists behave as if they share God’s privileged insight. They seemingly fancy themselves in possession of the divine ability to see beyond pronouncements and actions, and interpret the private reflections and genuine desires of leaders.
The very human discipline of ethical journalism, authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel explain in The Elements of Journalism, rests on transparency and reporters’ humility about the limits of verified facts and their own knowledge.
In coverage of Israel’s conflict with its neighbors, leading news agencies have repeatedly acted with arrogance, reporting as fact their personal understandings (either correct or not) about leaders’ inner wishes.
By playing God, they defy journalism’s commitment to the hard work of objective news reporting, which values verification and discourages editorializing, or the insertion of the reporters’ own views.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s Op-Ed at JPost.