The mega-hit TV game show “Jeopardy!” is not my thing; I can’t recall ever watching it for more than a few minutes. But chances are that more than a few GetReligion readers are fans. Some undoubtedly were among the approximately 15-million viewers who tuned in to the show’s prime time “The Greatest of All Time” competition.
In the world of TV game shows this was, I understand, a big deal. As such, it constituted legitimate entertainment news and has been extensively covered the past several days. Some of this is, of course, linked to legendary host Alex Trebek and his battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
The wave of news about “The Greatest” has not been the only recent “Jeopardy!” encounter with the news. And while the headlines generated by “The Greatest” episodes were a public relations gold mine, the show’s second news media spotlight was anything but.
Rather, the second “Jeopardy!” story was a public relations disaster on an international scale. (I’m guessing here, but I figure the old show business adage, “say anything you want about me as long as you spell my name right,” longer boosts ratings in the #MeToo era.)
Why was it a global downer?
Because the show was caught rewarding an incorrect answer to a geopolitically fraught question. And because the error concerned the always incendiary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the incident went viral.
As is the norm these days, the flub ricocheted around the web, garnering attention way beyond any rational measure of its real-world importance.
Here’s the top of a Washington Post story on the brouhaha to get those of you who need it up to speed.
The “Jeopardy!” category was “Where’s that Church?”
The clue, for $200, was about an ancient basilica, “built in the 300s A.D.,” in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
And the answer? That might depend on whom you ask. But the one deemed correct on Friday’s episode has plunged the TV game show straight into criticism — and deep into the heart of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Just after host Alex Trebek read the prompt about the Church of the Nativity, contestant Katie Needle was first to buzz. Responding in the show’s standard question-as-answer format, she said, “What is Palestine?”
But Trebek told Needle, a retail supervisor from Brooklyn, that she was wrong.
Then, another contestant, Jack McGuire, buzzed in. “What is Israel?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Trebek said, awarding $200 to the San Antonio tourism consultant as Needle stared at him with a look of confusion.
Catch the mistake?
Bethlehem, in fact, is in the West Bank and under Palestinian civil control. It is definitely not in Israel, though it’s just a handful of miles south of Israeli-controlled Jerusalem. Calling Bethlehem part of the non-state entity known as the Palestinian Authority is, to my mind, the most accurate answer.
“Jeopardy!” producers quickly realized their error and moved to cut the question from the episode prior to it’s airing on Friday, Jan. 10. Alas, the screw up aired anyway. Producers later blamed human error for that blunder, and for Trebek’s confused response.
Too late. News media, from the more responsible to the unabashedly propagandistic, jumped on the faux pas.
Not that there was much original reporting involved. Rewrites ruled the day, as with so much of what passes for journalism today.
A quick check online turned up stories on the incident in outlets as varied as the show biz papers Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, the Israeli outlets Ha’aretz and The Times of Israel, the conservative papers The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner and the New York Post, the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss and the liberal Zionist Jewish web site (it no longer publishes a print edition) The Forward.
Also weighing in were the Christian outlets Baptist News and Christian Post, the international Arab TV network Al-Jezeera, the mainstream international Jewish news service Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the Associated Press, of course, and even the Daily Stormer, the white nationalist and anti-Semitic site that, not surprisingly, attributed the problem to “Jewish perfidy.”
There were many more, but I think you get the picture. A meaningless story went viral because — we’ll, because this is how news, no matter how banal, can take on outsized importance in today’s electronic, and electrified, news environment. Today’s bitterly divided global political environment guarantees that virtually every bit of information is grist for someone’s agenda.
So the more opinionated media tweeted the story to fit their worldview. That included both hardline pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli outlets, of course.
“Despite the fact that the historically Christian Palestinian city has kept its Palestinian identity for thousands of years, Jeopardy has decided to redefine the Palestinian city’s historical, cultural, spiritual and even geographical location,” wrote the outraged Palestinian Chronicle.
The editor of Jewish News Syndicate editorialized, “As long as [Palestinians] remain unwilling to accept the existence of Israel, there will be no two-state solution to create a real state of Palestine … If the Palestinians want the existence of a state of Palestine to be recognized, they must choose peace and stop trying to expunge the Jewish history of the region. Until that happens, Bethlehem will remain as stateless as a Palestinian people that seem unable to give up their war on the Jews.”
I doubt many people consciously turn to “Jeopardy!” as a source for news. Still, because its trivia format imparts factual (well, most of the time anyway) information, it may stand in as a news source for a sliver of TV watchers — which is to say those who prefer to live in a no-news bubble and are ignorant about global issues.
Beyond “Jeopardy!,” it’s fair to say that the once-separate (though never entirely so) worlds of news and entertainment have grown ever closer as they compete for eyeballs online and also in the broadcast media.
“Jeopardy!” screwed up. So what? We all do. To quote a high-ranking White House official, “Get over it.”
Far more worrisome are the sinister intentional attempts to spread inaccurate information in the guise of news. I believe it’s only going to get worse.
Now that’s something of real importance that truly has global consequences.
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