Reconstructing mothers’ responsibility and guilt: Journalistic coverage of the ‘Remedia Affair’ in Israel

Abstract

This article explores journalistic representations of mothers during the horrific ‘Remedia Affair’, a 2003 tragedy in which dozens of Jewish Israeli babies fell sick and five died after being fed defective infant formula. The affair, a significant event in Israel’s collective memory, was narrativized as a ‘media scandal’ with multiple discourses of guilt, blame and victimhood. Analysis of the linguistic and visual coverage of Jewish Israeli mothers in six newspapers shows how mothers were reconstructed as guilty for the loss of the babies’ lives and well-being. In addition, the mothers were called to ‘come back’ to breastfeeding, an act that could have saved their children. Overall, this coverage reaffirmed the traditional social norms of the ‘ideal Jewish mother’ who sacrifices herself for her baby and is objectified as ‘food’, norms that were not commonly practiced by most Jewish Israeli families at the time.

Keywords

Blame critical discourse analysis feeding guilt health motherhood newspaper

Introduction

In the collective memory of Israel, November 2003 is remembered for the ‘Remedia Affair’ – a case in which a defective line of ‘Remedia’ brand herbal baby formula caused a severe neural illness in hundreds of babies.¹ The formula lacked sufficient quantities of Vitamin B1 and caused at least five deaths and 21 severe disabilities: to this day some of the victims cannot breathe by themselves, while others suffer from mental retardation, having lost their sight and/or hearing. Even the dozens of babies who were only ‘lightly’ damaged suffer from motor skill disorders, infantilism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and problems developing language skills. These cases are still being covered in the news today and are regularly discussed by parents, the health system, the court and businesses in Israel (e.g. Ben-Nir, 2017; Hovel, 2013; Moshkovitz et al., 2017; Netzer, 2013, 2017; Siegel-Itzkovich, 2017; Stutland, 2018).

Initially, the media covered the affair extensively for about 10 days, narrativizing it as a media scandal:

[P]rivate acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community [and] are made public and narrativized by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change. (Lull and Hinerman, 1997: 3)

In the case of the Remedia Affair, reporters presented the coverage as an investigation into those who caused the illnesses and deaths, as well as into relevant moral solutions, designed to avoid similar tragedies in the future. The journalistic coverage (including articles, captioned photos, opinion pieces, editorials, letters-to-the-editor and Remedia’s ads) started with the first connection of the Remedia product to the babies’ illness or death and included confrontations and accusations targeting the various ‘responsible’ parties, admissions of guilt, justifications, apologies and expressions of victimization. Along with the Remedia Company, which distributed the product in Israel, Humana (the German manufacturing company) and the Israeli Ministry of Health were accused by the media of not quality checking the product and thus allowing the defective production. But most significantly, the mothers (and not the fathers) were also blamed, both explicitly and implicitly, for not taking good care of their babies, including not showing knowledge and creativity about the best feeding solutions, not being alert enough to detect the babies’ symptoms, not reacting appropriately when the symptoms were recognized and especially for not breastfeeding them. It is important to note that when the affair occurred, most Jewish babies in Israel were bottle-fed, and that after the affair, the number of mothers who breastfed for at least 6 months increased from 32% (in 1998–1999) to 51.5% (in 2009–2012).²

My larger study includes 282 journalistic items about the affair, published 9–19 November 2003 in six newspapers, including popular, religious and liberal papers (Aronis, 2014).³ I will focus in this article on 109 items that are related to mothers, using a variety of tools associated with critical discourse analysis (CDA).⁴ The coverage can be divided into two points of view: the journalistic coverage about the mothers, and the smaller set of mothers’ own opinions and voices, for example, personal columns and opinion pieces written by mothers and published only in the popular newspapers. This article focuses on the broader journalistic coverage, while a future article will examine the mothers’ relatively sparse responses and columns more closely, focusing on their discursive practices of ‘saving face’, blaming others and demanding their own victimhood. Accordingly, in the following sections, I analyze how journalists represented mothers in this affair and blamed them for the condition of their babies, significantly mediating the mothers’ own actions and voices.

Motherhood, feeding and representations of maternal work

Previous studies have examined motherhood’s relationship to feeding, as when scholars interviewed mothers about their maternal practices and beliefs, explored their relationships with medical actors or information and analyzed media representations of bottle feeding versus breastfeeding (Foss and Southwell, 2006; Henderson et al., 2000; Knaak, 2010; Ludlow and et al., 2012; Shloim and et al., 2015; Wall, 2001). By contrast, this study of the Remedia Affair provides a rare view of the media representations of mothers in times of crisis, emphasizing their maternal care (specifically feeding) and their relationships with other social actors (fathers, babies, doctors and nurses). Times of crisis that are covered by the media are crucial sites for examining how the media deal with deviations from presumed and accepted norms and their subsequent reaffirmation (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 2004 [1948]).

