The entry of Yair Lapid, a TV presenter, journalist and actor, into the post of prime minister, is only part of a global trend of turning stars and TV personalities into politicians. If in the past the field of politics was reserved for arid old men and the glamorous world for young and beautiful – now it seems that the stars are taking over the key positions, from Mazlansky to Trump. Does this indicate a loss of content in favor of form? Is this due to disappointment from older generation politicians? Will the new stars be able to bring cleaner energies to the corrupt corridors of power? And will we elect the prime minister in reality in the future?
“Yair Lapid is a product of the media age,” she says Dr. Amit Lavie Dinur, Dean of the School of Communication at Reichman University. “As someone who grew up in the media and TV studios, especially as a studio news presenter Friday, the public’s sympathy was piqued towards him. Like his father, Tommy Lapid, who carried on the waves of popularity of the current affairs program ‘Popolitika’ and easily moved into politics and founded the ‘Change’ party.”
“In order to be elected today and gain recognition and sympathy, you need a persona that relies on the media,” Dinur adds. “That’s why TV stars like Lapid who gained popularity and harnessed it into politics have become an accepted phenomenon. This transition can be successful and one can predict that popular and influential network stars who are gaining great popularity in the public will harness their power to move into politics.”
Prime Minister Yair Lapid speaks at the signing of an umbrella agreement by Arad (Photo: Avi Rokach)
Low politics, glamorous stars
- The Scorpions are back, Hamlet, and Mickey Geva are doing a standup: 5 recommendations for the coming week
The cases of corruption and sexual harassment, trials and racist and problematic statements that are said quite a bit by politicians, seem to cause the public to lose faith in politicians and classes that were previously reserved for people with an honest and clean image. On the other hand, media people who have not spent years in the corrupt corridors of government systems can be portrayed as cleaner.
“Since the 1990s in Israel, and probably also in the world, the political field has become associated with stature, corruption and general misery, while the media field has become associated with success, power and influence,” she explains. Anat Sela-Inbar, Head of Television Creation at the School of Sound and Screen Arts in Sapphire. “This is how people with political capacity and activist awareness and commitment have turned to the media instead of politics over the past few decades. “Thus, the same people who grew up in the media, chose to enter the political field: Shelly Yachimovich, Nitzan Horowitz, Eldad Yaniv, Meirav Michaeli, Yair Lapid, Bothach has more.”
“We need to remember that politics is not just about visibility, but visibility has a strong impact.” Says Sagi Breslav, Social worker msw Couple and Family Therapist, a member of the SomeBuddy Therapist Community. When a media star we like enters politics heurism of availability works in his favor. A person with good standing skills in front of an audience who is aware of how he conducts himself in front of a camera and understands the importance of visibility will have a higher ability to buy the hearts of the voters, because of the familiarity effect. He just needs to make sure that the way he conducts himself and functions in the leadership aspects and of the role assigned to him will be in line with the image he knows how to create. “
It is possible that the process and the phenomenon are more indicative of star status and television than they are of disappointment with politicians. “The power and status of stars in the media, and especially in television, has recently been translated into political power, so for example when Oprah Winfrey gave a speech at the Golden Globes, he almost made you the leading candidate to overthrow Trump,” Sela-Inbar adds. “I believe that if we now see mainly the results of decades of television starhood – following the power of television and the blurring of the boundaries between it and reality (reality) from the 90s to the 2000s, in the future we will probably see more and more people entering politics. “Opinion leaders on social networks, YouTubers and ticks in the Knesset. By the way – in the past, too, journalists and writers were people with political awareness and a socio-cultural baggage that was translated into politics: from Herzl to Tommy Lapid.”
“The presence of celebrities in politics stems from two parallel processes that are both related to the loss of trust in the old politics of values and ideology and changes in it,” he explains. Dr. Matan Aharoni From the School of Communication of Ariel University. “On the one hand, actors, celebrities and news presenters feel that their very presence in the media is enough for them to participate in politics. If publishing a post, story, article or game in a series does something to those around them and creates some resonance, so they think it will be done in politics. .
It did not start yesterday
The entry of stars into positions in politics is not a new matter, but it seems that in recent decades the trend is certainly gaining momentum. “Ever since Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, citizens have chosen an actor, a cowboy who won the bad guys in movies, to save the United States from the situation it got into,” Aharoni adds. The citizens of Ukraine also needed political rescue and therefore chose an actor who played a subversive politician. Lapid also thought that his successful media presence could be translated into political success due to the innocence of the citizens. In his case the old political forces went out of their way to weaken him. It did not help and out of necessity he is now appointed prime minister, meanwhile for a short time. “But this trend of blurring boundaries and realities and of losing faith in the old systems will certainly lead to more celebrities trying their luck in areas that are not supposed to be related, like politics, and we will only lose out.”
“In Zionist history, journalists have played a very important role,” he adds Prof. Rafi Mann From the School of Communication at Ariel University. “They were at the core of the efforts to establish a Jewish state. Benjamin Zeev Herzl began his Zionist activities as a reporter for the important Austrian newspaper ‘Noy Frey Persa’ and continued his journalistic work even when he served as president of the Zionist movement. David Ben-Gurion began his political activity in Eretz Israel Among the other prominent journalists were Max Nordau, Nahum Sokolov, Berl Katzenelson, Zeev Jabotinsky, Moshe Sharett, and Zalman Shazar and many others. With the establishment of the state, 13 out of 120 members of the first Knesset defined their profession as journalists. “
“The crisis of the Yom Kippur War, as well as the intensification of television as a major means of communication, changed the face of the political arena in Israel,” Mann adds. “New parties and other types of figures have penetrated the public arena. In the search for political stars, new figures have led some of the parties to open the door to public figures from various fields of activity.
