“Eye on the Media” (guest columnist)

25/11/94

Tabloid Finds Scrabble Players‘Guilty’ of Snobbery

Byline: Sam Orbaum

I read about myself in a Hebrew newspaper recently, and my first thought was, gee, there's another Sam Orbaum in this country. And he's vile.
    My second thought was, can I sue?
    My third thought was to just write off the article, but when I couldn't sleep the night after I read it, I had a fourth: this might be what rape feels like.
    This is not about what a national newspaper can do to a nation: it is about what a local weekly can do to you or (as it happened) me. It is about an industry that preys on the unsuspecting, and can ruin a reputation without a moral flinch.
    The writer's name was Ari Folman, the "news"paper was Ha'ir - the Schocken chain's Tel Aviv weekly - and the premise for the story was that Tel Aviv would care to read about a group of Jerusalemites who meet once a week to push Scrabble tiles around.
    The story was so infested with mistakes, misquotes, invented quotes, malicious perversions, libels and lies that it is safe to say that its writer and his newspaper have no regard for fact, truth or accuracy; certainly, they could not give a hoot for journalistic integrity or responsibility.
    It is easy to say, "so what?" and dismiss the story, its author and publisher as unworthy of attention. Of course, nobody takes this sort of stuff seriously, right?
    Wrong.
    People read it and believe it. Recently, nasty, unfounded rumors spread about a popular Tel Aviv bakery, cutting severely into its business, and musician Matti Caspi was reported to have left the country to flee the gossip columnists. Irresponsible tabloids can whip up scandal and provocation with virtually no moral, legal or professional controls; the worst that can happen is a lawsuit or public outcry - which perfectly serves their purposes by generating garish publicity.
    Nobody takes this stuff seriously? Evan Cohen - Herzliya Scrabble Club director and national Scrabble champion - is the subject of much of the story. He relates that the article caused a minor uproar among his acquaintances. He's a high-school teacher and guidance counselor. At least one angry mother called him to inquire if the story was true. Cohen relates that "the mother asked how such an extreme chauvinist could be counseling her child."
    Cohen, who is 26 and studies linguistics, said: "Every person I met in university approached me with the article in hand, asking how I could say such things." He was portrayed as an ultra-misogynist, which could not have endeared him to his professors, all of whom are women.
    The influence - and its potential damage - spread when a Ma'ariv-owned publication called Zman Tel Aviv picked up the story. Without bothering to contact Cohen, it attacked him and taunted the snobbery of Scrabble players.

FOLMAN'S TREATMENT of the Jerusalem club was like a medieval trial. He asked pertinent questions and we provided honest answers, but it didn't matter, because he had already passed judgment. Regardless of the overwhelming proof that we were a good enough bunch engaged in a harmless pastime, we were found guilty of a slew of ludicrous charges and clamped in a pillory to be scorned by his braying public.
    This gentleman of journalism did not travel all the way down Highway 1 for a "nice" story. Good news is no news, so it was very annoying for him to hear that the Jerusalem Scrabble Club is one of the few places in this polarized city where every kind of Israeli can leave politics, suspicions, prejudices and antagonisms at the door and come together for close social contact without catching the fatal germs of someone's contrary beliefs.
    When Folman first contacted me, I told him that a story on the club would be especially welcome because our last appearance in the Hebrew press, a couple of years ago, had been an outrage: a feculent little rag called Yerushalayim, the local supplement of Yediot Aharonot, had written vicious things about us without the writer ever having bothered to visit the club. That story was headlined "Another brick in the wall of snobbery."
    Folman agreed that this was an awful thing to do - and begged me to fax him a copy of the Yerushalayim story. No, he said, it couldn't wait until we met that evening.
    It turned out to be his inspiration.
    He structured his own story on the article he had earlier scoffed at as trashy. The intro to his story read: "In Tel Aviv, snobs go to the opera; in Jerusalem, they go to Sam's Scrabble Club."
    Right off the bat, Folman's story gave a good indication that he was going to rake muck and lie, lie, lie. "We went to find snobs in Jerusalem," he began, then claimed that a search for the word "snob" in the archives of Kol Ha'ir instantly called up the above-mentioned Yerushalayim article. (If you're keeping track, that's 1 lie, 1 error. By the end of the article the tally reads like a basketball score. )
    He really hit his stride when he managed to mix Scrabble, sex and God. He took an innocent joke by a player at the club session and treated it as though she had said it seriously, writing: "Roz Grossman, a rabbi's wife, claimed ... that women are weak at Scrabble because all they think about all day is sex, and they don't want to embarrass the men." And he then invented this response by Cohen: "[Women] just don't have the physical and mental power to play [at the top level]."
    Funny, this business of journalism. One person with a pen and a vindictive whim can tell a quarter of a million readers anything he wants. And what are they going to do, argue?
    There is little a victim of this type of journalism can do. He could sue, if he had tens of thousands of shekels to gamble with.
    He could call upon the offending newspaper to honor journalistic ethics.
    When Cohen called the editor of Ha'ir to complain and request a retraction, the editor responded: "I stand by my writer."
    Cohen did get Ha'ir to run a letter by attaching it to a lawyer's letter threatening legal action. But the newspaper omitted all references to Folman's manipulations and lies, and added an editor's response backing Folman.
    We could hope that the paper's readership consumed the story with a good dose of dubiety. This, of course, won't happen either: Readers of The Times of London and The New York Times scrutinize every shade of meaning and rage about a slant, but readers of the News of the World and National Enquirer believe what they read.
    So, if we are to believe everything we read in Ha'ir, now it's official: I'm a "cruel dictator."
    And I resent my children because "I could have had [an international] career in Scrabble if my wife hadn't given birth to triplets. Those triplets have ruined all my chances."
    And Evan Cohen is an arrogant egocentric and chauvinist who has "given up" on a family life. "It's impossible to have both a career in Scrabble and a family."
    And Cohen and I detest each other. (Truly, we don't.) Folman goes so far as to quote my wife that Cohen "nurses a grievance" against me. But Folman never even spoke to her.
Folman's expose of the murky underworld of Israeli Scrabble teems with examples of bad journalism. But even if that doesn't upset you just mildly, this must:
    Folman asked which letters I liked most and least.
    I couldn't imagine why his readers would care, but I told him I don't like playing with the Y. And, I added on second thought, the L and O.
    "Sam's deadly hatred for the letter L," he wrote, "is worse than my mother's hatred of Mengele."
    If I were his mother, I'd slap his face.