Jeffrey Goldberg is an American, an award-winning journalist, and volunteered once with the IDF, serving as a prison guard. He scored an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu shortly before Netanyahu was sworn in as Israeli prime minister. The resulting piece was published by The Atlantic with the following headline and tease:
The message from Israel's new prime minister is stark: if the Obama administration doesn't prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, Israel may be forced to attack.
An Atlantic exclusive
by Jeffrey GoldbergNetanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran—Or I Will
The Atlantic and Goldberg were subsequently criticized because, in the opinion of one commentator, the promise of the headline was not fulfilled in the article. In other words, the headline writer torqued the piece — and, in this particular subject area, torque can be a dangerous thing. Or at least that's what Gary Rosenblatt of The Jewish Week concluded (after saying many nice things about Goldberg):
Nowhere in the Goldberg piece does Netanyahu say that Israel plans to attack Iran, nor does it even hint that the new Israeli leader will offer an ultimatum to Obama.
What it does say, as Netanyahu has been saying now for several years, is that Israel must convince the U.S. and the rest of the world that a nuclear Iran is a threat not only to Israel but to the U.S. and everyone else.
Goldberg, on his blog, replies to this criticism and defends the headline:
I'll give you two quotes that I neglected to include in the first piece. The first one is from one of Netanyahu's defense advisers, speaking on background: “We have to make sure our friends in Washington know that we can't wait forever. There will come a point soon when it will be too late to do anything about this program. We're going carefully, but if we have to act, we will act, even if America won't.”
The second is from Netanyahu: “Iran has threatened to annihilate a state or to have a state wiped off the map of the world. In historical terms, this is an astounding thing. It's a monumental outrage that goes effectively unchallenged in the court of public opinion. Sure, there are perfunctory condemnations, but there's no j'accuse – there's no shock and there's a resigned acceptance that this is acceptable practice. Bad things tend to get worse if they're not challenged early. Iranian leaders talk about Israel's destruction or disappearance while simultaneously creating weapons to ensure its disappearance.”
As a journalist, what I find odd is: The stuff Goldberg put in his blog absolutely makes the headline work. Why didn't he put that in the original piece?