ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6, one of mass journalism’s favorite categories of content—crime and disaster stories—is investigated. The chapter asks how Ben-Avi and his associates turned these stories into media events and identifies the strategies that they used: the melodramatic, the narrative, the spectacular, the polysemic, relevance and enjoyment, and, pursuant to them, strategies that aimed to impart an ideological Weltanschauung to, and assimilate it among, the readers. The first part of the chapter peers into coverage of crimes in Arab Jaffa that was meant to besmirch the image of the Oriental city and bolster the “sanctified” perception of the new Hebrew city, Tel Aviv. The second part studies how Ha-Or and its mass-media rivals (Ha-Herut and Moria) covered in 1912 one of the most shocking crime and sex affairs that the Old Yishuv had ever known. In the third part, the coverage of disasters in the popular newspapers Ha-Zvi and Ha-Or—starting with a fire in Jerusalem in 1908 and ending with the foundering of the Titanic in 1912—is analyzed.
