How Did Media Become Polarized? Lessons from Israel's 2023 Protest Movement
Political scientist Doron Shultziner uses Israel's 2023 judicial reform protests as a case study in media polarization, applying social psychology and social movement theory to explain why and how media ecosystems fracture.
Why we picked this
Israel's 2023 protests were the largest in the country's history, and the media polarization they exposed maps onto dynamics playing out across Western democracies. Shultziner's interdisciplinary framework — political science plus social psychology — offers analytical traction that pure media studies rarely provides.
In 2023, Israel experienced the largest protest movement in its history, triggered by the Netanyahu government’s proposed judicial overhaul. The protests revealed — and accelerated — a deep fracturing of the Israeli media landscape, with different news ecosystems feeding entirely different pictures of events, legitimacy, and stakes to their respective audiences. Prof. Doron Shultziner, Associate Professor at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem, uses this case to build a broader theory of media polarization.
Shultziner’s analytical approach combines political science and social psychology, drawing on historical comparison to understand how protest movements and their media coverage co-evolve. His work on why and how people revolt against authority positions him to examine not just what happened in Israel’s media environment, but the structural conditions that made polarization so rapid and so complete. The Israeli case, he argues, is a high-resolution version of dynamics playing out across democracies — it simply compressed into a shorter timeframe what other countries are experiencing over years.
The lecture is hosted by NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies, which brings together scholars examining Israeli society, politics, and culture in comparative and transnational context. The talk is designed as a contribution to broader conversations about democratic media, the conditions under which public discourse fractures, and whether the lessons of one country’s protest moment can inform how others think about press independence, social media, and political trust.