An audience is not influence

We have created millions of politically opinionated spectators. What we need are participants.

By Linda Sadacka, Special to World Israel News

A few days ago, New York State Senator Sam Sutton presented me with a Senate proclamation recognizing my community advocacy through journalism and social media.

I was grateful for the recognition. But the word that stayed with me was not honor. It was impactful.

We use that word far too casually.

A post reaches 100,000 people, and we call it impactful. An article goes viral, and we call it impactful. A speech receives a standing ovation, and we call it impactful. Yet none of those things, by themselves, tell us whether anything actually changed.

That is the question I believe journalists, activists, political organizers and Jewish communal leaders need to ask much more aggressively: What happened because people heard us?

Did someone vote who would otherwise have stayed home? Did a legislator receive enough calls to understand that an issue could no longer be ignored? Did a parent recognize what was happening on a college campus? Did a donor step forward? Did an institution finally act? Did someone who had been sitting quietly decide that silence was no longer acceptable?

If the answer is no, then perhaps what we generated was attention, not influence.

And in the Jewish world, particularly after October 7, we can no longer afford to confuse the two.

I have spent years writing about Israel, antisemitism and political issues, including for World Israel News. One of the stories that has stayed with me most involved Ava Rosenberg, the daughter of New York radio host Sid Rosenberg, and the vicious antisemitic harassment she faced while studying at Cardiff University in Wales.

When I reported her story for World Israel News, this was not an abstract piece about the troubling climate on university campuses. Ava was a young Jewish woman living through it. She had been accused of supporting genocide and killing Palestinians. She was subjected to a campaign of harassment serious enough to transform ordinary university life into something frightening and deeply personal. The reporting was supported by texts and photographs and brought a specific case into the wider public conversation.

That distinction matters because statistics about antisemitism can numb us. A human story can mobilize us.

When readers encounter another report showing that antisemitic incidents increased by some percentage, they may shake their heads and continue scrolling. When they see what happens to one Jewish student, when they understand the names, the accusations, the institutional response and the price that young person is paying simply for being openly Jewish and pro-Israel, the issue becomes harder to dismiss.

That is what journalism can do at its best.

It can expose what institutions would prefer to remain obscure. It can give a human face to a political problem. It can force people who have been comfortable with abstraction to confront consequences.

But even that is not enough.

Converting outrage into action

The purpose of advocacy journalism cannot simply be to make the reader angry. Anger is plentiful. We have entire industries devoted to producing it.

The more difficult task is converting outrage into action.

That lesson became equally clear to me in politics.

When Sam Sutton ran for the New York State Senate, I did not view political communication as an exercise in posting an endorsement and hoping people noticed. I worked to help mobilize Conservative and Republican voters and bring people to the polls.

That is less glamorous than social media politics. It is also considerably more important.

Elections are not won by the number of people who tell you privately that they agree with you. They are won by the people who actually vote.

That sounds self-evident, yet our politics suggests that many people have forgotten it. Citizens will spend hours consuming political content, forwarding articles, arguing in WhatsApp groups and expressing outrage about candidates they cannot stand, and then ignore a primary election in which a relatively small number of votes may determine who eventually governs them.

We have created millions of politically opinionated spectators.

What we need are participants.

An audience watches.

A constituency acts.

That is a distinction the Jewish community in particular needs to understand.

We have become exceptionally good at communicating with ourselves. We attend conferences with people who share our concerns. We circulate articles among people who already support Israel. We applaud speakers who tell us what we already know. We post videos that travel rapidly through Jewish social media networks and interpret the resulting engagement as evidence that we are winning an argument.

But preaching to the choir is not persuasion.

And applause is not political power.

If we want to defend Israel, fight antisemitism and protect Jewish life in America and abroad, then our communications strategy must begin with a harder question: Who is not already with us, and how do we reach them?

That means writing differently.

It means explaining rather than merely declaring. It means documenting rather than exaggerating. It means understanding that a person who knows very little about Israel may need facts and context before he needs rhetoric. It means refusing to surrender every uninformed voter, student or neighbor to a propaganda machine simply because they did not begin the conversation on our side.

Where journalism and activism meet

It also means giving people something to do.

Every serious piece of advocacy should contain, explicitly or implicitly, an answer to a simple question: What should the reader do next?

Register.

Vote.

Vote in the primary, not merely the general election.

Call your representative.

Write the university president.

Attend the hearing.

Support the organization doing effective work.

Send accurate information to someone outside your ideological circle.

Bring five people with you.

Ask the candidate the uncomfortable question.

Then remember the answer when Election Day arrives.

This is not activism as theater. It is civic organization.

There is another uncomfortable lesson here for those of us who work in media and advocacy. Social media has given us extraordinarily sophisticated ways to measure almost everything except what matters most.

We know how many people viewed a reel.

We know how long they watched it.

We know how many shared it.

We know our reach, impressions, engagement and follower growth.

But none of those numbers answers the most consequential question: Did anyone behave differently because of what we said?

Ten thousand likes cannot cast one ballot.

A million impressions cannot make one telephone call to Congress.

Virality cannot substitute for organization.

The same principle applies to Jewish institutions. Success cannot be measured only by gala attendance, press mentions, panels, photographs with officials or the size of an email list. Those things may have value, but they are tools, not accomplishments.

The proper measurement is harder.

How many people were educated?

How many people were activated?

How many relationships were built outside the usual circle?

How many voters were moved?

How many policymakers understood that ignoring the Jewish community would carry a political consequence?

How many people who previously believed they were powerless discovered that citizenship gives them considerably more power than they imagined?

That is where journalism and activism meet.

Reporting provides information. Argument provides interpretation. Organization provides direction. Voting provides consequence.

Remove the final step and much of what precedes it becomes noise.

The real test of advocacy

The New York State Senate proclamation I received is meaningful to me because it recognizes work across journalism, social media and community advocacy. But the recognition is useful only if it reinforces the principle behind that work.

The objective was never simply to have a voice.

There are plenty of voices.

The objective is to use words to move people from passive agreement to deliberate action.

We are living through a moment in which Israel is being challenged not only militarily but narratively; in which antisemitism has migrated from fringe corners into universities, cultural institutions, political movements and public streets; and in which elections decided by people who bother to participate can have consequences for Jewish communities thousands of miles away.

In such a moment, spectatorship is a luxury.

Read, certainly.

Share.

Argue.

Educate.

But eventually, do something.

Because the real test of advocacy is not whether people applaud what you wrote.

It is whether they do something they would not otherwise have done.