This is one of the great distortions of the modern age

What was once ordinary gossip, whispered in a room or traded between neighbors, has been industrialized. It now comes with cameras, studios, budgets, background music, and the respectable language of “investigation” and “public interest.” The result is a strange moral imbalance: a private individual may sue over defamation, but entire systems can repeatedly smear a public body, a government, a ministry, a police force, a religious community, an army, a municipality, or a social class — and almost no one rises to sue on their behalf.

The first reason is simple. A public body is not a private person. It does not always have one face, one heart, or one owner who can stand up and say: enough. The larger the institution, the more responsibility is diffused. Who exactly sues on behalf of “the government”? Who sues on behalf of “the system”? Who sues for “the police,” “the ultra-Orthodox,” “the settlers,” “the bureaucracy,” “the wealthy,” “the judges,” or “the military”? The damage is real, but it is spread across too many people to be defended in any simple legal way. That makes mass defamation of institutions practically resilient, even when it is morally corrosive.

The second reason is deeper. Modern media has learned to blur the line between criticism and vilification. Criticism is disciplined. It addresses specific actions, with evidence, limits, proportion, and context. Vilification needs a villain. It does not say, “there was a failure here.” It says, “here is a rotten system, a corrupt culture, a dark and permanent evil.” That sells better. It creates clicks, ratings, engagement, outrage, and emotional clarity. And so the press often stops describing events and starts manufacturing moral theater. Facts become props inside a storyline. The audience is no longer asked to understand reality, but to consume it as drama.

In cinema and television the problem becomes even more powerful, because defamation no longer has to appear as a direct accusation. It can work through repeated imagery. If, year after year, the police officer is portrayed as brutal, the politician as inherently corrupt, the religious Jew as parasitic, the settler as fanatical, the soldier as cold, the rabbi as hypocritical, and the civil servant as pathetic, then no explicit statement is needed. The image itself becomes the slander. Narrative repetition creates collective prejudice more effectively than argument ever could. A society can be taught to despise entire classes of people without ever hearing a legally actionable sentence.

The press also benefits from structural protection. It can always claim that it is “only asking questions,” “only presenting testimonies,” “only raising concerns,” or “only giving voice to allegations.” But when the headline, the editing, the soundtrack, the sequencing, the guest selection, and the visual framing all point in one direction, this is no longer neutral presentation. It is consciousness-shaping. Modern defamation is not always a crude lie. Often it is a partial truth, ripped from context, inflated, emotionally packaged, and arranged to produce a far more sweeping condemnation than the facts themselves justify.

This becomes especially dangerous when the target is an institution that cannot answer with equal speed or freedom. A government is constrained by procedure. A military is constrained by secrecy. A police department is constrained by ongoing investigations. A school is constrained by privacy laws. A court is constrained by judicial restraint. A public corporation is constrained by official communication channels. The media, by contrast, is faster, freer, sharper, and usually first. It strikes today; the institution responds two days later; the public has already moved on — but the stain remains.

There is also a basic moral failure here. Many people still imagine that slander applies only to private individuals. As though one must be careful with a neighbor’s name, but may speak recklessly about “systems,” “communities,” “the establishment,” or “the government.” Yet every such body is made up of human beings. When you smear “the police,” you also smear thousands of decent officers. When you smear “the ultra-Orthodox,” you stain entire families. When you casually degrade “the government,” you do not merely challenge a policy; you poison public trust in shared institutions. The harm is not abstract. It is social, moral, civic, and sometimes national.

In that sense, modern media is not merely a reporting mechanism. It is a force multiplier. It can weaken institutions without elections, destroy reputations without trial, and train entire generations into reflexive suspicion, cynicism, and contempt. When this happens without restraint, a market of defamation emerges: the more reckless actor gains attention, while the more careful one loses ground. At that point, this is not just a professional failure. It becomes an economy of slander.

None of this means public institutions should be immune from scrutiny. On the contrary, criticism of power is essential to a healthy society. But the distinction must remain sharp. Focused, evidence-based criticism of a specific act is necessary. Painting an entire institution as morally rotten in order to create a story, generate outrage, or satisfy a cultural appetite for villains is another form of corruption. At times it may be no less dangerous than the corruption it claims to expose.

The deeper truth is this: in the old world, slander was a sin of the tongue. In the modern world, it has become an industry. And the larger the target, the easier it is to wound and the harder it is to defend. That is why the places where no one is likely to sue are precisely the places where greater moral restraint is needed. More respect for truth. More discipline. More fear of the power to stain. Because when there is no human plaintiff, the only remaining question is whether conscience itself still has standing.