The act of feeding forms one of the first relationships a biological mother has with her baby after birth, and it affects how her identity is constituted as a mother (Hays, 1996; Rich, 1995 [1976]; Shloim and et al., 2015). Thus, the social assumption that all mothers can and should breastfeed their babies and, more broadly, be responsible for their babies’ feeding, whether they use breast milk or formula. Hence, mothers are easily connected to the act of feeding, even though bottle-feeding (of formula or pumped breast milk) also allows others to take part. The Remedia Affair occurred when most Israeli Jewish mothers⁵ did not breastfeed their babies, and when most mothers returned to work after 3 months of maternity leave (e.g. Me-Ami, 2004). Following a neo-liberal ideology that arose in Israel in the 1970s and spread in the 1990s, women had secured many important equal rights by 2003 (the time of the Remedia Affair), including those involving the labor market and career development, while many fathers became highly involved with the care of their children (Berkovitch, 1997; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2005; Lachover, 2014; Nardi, 1992). Since Israel’s establishment, Jewish Israeli women have been expected to work and help build the country and being a working mother in Israel is not only common but also a desired norm. As in other industrialized cultures, formula feeding had become common in Israel, and supplementary food and drinks were likewise interpreted as good and effective (van Esterik, 2002).⁶

Specifically, infant formula was stridently marketed in hospitals and in the public sphere, and there was no official policy encouraging breastfeeding.⁷ This was reflected in the low availability of professional guidelines for breastfeeding in hospitals and in family health centers, in the encouragement of mothers to feed babies with formula or as a supplement for breastfeeding and in some hospitals in the impossibility of staying in the same room with one’s baby. In addition, there was almost nowhere to breastfeed in public areas or in workplaces. In general, at the time of the Remedia Affair, there was a low awareness in society of the benefits of breastfeeding and little encouragement to do so.

Previous research, mainly based on mothers’ experiences and interviews in North America, the United Kingdom and Asia, shows a complex reasoning system for feeding babies with formula, with variables including the mother’s well-being and health, her work situation, her relationship with her partner and with her other children, active fatherhood and fear of poor-quality breast milk (Ludlow and et al., 2012; Murphy, 1999; van Esterik, 2002). However, the public discourse on breastfeeding in Western countries, which is usually constructed within medical-scientific discourse and is underlain by notions of fear and risk, has become imbued with ideas about the morality of mothering (Henderson et al., 2000; Knaak, 2010; Lee, 2008). Knaak (2010) argues that the increased expert-guided public discourse on health aspects of breastfeeding is ideologically infused by what it means to be a ‘good mother’ in an advanced capitalist society, and it reconstructs a ‘risk consciousness’ for mothers (see also Avishai, 2007; Badinter, 2011; Foss, 2010; Wall, 2001).

Importantly, Israel is not only a pro-natal society but also a child-centered one. Like many other Western countries, children’s needs and well-being are put before those of others, including mothers. Moreover, ‘good motherhood’ is an ideal that dismisses the mother as a subject with legitimate needs and wants as they sacrifice themselves to conform with an unachievable ideal (Badinter, 2011; Douglas and Michaels, 2005; Hays, 1996; Wall, 2001).⁸ Hays (1996) explained that ideal is a cultural model of natural, intensive, self-sacrificing and isolated motherhood. Interestingly, the public discourse in Israel has always promoted a ‘dual ideal’ or a ‘double norm’ for women, who have been expected to contribute to the collective by striving both for a high birthrate and ‘good motherhood’, and also for a productive working life (Berkovitch, 1997; Lachover, 2014). Thus, women are expected to be both ideal mothers and ideal workers. In that sense, feminist trends in Israel that follow the neo-liberal ideology perform rather differently than in other Western societies. Women have gained equal rights in many arenas, but not at the expense of motherhood. Shloim et al. (2015) explored Israeli mothers’ definitions of motherhood through feeding, in terms of the gap between ‘ideal’ and ‘good enough’ mothering. They found that Israeli mothers are expected to work full time and to be the main caretakers of their families, thus intertwining liberal and traditional practices of motherhood in daily life (See also Berkovitch, 1997; Lachover, 2014; Steiner and Lachover, 2016).

This conflict between the ideal mother and worker can also be seen in the old conflict between breastfeeding and bottle-feeding (e.g. Me-Ami, 2004), which developed through complex discussions about benefits for mothers and babies, often invoking binaries of ‘ideal’ versus ‘good enough’ mothering and ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ mothers (e.g. Badinter, 2011; Douglas and Michaels, 2005; Lachover, 2017; Shloim and et al., 2015; Steiner and Lachover, 2016). According to Douglas and Michaels (2005), American media representations of the impossibly perfect mother contradict the reality of actual mothers’ exhausting daily lives, creating incurable frustration among mothers who consume that media. This analysis holds true for Israeli media as well, especially in terms of the simultaneous media obsession with cases of ‘bad’ mothers in reports of maternal neglect, rebellion and even maternal infanticide. This duality voices the many anxieties arising from the fact that mothers are expected to go to work to support the financial needs of the family, invest in their own development and gratify their own needs and desires (see also Kaplan, 1994).

The data

The newspaper coverage of the Remedia Affair analyzed here covered the main period of the media scandal: 9–19 November 2003. The data include a broad spectrum of six Israeli newspapers: the two most widely read papers in the country at the time by the dominant Jewish population, Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv, along with four sectoral papers that address more limited segments (sectors) of Israeli society. Of these four, Haaretz is a liberal, intellectual paper that targets upper-class cultural elites, similar to the New York Times or The Guardian, while Hamodia, Yated Ne’eman and Hatzofe are mouthpieces of the religious and ultra-orthodox sectors.⁹

At that time in Israel, print newspapers were commonly consumed and provided a wider and deeper range of commentary on a specific topic, especially compared with radio, television and sometimes the electronic versions of the newspapers. Likewise, in 2003, social media was not as extensive as nowadays. Newspapers also offer a good opportunity to examine the authoritative voice of the ‘media’ and its ‘producers’. Arguably, radio and television interviews broadcast more of the interviewees’ authentic selves by including their faces, voices and other aspects that cannot be easily ‘controlled’ by the newspaper. However, by their nature, newspapers highly mediate voices, sources, interviewees and topics, and can be highly selective in presenting only parts of quoted utterances. Hence, focusing on newspapers provides a clearer view of journalistic practices that both construct and reflect social norms. In this case, it emphasizes the journalists and editors more than their sources and the people they cover.

Haaretz was included because its liberal agenda raised expectations of representations of dual parenting (mothers and fathers) in articles dealing with social structures and reasons for using formula presented with less emotion and with considerations of wider, complex causality, rather than directly blaming mothers. The religious newspapers were chosen to provide a range of traditional views of parenthood, but also because a significant number of the children involved in the affair came from the religious and ultra-orthodox communities, where non-dairy formulas are usually preferred due to adherence to kashrut (kosher) standards.¹⁰

This study critically analyses the discourse in 109 items dealing with the parental/maternal theme directly or indirectly.¹¹ By ‘items’, I mean headlines on the front page (and their accompanying sub-headings/captions), news pieces and reports, boxes and pictures/visual-items that presented an additional topic and were not an integral part of the report, letters to the editor and Remedia’s own ads. This set of diverse items provides us with a fuller picture of the representation of mothers in the coverage of the affair, as it relies on different sources – publicists, editors, journalists, experts, religious leaders and readers (through letters-to-the-editor).

Methods and analytical framework

The analysis follows the practical methods of CDA, an interdisciplinary method for analyzing discourse that has been influential since the early 1990s (Tracy et al., 2011; Wodak and Meyer, 2016). Three of its basic principles led my analysis: (1) ‘to gain proper understanding of how language functions in constituting and transmitting knowledge, in organizing social institutions or in exercising power’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2016: 7); (2) ‘to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, constituted, legitimized, and so on, by language use (or in discourse)’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2016: 10); and (3) to examine ‘the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance’ (van Dijk, 1993: 249, italics in original; see also Fairclough, 1995; Tracy et al., 2011).

Therefore, my goal was to analyze the language of the Remedia Affair’s journalistic coverage to learn how it has constituted and transmitted knowledge about Israeli Jewish motherhood’s role and social status within the constellation of social power and inequality in Israel. As Fairclough and Wodak (1997) explain, CDA discursive practices not only express issues of power, but may have major ideological effects when they

can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations, between […] social classes, women and men, ethnic/cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they represent things and position people. (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258)

My main interest was to learn about the power relationships represented between men and women, fathers and mothers, babies and mothers and journalists/media and mothers, and the associated embedded ideologies. Thus, I am interested in how the discourse of dominance, as presented in the newspapers, represents mothers and (re)produces their social and family stance. As will be shown, this type of discourse reflects both the dominance of the journalists and of men and experts over Israeli women/mothers.

In my analysis, I also considered the visual prominence of the text – the headlines, the first parts of the textual items and the visual emphases in leads and quotes that visually stand out through special design (Bell, 1998; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1998) – as it reflects and arguably constructs the main messages and embedded ideologies within the texts. Through my study, I realized that while my main method focused on analyzing the textual data, the visual features and design of texts are important in understanding the mothers’ representation in the coverage. Hence, I added limited visual analysis and used van Leeuwen’s (2008) tools for analyzing the visual through a CDA approach. Furthermore, I analyzed relevant photographs and examined how mothers were depicted in relation to their babies and how the viewers’ perspective toward the mother is constructed. Utilizing the notion of ‘multimodality’, I also examined how the relations between the textual and the visual function (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). As Lazar (2000) suggests, only the interplay of language and visual images together can offer complete analysis of discourse; she calls to extend the conception of discourse from solely language to a multi-semiotic manifestation of discoursal meaning(s) (Lazar, 2000: 377).

Looking for structures, strategies and other properties of the journalistic text in order to understand the (re)production of the discourse (van Dijk, 1993) about mothers, I focused on particular elements and aspects. The analysis deals with the appearance of the mothers within the coverage, their characteristics and relationships with their babies and their comparisons to other significant caretakers such as fathers, doctors and nurses. Specifically, I examined how presuppositions, diction, labeling practices and practices of presenting the mothers’ voices and their roles as agents or social actors (re)produce certain ideological evaluations (positive or negative) and messages about them, and about their role and responsibility (Fairclough, 2003; Sunderland, 2004; van Leeuwen, 1995, 1996). Therefore, I paid special attention to discursive ways of including and excluding mothers (presence, absence, backgrounding, agentless actions, etc.) and to styles of journalistic reporting about the subject and/or the mothers, while also considering represented social actions, lexical choices and methods of nomination regarding the mothers, food, feeding (Fairclough, 1995, 2003; Sunderland, 2004, 2006; Tracy et al., 2011; van Dijk, 1993; van Leeuwen, 1995, 1996).

