Do Jews Control the Media?

After the army, many of us Israelis disappear for a while; we go looking for something, not exactly sure what. We backpack alone; we sit in ashrams we can’t quite explain to our parents; we practice Vipassana and become one with nature; we try to unpack what the uniform did without ever really taking off the deeper uniform, the one underneath, the constant hum of knowing that somewhere, someone is working very hard to make sure the world forgets we have a right to exist, let alone to grieve. We carry our identity and our pain like a big, heavy rock; we meet people, we experience smells, colors, and strangers’ kitchens, and somewhere in all that noise, we meet ourselves again.

I traveled in India for almost one and a half years; I’ve traveled a lot since, but there’s a particular smell, chai boiling on a train somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else, that I don’t think will ever leave me. I still hear the music leaking from every shopfront, see the fruit stacked like jewelry on every porch, and watch the fabric catch light as if it were meant to. I miss it more than I know how to explain, even now.

One afternoon, I was sitting in a jewelry shop when the man behind the counter looked at me and said with total conviction: 

“You’re Israeli. Israel is a very big country.” I asked him why he thought so. He said, “So many Israelis pass through India. Israelis are the foreigners I run into most. You guys are everywhere.” I smiled. He wasn’t wrong about what he’d seen, but he was wrong about what it meant.

There's a name for the shortcut his brain took: the availability heuristic. It's the mental shortcut we all use when we judge how common something is by how easily examples come to mind, rather than by the actual numbers. Because he encountered many Israelis, he assumed the country was very large.

After September 11th, Americans across the country decided, almost overnight, that flying was far more dangerous than driving. The odds of dying in a car crash are much higher than the odds of dying on a hijacked plane. But fear doesn’t consult statistics; it consults whatever image is still burned into your retina from the last time you turned on the news. So they got in their cars, and roughly 1,600 Americans died on the highway. When we make decisions, we don’t sit down and rationally calculate the data and numbers. Our decisions are reflexes, and they run entirely on whatever information is most recent and most vivid, not on whatever information is most accurate.

Hold that thought, because it’s the same broken math behind the question of who actually runs the media. It’s the same engine that produces stereotypes and blood libels, built from whatever handful of vivid examples happened to lodge in someone’s memory, then promoted without anyone noticing until nobody can tell anymore whether they’re looking at the shortcut or the reality. In this article, we’ll look the data in the eye and ask the hard question. Is it true, or is it just this broken shortcut, engineered on purpose by people who need you thinking about Jews instead of about them? Let’s dive in, take the claim apart piece by piece, and once and for all answer the question so many people claim is true: do Jews control the media? Or are the people actually controlling it counting on you looking the other way?