Daniel "Danny" Seaman (born 1961) is an Israeli media professional and former civil servant, mainly active in the fields of foreign service and public diplomacy.
Seaman received the Israel Outstanding Civil Service Award in 2000 for coordinating the international press coverage of Pope John Paul II's visit to the Holy Land in March 2000.
Seaman was appointed as acting director of the Government Press Office (GPO) in December 2000 and worked with foreign journalists who covered news events in Israel and the Palestinian territories until 2010.
Seaman is said to have observed the a dramatic intensification of public diplomacy in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what interviewers have called "cognitive warfare" waged in a "battlefront of perceptions", in which Israel must handle a "global media battle".
The problem is, he argues, that the Arab world fails to maintain journalistic standards accepted in the West, and in waging their media war insult the free press tradition which, he affirms, Israel upholds.
Israelis when hurt return to a normal life quickly, whereas Palestinians exploit their tragedies as weapons in a media battle.
This raised an outcry of protest, with UNWRA claiming that failure of access by journalists hindered a truthful representation of what was occurring.
Seaman was quoted on CNN as saying that Israel had learnt a lesson from its war with Hezbollah in Lebanon earlier in 2006:'There was too much exposure, it had an effect on our ability to achieve strategic goals', a declaration taken to indicate the real rationale behind the government's ban.
[10] Seaman was also quoted by The New York Times's Ethan Bronner as arguing: 'Any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason we should help that.
[14][15] Such journalists included Israeli mainstream media employees such as Atta Awisat, a veteran staff photographer at Yedioth Ahronoth, then the largest newspaper in Israel, allegedly due to clearance issues with the security agencies.
Such as with the case of [Swedish newspaper] Aftonbladet, and their despicable anti-Semitic [...] report on the IDF [purportedly] abducting Palestinians and using their body organs.
We can take up to 90 days and we can take longer...[17]Another journalist who became the target of Seaman's contempt was Jörg Bremer, a 15-year veteran of the press corps in Jerusalem, who worked as the correspondent of the right-liberal German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
For calling this measure a political way of keeping unwanted journalist at bay and for asking for the German government's support, Bremer was described by Seaman in a newspaper interview as "an idiot," "a piece of shit" and "a miserable liar.
[19] In August 2013, Haaretz accused him of having "gained a reputation for his confrontations with foreign correspondents and for the complaints they lodged against him" and called him "an abusive racist."
Seaman was admonished by the government, which distanced itself from his views and then suspended him from his position as Director of Interactive Media because of offensive, racist comments.