Analysis and discussion

In all six newspapers that covered the Remedia Affair, the mothers’ maternal work and function were negatively portrayed through discourses of blame, apology and self-justification, implicitly or explicitly pointing at the mothers’ responsibility for both the babies and the harm caused to them. This was seen in the various texts through the editing, the choice of quotes and how the mothers’ words were emphasized in interviews and textual mediation. Even though the mothers themselves were absent in most of the coverage, as they were hardly interviewed or presented in the photographs, they were also constructed as guilty and incompetent in their maternal care, largely for not breastfeeding their babies. The following sub-sections are divided into three ‘gendered discourses’ (Sunderland, 2004: 21) discourses that are based on language use and gender representation, where mothers are represented and/or expected to behave in particular gendered ways. These discourses are what I have called: feeding as the mother’s responsibility, unprofessional motherhood and the reconstruction of guilt, and the call to return to breastfeeding. The names of the newspapers are indicated by their initials: Yedioth Ahronoth – YA, Maariv – M, Haaretz – HA, Hamodia – HM, Yated Ne’eman – YN and Hatzofe – HT.

Feeding as the mother’s responsibility

In all six newspapers, analysis of the descriptions of the mothers and how they are addressed shows an embedded ideology that they should take primary responsibility for feeding their babies, even though formula allows the father or other adults to share this role. Nevertheless, many items used gender-neutral language, such as parents or they, especially when readers were called on to feed their babies with a different formula brand, given directions or instructions, or described as rushing to buy an alternative formula or blaming other parties for their baby’s harm. Hebrew is a ‘masculine generic’ language which purports to include both women and men with certain linguistically masculine nouns and pronouns such as they, you, your, children and parents. My English translations retain the masculine references, but Hebrew readers would commonly interpret phrases like [male] baby, if referred to generally, as denoting both female and male. In the following, I have underlined the words that are presented in their masculine form, but in principle address both genders: ‘Questions and Answers to Parents’ (YA, 9 November 2003: 1); ‘Now the parents are forced [coerced] to cope with a hard question: did the milk substitute which they fed their child actually risk his life?’; and ‘That’s how you will feed your children safely’ (Frishman, M, 10 November 2003: 13).

However, when referring to the actual social action of feeding, in practice, the mothers were frequently identified as the social actors. A few features explicitly position mothers as the main and often the only feeders. For instance, on the first day of the media scandal, Remedia published an announcement to parents about its product spread across a full newspaper page in the most widely read newspaper at the time (YA). The announcement refers to the parents as they and uses the gender-neutral words consumers and parents, along with the pronoun you that implies a shared address to both mothers and fathers. But within the announcement, mothers, and not fathers, are mentioned directly regarding the feeding:

1. Message to Remedia consumers

(a) Remedia recommends that mothers who use Herbal Remedia change to using a different formula.

(b) Remedia has opened a special 24-hour information phone line for parents. We invite you to call the information line with any questions. (M, 9 November 2003: 7, emphasis added)

Fathers or other adult caregivers are not addressed directly regarding the action of feeding. In a way, the lexical choice of the generic category parents could be interpreted as pointing metonymically at mothers, since they are explicitly mentioned as the subjects that actively use Herbal Remedia (1a). The mothers are implied as the main actors of the social action (van Leeuwen, 1995, 1996) using the product, so the fathers can be seen as textually ‘backgrounded’. They are assumed to be official agents/social actors (addressed as consumers and you) but are not indicated within the precise action of feeding, and hence excluded.

The connection between the mothers and the users of the herbal formula, instead of the babies who actually consume the food, also backgrounds the latter as social actors while shifting the focus to the mothers, which increases their responsibility. Surprisingly, the babies are textually absent and excluded from the whole corporate announcement. Readers unfamiliar with the context could interpret the message as meaning the mothers are the actual consumers of Herbal Remedia. The absence of distinction between the babies (as the consumers) and the mothers (as the feeders) presupposes the immanent connection between them, as if they were one unit, not two separate human beings. A similar relation between the mothers and the action of using the product themselves appeared in an editorial column in a religious newspaper, which discussed the irresponsibility of Humana, Remedia and the Ministry of Health, and how mothers were betrayed. The following phrase was included: ‘thousands of women that use products of that kind’ (YN, 12 November 2003: 9, emphasis added). A feature article in YA included an interview with a Remedia worker, a mother herself, who is described as expressing deep guilt for advising other ‘mothers […] to use the herbal formula’ (Regev, YA, 12 November 2003: 6, emphasis added; these details were also mentioned in the article lead).

As in this last quote, in many items the mothers (not the fathers) are mentioned as related to the action of feeding. An item about a nutrition survey conducted by an Israeli health maintenance organization was published on the third day of the affair in M under the headline: ‘Nutrition Survey: The Mothers Know More than the Doctor’ (Even, M, 11 November 2003: 6). The item describes a test of the nutritional knowledge of different relevant actors regarding baby feeding: doctors, nurses and mothers. Fathers were not included in the survey or the report, not even in a generic parents category.

