Pointing out, in the mid-1980s, that “Jews play an increasingly important role in journalism, “ Charles Silberman noted that: In 1982, for example, Jews made up a little less than 6 percent of the national press corps as a whole but 25 to 30 percent of the “media elite”—those working for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal; for Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report; and for the news divisions of CBS, NBC, ABC, and the Public Broadcasting System and its leading
stations. (A 1971 study put the number of Jews in the media elite at 25 percent.) When one looks at the key decision-making positions, the Jewish role appears to be even larger.
Silberman adds: Jews are equally influential, if less well known, in the management of television news. It is the network
correspondents, of course, who have become household names, among themJews. The greatest concentration of Jews, however, is at the producer level—and it is the producers who decide which stories will go on the air, and how long, and in what order they will run. In 1982, before a shift in assignments, the executive producers of all three evening newscasts were Jewish, as were the executive producers of CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC’s 20/20. And Jews are almost equally prominent at the “senior producer” and “broadcast producer” levels as well as in senior management. In his 1995 book, Assimilation and Its Discontents, Jewish author Barry Rubin also emphasizes how Jewish concerns permeate American popular culture in the print media. He pointed out how, for example, on one single day—Oct. 18, 1992—the reviews section of The Washington Post: [Was] full of books by or about Jews: on sports and the American Jewish experience; a biography of Bill Graham, a Holocaust survivor and leading rock & roll impresario; the story of an upper-class New York family infected by antisemitism; a South African woman’s group portrait of her set of Jewish friends; a Jewish couple’s volume on foreign investments in America, analyzing
problems of multiple loyalties and foreign influence parallel issues in assimilation; and a Jewish author’s book on politics in higher education, discussing multiculturalismin terms drawn from the integration of Jews into American society.9
Forgive me if I have belabored an all-too obvious point. There is a very strong Jewish presence in the media. That Jewish presence bends the American media in a bias in favor of Israel and against the Arab world. Professor Ben Bagdikian, a prominent media critic and author of the book, The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 1997) has pointed out the dangers of a select few controlling the mass media: