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Using Radio to Make Israel's Case

By Michael Freund

For Michael Papo, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis, the challenge seemed overwhelming. With limited financial resources, what could he do to ensure that Israel's generally favorable image in his local community remained positive?

Unable to afford a traditional multi-media ad buy and not convinced that even if he could, it would make much of an impact, Papo wanted something more effective and longer lasting. His objective was to circumvent the leading news vehicles like television and newspapers, while still reaching a large, local grassroots audience with clout and influence.

When Papo heard about "America's Voices in Israel" - a recently established, US-based not-for-profit organization that brings American talk radio hosts to Israel to broadcast their shows back home - he knew he was onto something.

Founded and chaired by Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and supported by groups ranging from the America-Israel Friendship League, the Ronald Lauder organization and the Jerusalem Post, "America's Voices" is working to enlist talk radio in the battle for Israel's image because, as Hoenlein says "it is by far the most effective and affordable vehicle in the American media arsenal."

The statistics back Hoenlein up. Surveys demonstrate that Americans spend more time each day listening to the radio than the combined time they spend reading newspapers and watching television. The Radio Advertising Bureau recently released a survey which showed that Americans spend "85 percent of their time with ear oriented media" versus only 15 percent with what it called "eye oriented media," like newspapers and television.

As Americans' commuting times increase, so does the time they spend listening to the radio, thus further boosting radio's advantage, and making this long-neglected medium an even more important tool in shaping public opinion.

And no tool, says Hoenlein, is better suited than radio to help defenders of Israel make their case.

"Radio is Israel's natural media ally. Because they can't rely on graphic or visual images to make their points, radio advocates must win their arguments using reason, logic and common sense - three things that Israel's cause has in abundance," he said. "Since radio listeners spend more time listening, they have more time to think through things before making up their minds, and that extra time is what gives Israel's advocates a hasbara [advocacy] advantage."

Eli Kazhdan, co-founder of the Jerusalem-based Israel Citizens Information Counsel, and a director of "America's Voices," concurs.

Arab propagandists, he says, have a much harder time winning arguments on the radio than they do on television because on the radio they have to defend what in all honesty is becoming harder and harder to defend.

"At the end of the day,” Kazhdan argues, "radio deprives anti-Israel campaigners of the graphic images they need to create the emotional sympathies necessary to justify the unjustifiable. Radio works for Israel the way television works for the Palestinians, which is why it is so important that we stop ceding our ‘home field advantage' in our hasbara battles and fight more of them on friendly ground."

Radio, says Kazhdan, "is to Israel what Wrigley Field is to the Chicago Cubs. It is our home field.”

AMERICAN RADIO has created mega-stars, some of whom have tens of millions of listeners. Don Imus is one of them. Heard on more than 150 radio stations in all 50 states, Imus has been a New York fixture for decades. His morning show is also simulcast on the MSNBC cable television network, and even though it is little more than one fixed camera filming the radio broadcast, the “Imus in the Morning Program” is the number-one-rated program on the entire network.

Hoenlein says it was Imus more than anyone who "forced" creation of America's Voices. The impetus came when Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose, in an appearance on the Imus program late last year, invited the radio icon to broadcast his show from the studios of Jerusalem Post Radio for a week. Imus agreed. A date was set for the week of January 6, 2002.

With little time to prepare, the Post raced to assemble a state-of-the-art radio production facility custom-built to accommodate the Imus program's extensive technical requirements.

When the deteriorating security situation forced the trip's cancellation, the Post was left with a top-tier radio production facility, but no one to use it. "We had to figure something out," Hoenlein says. "Here we were sitting on the finest radio facility in the country staring at a huge, undelivered hasbara need. Why not create a parade of talk show hosts through this place? Why not use this facility to help Israel sell itself?"

Without really knowing it, America's Voices had its first test-run last October when nationally syndicated talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy broadcast his show for a full week from the Post's old radio studio. During his last broadcast from Jerusalem, the man best known to most Americans for his role in the 1972 Watergate break-in told his 8 million listeners that "this experience has truly been one of the most important and special of my radio career. There really is no place like Israel and there really are no people like the Israelis. Other than in my own country, there is no place on earth where I truly feel more at home than here in Israel. We can never stop learning from them nor fully appreciate the sacrifices these folks make every day to defend their freedoms and their homeland."

As Kenneth Bialkin, President of the American-Israel Friendship League, past Chairman of the Conference of Presidents, and an America's Voices director, says, "A statement that is powerful, and delivered to that many people, is a pretty hard thing to put a price tag on. I have always said that Israel is its own best salesman. The key is to get these opinion makers, who are far more influential than people realize, to experience Israel for themselves."

America's Voices says it learned a lot from the Liddy visit about what national radio hosts need and expect and used that experience to encourage more to come. In the last few months "America's Voices" and Jerusalem Post Radio have partnered to host week-long broadcast visits of national radio personalities like Bruce Williams, of Talk America, to major market leaders like John Bachelor of WABC radio, New York's number one talk station.