In addition, when mothers were interviewed, recounting times before the discovery of the harmful formula, their reported speech associates them with the action of feeding. For instance, ‘In her words [according to her], two months after the baby’s birth she stopped breastfeeding and she has fed Ofek “Herbal Remedia” for the last four months’ (Freilich, YA, 10 November 2003: 13, emphasis added). Other mothers were quoted as saying ‘I can’t believe that because I fed my child with baby formula he is in the hospital in a critical condition’ and ‘I have fed Nili the Herbal “Remedia” since she was born’ (Karni and Meiri, YA, 9 November 2003: 6, emphasis added). Usually the fathers who were interviewed described how their babies ate or consumed the formula, or that they, along with the mothers, in a plural verb form, gave the baby formula: the actual act of feeding is rarely mentioned by the fathers. For instance, ‘After birth we gave Guy a different powder’ (Kot, YA, 10 November 2003: 12). In this context, it is important to note that the common term for infant formula in Hebrew at the time was Mother’s Milk Substitute(s) – Taxlif(ei) Xalav E’m. While in English, the term formula implies a sophisticated process of scientific preparation, in Hebrew the phrase implies a substitute for the ‘real’ thing. This idiom, frequently used in the media coverage, not only presupposes that mother’s milk is the best food for the baby but directly connects the mother to the formula. For instance, one double-spread article was headlined: ‘Fear: The Whole Market for Mother’s-Milk Substitutes Will Be Damaged’ (Gross, M, 9 November 2003: 2–3).¹²

Unprofessional motherhood and the reconstruction of guilt

The mothers’ exclusion

Despite the assumption within the coverage that feeding is the mother’s task and responsibility, mothers were, surprisingly, often excluded or backgrounded (Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 1996) in the sense that journalists for all six newspapers more often wrote about the mothers rather than inviting them to share their words through direct or indirect speech. In comparison to the prominent voices of fathers and medical actors, which were emphasized in the headlines and leads, the mothers’ voices earned much less ‘stage time’ and were usually excluded altogether, and hence they were suppressed (Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 1996).

An expression of this pattern can be seen in the large number of male interviewees. The explicit occurrence of mothers’ reported speech was very rare while fathers’ reported words were abundant. For instance, in an article about the death of one of the babies, only the father was interviewed, and he is described as actively trying to save the child (Kot, YA, 10 November 2003: 12). In another article that describes the current situation of an ill baby, only the father is interviewed and in the accompanying visual is shown sitting devotedly and alone at his child’s bedside (Brot, YA, 10 November 2003: 12). The mother is textually and visually excluded, and her care of her baby is systematically ignored.

This exclusion was even more significant in HA and the religious papers. These papers, which hardly ever interviewed the mothers highlighted the agentless action of the feeding using the passive-voice: babies were fed (e.g. ‘Baby was fed herbal ‘Remedia’, HT, 10 November 2003: 2). At HA, this might have derived from a desire to shed more light on the baby or the scientific practice, or not to differentiate between mothers and fathers; in the religious newspapers, it might have derived from a sense of traditional religious ‘modesty’ limiting women’s appearance in the public sphere. This exclusion is also evidenced in the visuals (van Leeuwen, 2008) in all six newspapers, which mainly included babies by themselves, babies with fathers and babies with nurses or female doctors. There are also many visuals of the product itself. The mothers are rarely seen. Visuals that included mothers with babies were usually in a breastfeeding situation, or showed the babies crying or restless while the mothers seem helpless.

When mothers were interviewed – Implicit guilt

The few mothers who were interviewed were actively portrayed as publicly bearing the blame for the harm done to their babies. This was done through choices of quotations and their emphasis within the items. However, they also reportedly deployed self-justification practices and excuses to make others share the responsibility with them. In the fourth day of the coverage, the following headline was given to a report on the state of the hospitalized infants: ‘I poisoned my baby’ (Rabin, M, 12 November 2003: 7). The lead under the headline was as follows: ‘Says Michal Bracha, whose son Guy is hospitalized in the intensive care unit * Parents threaten to harm “Remedia” CEO and his family members, who have hired bodyguards’ (See appendix I). Within the context of the affair, the reported utterance I poisoned my baby can be understood as a confession, a mother’s direct admission of guilt. The transitive verb phrase ‘I poisoned’ connotes an actively harmful deed, positioning the mother as the actor and her baby as the ‘victim’. The word poison has an even greater negative connotation in Jewish Israeli society, than in other Western societies, where the Nazi past still resonates.¹³ This again represents the mother bearing (sole?) responsibility for the well-being and nutrition of her baby. However, the headline was actually excerpted from a fuller quotation from the mother that appears at the beginning of the article: ‘I poisoned my baby, we did it unwittingly, but it is incredible how we believed in this milk’ (emphasis added).

