The Interplay of News Production and Journalistic Self-Branding in the Coverage of Celebrity Mixed Marriages

ABSTRACT

In October 2018, Lucy Aharish, a Muslim Israeli-Arab journalist, and Tzachi Halevy, a Jewish Israeli actor, were married. In Israel, mixed-marriage, especially between a Jewish-Israeli man and a Muslim-Arab-Israeli woman, is perceived to threaten the social order. This celebrities’ mixed marriage triggered a heated public debate focusing on “assimilation” and arguing the marriage was a threat to the demography of the Jewish state. The high-visibility coverage of the story allows us to examine the role of celebrities in creating mediated public-discourse around complex categories of identity. We ask: How has Israeli journalism framed the issue of mixed marriage through the case of Aharish and Halevy? And what roles have Aharish and Halevy as celebrities played in framing their own story? Based on content-analysis of 149 news items published on digital news-sites, we detected three main news frames: “A love story,” “Advocating inclusion,” and “Fighting assimilation.” Analyzing the prominent role and the agency of the couple in the coverage, the case-study demonstrates how “traditional” news construction by journalists consolidates with self-branding of news-people. It suggests that we examine not only the frames embedded in news, but also the process of framing within the current individualistic news environment – where journalists become celebrified journalists.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sofia Haytin and Tzipi Lazar for their help with building the research corpus and analyzing the data.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Within this study, we considered Aharish’s self-definition and the fact that she self-represents herself publicly as an Arab woman, emphasizing her ethnic origin, culture. and language (see, e.g., https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-israeli-tv-anchor-opens-up-on-difficulty-of-interfaith-marriage-in-israel/).

² Since there is no official civil marriage mechanism in Israel, Aharish and Halevy conducted an alternative private ceremony, which has no legal status and was conducted by a friend of the couple.

³ Buzzilla is an Israeli commercial company specializing in monitoring cyberspace and providing the contents of all Israeli news media.

⁴ Fauda (meaning chaos in Arabic) is an Israeli television series distributed by Netflix; Halevy appeared in its first season (2014) and portrayed a member of a counter-terrorism unit of the Israeli Defense Force.

⁵ Although we cannot base this on fact, we assume the couple, who expressed their gratitude to the media in all their public interviews for keeping their secret through the years, paid it back by giving the scoop to the Guy Pines’s show. This might also explain Halevy’s first interview after the wedding on the same show.