Here's how little Israelis care about Haaretz's reporting ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, December 30, 2024

Here's how little Israelis care about Haaretz's reporting

Every day I browse through Haaretz's headlines. Its obsessive hate of Netanyahu and most Israelis still surprise me after all these years.

It occurs to me that Haaretz headlines are pretty much clickbait. They are designed to outrage and get you to read the vapid analysis and obsessive hate.

Haaretz's newspaper circulation is tiny in Israel. In 2009, it was at 7.1%, in 2022 it was down to 4.7% exposure rate.

But what about online? Most people get their news from online sources, not physical newspapers - maybe Haaretz has an outsized influence there?

I found an April report on online media usage in Israel from the Israel Democracy Institute. It asked people which Internet site was their primary source of news.

It divided up the results by people who identify as left, center or right:

Nobody on the Right uses Haaretz as their news source. Only about 1% of the center do, and a mere 8% of the Left use Haaretz as their news source.

In recent years, however, the number of Israelis who identify as Left has dwindled as well. It is now only 16%. So according to this poll, only about 1% of Israelis use Haaretz online as their news source.

That is practically nothing.

Haaretz says it has over 100,000 digital subscribers. I would love to know a breakdown of how many are in Hebrew and how many are in English, how many are in Israel and how many outside. My guess is that the bulk of their readership is not even Israeli.

Haaretz is the number one primary source of anti-Israel propaganda. It represents a minuscule number of Israelis.

Haaretz's very existence proves how free the Israeli press is. Its numbers prove how irrelevant it is to the average Israeli.