The first line of the report suggests the mother who is admitting her personal guilt in the headline is nonetheless trying to avoid responsibility, or at least to share it with her spouse, perhaps to save face (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1959). She poisoned the baby on her own, but she did and believed together with her spouse, thus adopting a strategy of evading responsibility (Benoit, 1995) by claiming that she acted in good faith and that the negative consequences were unintended. She probably refers to the child’s father when using we and explains it was done unwittingly. Using the expression ‘it is incredible’ may be a way to release her from blame, as it implies that it could not be known to, or believed by, anyone. She then uses the verb believed which holds the positive meaning of good faith as well as of being cleared of guilt: unlike in English, saying I believe is a common way to express certainty in Israeli Hebrew, as it is connected with positive intentions through Jewish religious culture. The use of the word milk instead of formula, poison or powder, terms which were used by the male journalists and fathers, also can be read as the mother trying to reduce her responsibility, as she intended to feed her baby natural, healthy and wholesome food.

In contrast with the ‘poisoning’ mother, mothers who were alert to symptoms or who breastfed enjoyed more sympathetic coverage. Besides reinforcing the general blame for supposedly negligent mothers, this shows that mothers could save face by returning to the myth of the good, breastfeeding mother, and by proving their maternal abilities by detecting the symptoms early. For example, one of the items had the following quote in a lead: ‘I fed him Remedia, but twice a day I also breastfed him. The doctors said that it was my milk that saved his life’ (M, 11 November 2003: 6). That mother, who was alert enough to make the connection between the symptoms and the food and ‘independently’ stopped giving it to her child, was portrayed as resourceful, and her statement was also bolded in a lead: ‘Already two weeks ago we called Remedia and told them that something is not right, because our baby threw up all the time’. While in the text, she is depicted as noticing the connection between the herbal Remedia and the symptoms of her baby independently, in the quotation which was bolded in the lead she uses a male plural verb, which also gives credit to the father.

While every publication in a newspaper acts as an ‘active’ editorial work that reconstructs a certain ideology (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1993), these editors and reporters also added their own snippets of information that were not part of the original coverage, further constructing the idea of maternal guilt. For instance, in an article about the commercial-consumer angle, an unrelated caption under a photograph of Remedia products was added: ‘Mother’s milk substitutes. Mothers express their sense of guilt’ (Chen, YA, 24 Sha’ot, 10 November 2003: 2–3). This lexicon (re)produces the mothers through negative evaluations (van Dijk, 1993). The report on medical knowledge mentioned earlier, headlined ‘Mothers know better than doctors’ (Even, M, 11 November 2003: 6), could also be interpreted as blaming the mothers for unprofessional maternal care. This structure of argumentation is based on the ‘factual’ style of ‘experts’ (van Dijk, 1993) that leads the reader to infer the mothers’ blame. The overall coverage implies a clear hierarchy in baby feeding: the breastfeeding mother fulfills the maternal role devotedly and perfectly, while the mother who feeds her child with formula is perceived as less ‘professional’ in her maternal role. This reconstruction of the mother’s guilt also resulted in urging mothers to come back to breastfeeding to avoid future tragedies. This too is a reconstruction of guilt – guilt for not breastfeeding.

The call to return to breastfeeding

As early as the third day of the coverage, mothers were called to ‘come back’ to breastfeeding based on scientific validation or even a divine commandment. Similarly to findings by Foss (2010), these writers used scientific evidence and the advice of ‘experts’ to justify breastfeeding as the ‘dominant’ form of feeding. In this case, the scientific explanations were supplemented by religious calls and religious experts, who recycled ‘knowledge’ about the nature of creation and God’s will, and appropriated the science to God’s realm and creation. Several articles were published about mothers ‘returning to breastfeeding’, often based on weak or absent evidence. The lexical choice ‘returning’ implies going back to where one (or where others like oneself) was before, and within the context of mothers in modern, industrial life, it also implies going back to traditional mothering. Simultaneously, it suggests that mothers who had chosen not to breastfeed would be able to start breastfeeding, a difficult if not impossible act. For example, on 11 November (Alroi de Behr, M: 8), an article entitled ‘Returning [Feminine Plural] to the Sources?’ was accompanied by an uncaptioned file photo of two women breastfeeding children: one is feeding an infant, and the other is feeding a toddler (See appendix I). Taken from a very high angle, the photograph constructs the viewers’ sight from above. The angle emphasizes their faces and breasts, and the focus is on the male toddler: his mouth is filled with a breast as he grasps his mother’s necklace. The mothers, who are not looking at the camera, look unhappy. Following Kress and van Leeuwen (in van Leeuwen, 2008), this vertical angle represents power relations, and as in this case, the viewers ‘extract imaginary symbolic power over’ (p. 138) the mothers that are seen unhappily breastfeeding. Since the mothers in the photograph are being looked at, they have been ‘distanciated’ (p. 141) from us, the viewers, with no potential ‘interaction’.

