The Times of Israel

ANNE'S OPINIONS

Posted on 16 February 2012 

Here is something to sweeten the gloom and doom aboutmedia bias against Israel: David Horovitz, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, has started up a new website, The Times of Israel, and it is looking great!

From David Horovitz’s opening article:

The Times of Israel represents a determined effort, by a team of skilled, committed journalists, to report Israel, the region and the Jewish world accurately and engagingly.

Our independence means we have no affiliation to any political figure or party. My capital partner, Seth Klarman, is backing this project while taking no role whatsoever in its editorial operation.

We aim to carry content that is fresh, fascinating, entertaining. But that’s not all.

I happen to think that we Jews, in this one country where we’re a majority, can be our own worst enemies – spectacularly intolerant of one another, in ways we would never tolerate in Jewish communities overseas. We undermined our two previous attempts at sovereignty millennia ago, through internal hatreds; we’ve murdered our own prime minister this time; we suffer streams of Judaism furiously at odds with each other. We argue bitterly, incessantly, over the best means to safeguard the well-being of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation worldwide.

Fair-minded journalism, based in Israel, and read both here in Israel and among those who care for the Jewish nation around the world, has a vital, even noble role to play in enabling informed debate over the challenges and the choices that face the Jewish state. Informing that debate is one of the prime goals of The Times of Israel.

In support of this goal, our reporters, including many of the most respected names in the field, will be writing rich and enthralling original content. Our “breaking news” editors will be keeping readers up to speed on latest developments. We’ll constantly draw our readers’ attention to other compelling material elsewhere on the web. We’ll also be carrying a daily Hebrew media review and a daily Arabic media review – a guided tour around the headlines and most interesting content in the Hebrew and Arabic press. The aim again, quite simply, is to contribute to a well-rounded picture of our fast-changing, unpredictable regional environment.

Read the rest and read the paper daily!

I’ve linked the site in my “Israeli news” blogroll on the right sidebar. Good luck Mr. Horovitz and thank you for bringing a welcome breath of fresh air to Israel-related news reporting.