“If it seems to us that politicians who come from the world of entertainment are something that has intensified recently, then we should mention names that may be less familiar to Israelis,” says Dr. Alina Bernstein, a lecturer in the School of Communication at the College of Management. “Like Michel Martelly, a singer who became president of Haiti and served from 2011 to 2016. British actress Glenda Jackson – winner of two Oscars, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award – was a Labor politician from 1992 to 2015, Fred Grandy is known to veteran television viewers primarily as Gopher from “Love Ship” and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987 as a representative of the State of Iowa. Singer and dancer George Murphy was elected senator of California in 1964 and of course film actor Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980 – he is the man who said in 1987 that politics is like the entertainment business – although it is important to note that he had political experience as California governor for Two tenures (1967-1975) The same California where Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003 and again in 2006. So Donald Trump, the businessman and reality star was certainly nothing new in the American context. Imran Kan “.
“This is a phenomenon that is not new at all,” Breslav adds. “This transition is well known from the past. But a slightly different phenomenon seems to be occurring. Less transition between domains and more blurring between domains. More distinct. “
Donald Trump (Photo: Reuters)Advantage in the political arena
With the entry of Lapid into the most important position of the State of Israel, it does not seem that the trend is going to change soon, but even overcome. The question arises, should we really be concerned, and how will it profoundly affect the perception of democracy in the West.
“My prediction is that we are not likely to elect the prime minister in reality any time soon…,” he says Dr. Eran Amsalem From the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University. “The positions, platform and ideology of leaders and parties are still very important. Even today, the citizens of Israel and around the world attach great importance to the political, economic, security, situation in the country when it comes to deciding who to vote for. Where politics is increasingly conducted through the media, politicians without high media ability have no chance of climbing to the top of the pyramid.In an age where every action is filmed and reported in real time, and when politicians have the ability to communicate directly with the public through social networks, politicians are committed to a wide range of communication skills “For example, to speak and be interviewed fluently and convincingly in Hebrew and English, to arouse emotion and interest among different audiences, to express oneself through short and receptive messages and more.”
“When this is the case, it is not at all surprising that prominent journalists like Yair Lapid, or entertainers like Volodymyr Zalansky, are so successful in politics,” Amsalem adds. “There are at least two reasons for this. The first is that they probably have a natural talent in the field. Some people are simply better communicatively (if we will, more charismatic) than others. In the case of those stars-who-became-politicians, the same talent that made them media stars allows them Gain sympathy and prominence and thereby advance in politics as well.The second reason is that those media people have many years of experience in performing the exact same actions they are then required to do in politics – to speak in front of large and diverse audiences, ‘cross screen’, interview the media convincingly and without incident, “Write interesting and original content, etc. The natural talent they come with, in addition to the experience they gained in their previous careers, gives them a very significant advantage in the political arena.”
“There are a lot of criticisms of the phenomenon in general and what it says about the future of democracy,” Bernstein adds. “Without claiming that any celebrity can become a politician and / or that it is a legitimate process in all cases, even the almost automatic criticism is out of place. It is important to understand what processes led us to this situation and perhaps think about it a little differently. There is a lot of product of the changes in the relationship between media and politics. In the current world, which is largely influenced by the media, there is a lot going on in the symbolic world, really symbolic patterns for heroes and villains, ‘respectable’ values and not, mythologies, etc. In such a world. And rely mainly on partisan ideology.Politicians become stars and politics becomes largely a series of plays and citizens become spectators.
“In addition, and these are directions where you can find a lot of academic writing, there is a strong connection between politics and marketing, and the logic of marketing is that ‘representatives’ sell themselves to the market and so celebrity politicians sell themselves as a valuable product in today’s society. Who see, again, with all the requisite reservations, this process as part of a process of change and modernization.Of course one can be critical of these processes but one has to understand that they are part of more general processes like the stagnation of all media, the obsession of communication with celebrities in general, Image and external appearance, etc. “
“When he entered politics, in an era when parties were looking for celebrities, Yair Lapid managed to dance at both weddings,” Mann continues. “On the one hand he is a celebrity, a figure that the public knows from his various fields of activity, and many appreciate and are impressed by him. And on the other hand – not only his personality is known but also his positions on a number of issues on the agenda. Shalev – he replied in reference to columns he had published over the years in Yedioth Ahronoth: “There is no other politician in Israel, senior as he may be, whose views have been presented to the public, in such a broad and precise manner.”
“To Lapid’s credit, it is also possible to mention his ongoing activities before his election to the Knesset and even after he became a Knesset member in meetings with the public all over the country,” Mann concludes. “He realized that a celebrity figure from the television screen is not enough. Face-to-face conversations, in home circles or at conventions create a real connection between the politician and his supporters. “Maariv” and later in “Popolitika” and on television. “
“I do not think we should be too worried about this phenomenon,” Amsalem concludes. “Communication skills are a positive and desirable thing. It seems to me that we all prefer a leader who knows how to explain his decisions to the public – with an emphasis on a time of crisis like war or plague – with confidence and fluency than one who sweats and stutters in front of the camera. “In addition, it should be remembered that even today most leaders in most countries come from different backgrounds, such as military or business careers, so in the overall picture things look quite balanced.”
The integration of celebrities and TV stars into the political system, and the entry of Yair Lapid into the post of Prime Minister, can teach us a great deal about our perceptions of reality, representations and everything in between. Many experts express concern about the phenomenon, while others point to the importance of media skills in the political arena. A prediction of choosing our leader through sounds like a joint scenario of “black mirror”, and it is not yet clear what governmental reality the phenomenon will give birth to, but at least regarding the upcoming elections, we know where we are going to vote, as we know it today. Who knows, maybe one last time.