The article’s lead says, ‘Many mothers are now reconsidering breastfeeding * Doctors promise suitable alternatives to the tainted Remedia product, but emphasize there is no substitute for mother’s milk * “This is the only product I can endorse”’ (Alroi de Behr, M, 11 November 2003: 8). While the report starts with a question about the chances of the Remedia Affair leading to ‘the new-old trend – breastfeeding’, and states that the affair brings breastfeeding back to the public discussion, it only quotes ‘supporters’, namely, an organization of lactation counselors (International Board-Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLC)) and a medical doctor. Similarly, with no basis in factual data or interviews with mothers, another item was published with the headline: ‘Be’re’shit: The Remedia Affair has put breastfeeding back on the agenda’ (Freilich, YA, Shelach, 17 November 2003: 1). Be’re’shit is the Hebrew name for the book of Genesis, but also means ‘from time immemorial’ or ‘from the source’. This item was published on the title page of the women’s section in the newspaper, with a large visual of an infant smiling and pleasurably chewing/sucking a nipple. The backgrounded mother appears in the visual only through her breast, objectified into part of her body, and a certain function, which symbolically excludes her (van Leeuwen, 2008). The item gives a few tips for breastfeeding and somewhat scientific facts about it (e.g. how many times a mother should breastfeed a day, that a sudden intermission of breastfeeding could cause a damage, and that breastfeeding should not hurt), and though signed by a journalist, it states that the information was given by two breastfeeding counselors and the Ministry of Health’s food and nutrition services.

A more extreme version of this call to ‘return’ to breastfeeding can be seen in editorials and pundits’ columns. In the popular newspaper M, it appeared within a letter to the editor, the only one on the Remedia Affair that was published in that newspaper: ‘To return to mother’s milk’ (Porat, M, 11 November 2003). The male writer explained the scientific and economic advantages of breastfeeding, but ignored both the social action/implications of breastfeeding, and its agents – the mothers, who are not mentioned in his letter except indirectly in the phrase mother’s milk. Another column in another paper (Arieli, M, 14 November 2003: 6) that mostly dealt with other issues besides the Remedia case, and did not include anything about breastfeeding, included a cartoon (probably added by the editor) of two babies sitting in a bar trying to reach across the bar to touch the female bartender’s breast. The caption printed above their heads read ‘we will drink only real [true] milk’. This cartoon strengthens the mother’s role of service that relates to her actual body.

In the sectoral press, the call was even more prominent. In special personal columns and opinion pieces in the religious/ultra-orthodox press, male pundits called upon mothers to breastfeed their babies, arguing that breastfeeding is anchored in religious commandments and reflects the miracle of creation. For instance, an editorial in the weekly Home and Family section of HM (The Remedia Scandal, 13 November 2003: 2) stated,

Here it turns out again, in such a hard and tormented way, that human beings cannot outsmart the nature of creation. The creator of the world in his mercy, created his world and creatures in a way that there is not in fact an authentic substitute for a mother feeding her children. That is the greatest peak. That is the blessing – and no consideration should be given to matters of convenience or trouble.

The assumption in this text is that the modern/scientific life has regrettably moved mothers away from their natural role as feeders by and through their own bodies, and that while breastfeeding is more demanding, the struggle is rewarding. A similar editorial in YN (Hovav, 12 November 2003: 9) deals with the affair and the importance of B1, the vitamin missing in the defective formula. The author argued that since B1 is part of God’s creation, God is in charge of the scientific exploration of the vitamin, which exists naturally in breast milk.

In contrast, many articles in HA presented scientific-medical data about breastfeeding and called on the health system to encourage mothers to breastfeed, as in the editorial ‘The Life of the Baby is in Their Hands’ (HA, 10 November 2003: B1). The call for ‘expert’ doctors to convince mothers to breastfeed, using rational, scientific rhetoric, presupposes that mothers have an irrational nature, or that they are not professional and conscious of the importance of breastfeeding. Instead of being directly addressed, the mothers are, again, talked over by writing about them (‘did doctors receive enough assistance in their effort to encourage mothers to breastfeed and give their baby natural immunization(?)’). Moreover, the author does not even attempt to relate to their conflicted situation. Two weeks after the affair ended, HA published a magazine article about breastfeeding titled ‘For/In the Milky Way’, with a front-page picture showing a mother breastfeeding two children, one on each breast (Lori, Mussaf Haaretz, 21 November 2003). The Hebrew words in the title could be read as both ‘BiShvil HaXalav’ – For the (Sake of the) Milk, or ‘Be’Shvil HaXalav’ – (Being) In the Milky Way. In the context of the picture, this could be understood as promoting breastfeeding for the quality of the milk, as well as tying the action of breastfeeding to the Milky Way Galaxy, the only known site of intelligent human life in our universe.

The lead for this article was, ‘The Remedia Trauma magically improved the public relations of breastfeeding and opened again the race for the perfect motherhood’. Among 10 new mothers interviewed, only two explained their reasons for not breastfeeding. Most of the article gave voice to breastfeeding counselors and breastfeeding mothers and described the faulty practices of the Israeli health system regarding breastfeeding. Although this article was published after the coverage of the media scandal and was not in the data set, it also frames the call to breastfeed as a solution to the harm caused by the faulty formula, even in a liberal newspaper.

Conclusion

The coverage of the Remedia affair constructed the Jewish Israeli mother as her child’s primary caregiver.¹⁴ Alongside accusations directed at other parties involved in the affair, the newspaper coverage positioned the mothers as also being responsible for the harm caused to their babies, and as holding the solution for avoiding such cases in the future – mainly by ‘returning’ to breastfeeding. Mothers were represented as being ‘unprofessional’ in their maternal practice – for not identifying the symptoms of the illness early enough, for not understanding that breast milk is healthier than formula and for having chosen not to breastfeed their children, thereby causing them severe harm. These accusations go hand in hand with common Western beliefs that mothers are fully responsible for determining what happens to their children, while also getting blamed for anything that ‘goes wrong’ with them (Caplan, 2007; Douglas and Michaels, 2005; Ladd-Taylor, 2007).