While Hoenlein feels that most Americans are supportive of Israel, he says that much remains to be done to reinforce that support. "We must make our voices heard. We cannot take for granted the support that Israel enjoys.”

Programs such as "America's Voices", he says, aim precisely to do just that, particularly because they allow Americans to hear about Israel from people whom they trust.

Hoenlein is not alone in his assessment. As president and chief executive officer of the United Jewish Communities, an umbrella organization representing 189 Jewish federations and 400 independent communities across North America, Stephen Hoffman has closely followed Israel's hasbara efforts, which he feels are "not as bad as you might fear, but on the other hand, not as good as they should be."

Hoffman's own experience has been that when he brings media people to Israel, they have been very effective in “telling the real story. When you can get a media guy to travel with you to Israel, they will try hard to be balanced.”

That, Hoffman says, "plays in our favor, since the facts are on our side."

While the Liddy visit helped create a model for bringing national US radio shows to Israel, Indianapolis's Michael Papo thinks he may have stumbled upon a similar, if slightly different, model, namely: how to cost-effectively allow local federations to bring local talk show hosts using local Jewish federations as the sponsoring agents. Papo says he "couldn't believe it" when he learned that he could bring his city's number-one rated talk show host to broadcast a week's worth of programs live from Israel for only $12,000.

"I can't even buy one full-page ad in my local newspaper for that," he says. "Even I couldn't fully appreciate the incredible opportunities such a minimal community investment would present at first, so it is not surprising that some of our board members had questions," Papo says.

Once those questions were answered, Papo got his board's approval and, along with Federation President Charles Cohen, invited Indianapolis radio personality Greg Garrison to come to Israel to broadcast his three-hour morning talk show for a week as the guest of the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis.

For Garrison, an evangelical conservative staunchly supportive of the Jewish state, coming to Israel was a no-brainer. "Getting to visit Israel for the first time with Chuck and Mike as my guides and as a guest of the Indianapolis Jewish community was one of the greatest honors I ever had.”

Syndicated across Indiana with an estimated listenership of about 600,000 on Indianapolis flagship radio station WIBC, Garrison says his April visit and broadcasts were an opportunity "to finally see for my own eyes what I have always believed, and that is that Israel is a country Americans must defend and support. But now that I have seen it, I can speak with so much authority and in my business, authority means everything."

Opening the first segment of his first broadcast, Garrison reminded his listeners that the Monday they were preparing to start back home in Indiana was rapidly coming to a close in Jerusalem. "The eight hour time change gives us the advantage of letting you hear about our full day at the same time you are starting yours. Today, as you have already probably heard, tanks went back into Ramallah. Well, as everyone here knows, and as you should too, those tanks have nothing to do with ‘occupation' and everything to do with fighting terror."

Figures ranging from former Prime Ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Housing Minister Natan Sharansky, Gideon Meir of the Foreign Ministry and Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert all appeared live on Garrison's show, enabling his listeners to call in and ask their own questions directly to some of Israel's most important figures.

"How do you put a price tag on that?" Cohen says.

Answering his own question, Cohen says the trip “was a win-win for everyone. For Garrison it was a chance to produce an incredibly exciting week of broadcasts from Jerusalem, and for his station, WIBC, it was a chance to massively promote the fact that they were sending their top host to cover the world's biggest story.

"In itself," he says, "this on-air promotion created tremendous local third-party media interest, which only further increased the local profile of the trip. For us, our federation got more exposure from the Garrison visit than from any other project anyone can remember."

That exposure, says Cohen, is important not just for the general community to know we exist, "but it is also important for our own base. It was extremely important for the Jewish community of Indianapolis to see that their federation was out there defending and supporting Israel in such a public and prominent way. There was this incredible pent-up frustration. Things were going so horribly wrong in Israel which people felt they were kind of powerless to do anything about. Bringing Garrison helped our community immensely only to show that we weren't powerless we really could help."

"Of course, it helped us too," says Mark Ziman, chief financial officer of the Jerusalem Post and administrator of the "America's Voices" program. "No question about it. The Indianapolis visit gave us the chance to demonstrate yet again what we can do. Not only were we able to produce 12 hours of technically flawless digital CD quality remote studio broadcasts, but our Jerusalem Post name and connections helped Garrison get live in-studio interviews with two past Israeli prime ministers and other leading officials. No one else could have come close to that."

Cohen is hopeful that the success of the Garrison trip will lead the Indianapolis Federation to push for a similar effort nationwide.

"This will hopefully serve as the seed of a national program to get all organized Jewish communities to do the same thing," he says. "The Arabs have been doing their job explaining their positions. Now, we need to do ours."

Papo feels that the Garrison visit also presents the Federation system with a challenge it needs to meet. "There are 189 federations throughout North America. If each of them would use America's Voices or something like it, we can really change Israeli hasbara forever."

"The one thing the Garrison trip taught me," says Papo, "was that no community is too small to have a tremendously positive impact and for about the same price that it costs to place one ad in the local newspaper for one day, the impact of our trip with Greg will last a lifetime."

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