An era of fake news and manufactured leaders
Opinion: Policies, views and beliefs don't matter in this elections campaign; media advisors don't help their candidates present their policies, but rather dictate their actions based on the whims of the public.
Leaders, without a doubt, need charisma. It's better if they are also eloquent, sharp-witted and persuasive rather than boring, confusing and uninspiring. Leaders, without a doubt, also need positions, opinions and beliefs. They can definitely be complex, initiate surprising collaborations or show flexibility on a variety of topics—but their core values as representatives of the public should be transparent and clear.
Media advisors exist precisely for this reason: to hone messages, prepare candidates, and provide feedback and guidance.
In this election campaign, however, it seems like the rules of the game have changed. PR advisors don't serve as spokespeople for policy, instead they dictate it. A media advisor will try to guess or estimate what people want to hear—and deliver the goods.
Unfortunately, this bad habit crosses party lines and plagues almost everyone. It started when parties decided to populate their candidate lists without holding primaries. The candidates' positions don't matter; at the end of the day, it is a celebrity that is required. It's better if this celebrity ticks a variety of boxes of identity politics; and if they don't, they should at least sport a senior army rank on their epaulettes. Everything else is secondary. That way, we get a glamorous and impressive list, just not necessarily a coherent one. And it continues, of course, as the public tries to fathom the views of these figures who will one day fill the Knesset.
On Monday afternoon, all the members of the Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya'alon Blue and White Party convened to sort out their political positions, after coming to the conclusion that candidates from three different factions actually have their own views, and that they dare to utter them aloud. The problem is that all of these different positions don't always align with one another. Confused? So are they.
Politicians who for years built their public identity and demonstrated their core beliefs through their work were required to keep quiet, because everything is recorded and documented these days, and no one wants to find out that the views of the party's no. 2 contradicts those of the party's no.1.
And this advice is coming from the very same media advisor who would tell a candidate to speak with respect to the prime minister and present a world view and a vision all in one speech, but then attack the very same prime minister like there's no tomorrow in the next speech. But body language doesn't lie, no matter how much you practice. And at the end of the day, Benny Gantz is signalling his discomfort with the box created for him.
In the Likud Party, according to reports, the prime minister has put all of the ministers on a break until the elections. No need to give interviews, no need to initiate any policies. So what if you worked hard the entire term? Stay home and everything will be okay. The Prime Minister's Office will take care of everything.
As for the New Right party—at first they tried to sell us a political entity for both religious and secular, until the latter tarted asking what exactly about the party was for them. The confusing and evasive answers led the party to pull out of a panel discussion on religion and state. Now, they've found a new source of votes, and the agenda of reconciliation has been abandoned in favor of a mantra of "Benjamin Netanyahu will divide Jerusalem."
In Shas, too, the party knew to pander to the "transparent" part of the population last time, and how to shelve that strategy this time.
Because at the end of the day, the question is: where can we pluck more votes from? Where's the bigger pond? And what does the target audience want to hear—but also what can't it bear? But when the target audience changes every half an hour, it's hard to hit the bull's eye.
This campaign is just the latest low point in this virtual reality in which we all live. We're in the era of fake news, which encases us in every direction—be it out of negligence or malice—and bots that spread paid messages as if they were flesh and blood. So we need to invest a lot of energy into distilling the facts, formulating positions and finding out what the people are actually thinking.
Sadly, it appears our politicians have chosen to devote themselves to this new trend and use it for one thing only - winning. What will their policies be on the day after the elections? Please, don't make them laugh, for who truly cares?