In a negative way, the coverage of the Remedia Affair reaffirmed the ‘good’, traditional Jewish Israeli mother, who should sacrifice herself for her child and know what is best for her or him. As part of this, breastfeeding was constructed as a social action that could have saved the babies’ lives. Part of the solution offered by the media for avoiding future tragedies was to create a better quality control process and to have mothers ‘return’ to breastfeeding. The suggestion to use more than one type of formula arose later, and did not appear in the main coverage.

By writing about mothers mostly in the context of food provision, the journalists from all six newspapers constructed them as a means of providing food for their baby, or, in other words, transformed them into means/objects. Mothers were treated as the feeders, or practically as the food itself, through the notion of breastfeeding and through lexical choices like ‘mother’s milk’ or ‘mother’s milk substitutes’. In effect, the coverage equated mothers with food.

Interestingly, even though the coverage assumes that mothers are the primary caregivers, they are mostly absent or backgrounded – textually and visually – and in practice excluded from the public discourse established by the media. This might explain why the coverage did not introduce a wider discourse about structural social issues and potential solutions that impact the practices of motherhood (e.g. Steiner and Lachover, 2016; Vavrus, 2007). For instance, it did not consider the fact that Israeli women are expected to go back to work after 3 months of maternity leave, even though many of them are raising at least two, usually three to four, children, and even though some of them are also single mothers. Nor did the option for nursing mothers to pump milk and leave it to others to feed the baby arise. Also not discussed was the common maternal discourse about the rhetoric of choice (Vavrus, 2007), the negotiation between ‘ideal’ and ‘good enough’ motherhood (Shloim et al., 2015) and the helplessness parents may experience within a society that relies on outside services for food.

Although the Remedia Affair took place after significant improvements in the status of mothers in Israel, its media framing did not reflect these changes. Rather, it was effectively narrativized as a conservative media scandal that undid some of the significant achievements in women’s, and particularly mothers’, progress in society. The facts that mothers tend to work, the previously low percentages of breastfeeding mothers, and the sharing of childcare with other adults and institutions (reflecting more egalitarian gender relations (Lazar, 2000)) were barely mentioned. Likewise, the coverage ignored the conflict between the mother’s and the child’s best interests and did not discuss the reasons for the use of ‘mother’s milk substitutes’.

In their well-known article, Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948) defined the media as ‘serv[ing] to reaffirm social norms by exposing deviations from these norms to public view’ (22). Following this idea, the coverage of the Remedia Affair revealed a similar process of the mainstream media striving to reaffirm (ideal) social norms regarding maternal care (the sacrificing, professional/scientific, breastfeeding mother), in a time when deviations are regularly exposed and discussed in the media. Reaffirming social norms emphasizes, in this case, the hegemonically desired role and character of the Jewish Israeli mother – bound to Conservative Gender Relations (Lazar, 2000) – while neglecting her actual practice in daily life (‘good enough’ mothering, bottle feeding, and struggling to balance home and work). The affair thus enabled the textual realization of the horrific scenario whereby mothers ‘rebelled’ or were ‘liberated’, ‘leaving’ their damaged babies to the mercy of others (Barnett, 2005, 2006; Douglas and Michaels, 2005) – at both the familial and social levels: to fathers, grandparents, doctors, nurses, the legal system, the media and the society as a whole. This suggests that the advancement of the status of women and their liberation (bodily and otherwise) actually still defies traditional norms in Israel, which try to enforce an aspiration for women to be traditional breastfeeding mothers.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

‘Remedia’ Panic: Use of Company’s Herbal Food Becomes Forbidden

Suspicion: 2 Babies Died from the Mysterious Illness. (YA, 9 Nov 2003: 1)

‘I Poisoned My Baby’

- Says Michal Bracha, whose son Guy is hospitalized in the intensive care unit □ Parents threaten to harm ‘Remedia’ CEO and his family members, who have hired bodyguards. (Rabin, M, 12 Nov 2003: 7)

Returning to the Sources?

Many mothers are now reconsidering breastfeeding □ Doctors promise suitable alternatives to the tainted Remedia product, but emphasize there is no substitute for mother’s milk □ ‘This is the only product I can endorse’. (Alroi de Behr, M, 11 Nov 2003: 8)

Acknowledgements

I offer my deepest thanks to Teun van Dijk, the editor, Jane Sunderland, the reviewer, and to several colleagues for reading drafts of this project and for offering helpful, wise and relevant feedback: Esther Schely-Newman, Karen Tracy, Zohar Kampf, Kinnerett Lahad and Lynn O’Brien Hallstein. Their comments helped shape both this and future publications.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Carolin Aronis is currently a Special Faculty member of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies and Journalism from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and specializes in media and cultural studies, gender studies, approaches to textual analysis and urban communication. She formerly worked as a journalist.

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