Media Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict—Zack Colman

The role of the media in the Israel/Palestine conflict cannot be underestimated. As an American, the common picture we see of Israel is one of violence and perpetual unrest. We do not get to see the inner-workings of Israeli society. We do not get to hear about the millions of people who crave peace — we only hear about the minority that does its best to prevent peace. But, as we noticed from living in Israel, while terror and fear is certainly part of daily life, it tends to be exaggerated by the American media.
The media has the ability to shape the public’s perception of the world, and it does so by being society’s gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is quite possibly the most important function of journalism. Journalists single-handedly decide what the public will read, see and hear. They decide how important the issue is by where the story is placed in a newspaper or news broadcast. They can decide to not print or broadcast anything about a story at all.
Gatekeepers, though, are humans, and humans have natural biases. With many powerful members of the media being Jewish, it is no surprise that the Israel/Palestine conflict gets a massive amount of coverage and prominent placement in television broadcasts and newspapers. Abe M. Rosenthal, the former editor of the New York Times, was a Jewish man with a pro-Israel stance. As people look back to the “newspapers of record,” Rosenthal’s stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict will continue to influence scholars. But gatekeeper bias doesn’t stop at the gatekeeper himself — in order to get more bylines and more big stories, reporters have to cater to what their editors desire and their editors’ biases. The whole chain of command below Rosenthal, therefore, took a pro-Israel stance whether they liked it or not.
One thing greatly affecting the way newspapers are run is the current crisis the industry faces with the emergence of the Internet. On the Internet, people can receive real-time updated news for free, and newspapers have yet to find a way to make advertising (through which most revenues are earned) profitable. People have developed what is called “banner blindness” and thus do not even notice advertisements on the Internet. The free, more in-depth content on the Internet has led to a decline in subscriptions. As a result, newspapers have cut staff, page size, story size, and international news coverage.
This presents a major problem for the Israel/Palestine conflict. As newspaper organizations continue to cut and cut, they will become more localized — even “hyper-localized.” Soon enough, coverage of international events will be left to a select few wire services that don’t have the space to go in-depth or run human-interest stories. There will be fewer news outlets to offer their opinions and we will end up with the same take on international events.
This doesn’t sound all that bad until you take into account the “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy. In order to capture viewers or sell papers off the newsstands, news organizations tend to emphasize the guts and gore of the world. Stories about gruesome killings sell more than ones about the economy or new fashion trends, and news organizations know this. By attracting subscribers or viewers, news organizations can then gain more advertisers and pad their pockets.
Now, take these two problems and put them together. What you have is less space devoted to international coverage (which is the content are declining most at newspapers, according to a July study), but an engrained penchant for publishing the guts and gore of the world. When discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict, what you will get from this equation is fewer articles that deal with issues other than terrorist attacks or threats to any sort of stability in the area. Even now, there is a lack of coverage concerning matters of peace (I browsed a month’s worth of articles on CNN.com and found only one dealing with peace) and most stories about Israel will be about a possible attack on or from Iran or terrorist attacks. With less space devoted to international coverage, this is all readers will be likely to see from Israel.
Linda Gradstein of National Public Radio has said it’s already difficult enough to push through human-interest stories about Israel. Peace coverage generally fails to get into the mainstream media because it would change the image the media has concocted about the region. Much of this image rests on the journalism concept of currency.
Currency, in journalism terms, is following an event from beginning to end. This is most common in court trials, where the story will recapitulate the series of events leading up to today’s news at the end of the main story.
With the Israel/Palestine conflict, currency presents two problems. Since most stories about Israel relate to terrorism and death, recounting previous events at the end of each story only serves to embed the idea that Israel is a dangerous place. It doesn’t allow the reader to think maybe this is an isolated incident — by listing everything that happened before (even if years apart), it gives a negative image of the area.
The most significant problem with currency is context — where does one start to recount events? With thousands of years of history, it’s impossible to go all the way back to the beginning of the land to explain the conflict. But with so many uneducated people in the world, a history lesson would go a long way to eliminate potential biases and confusion. By not giving enough context (or too much), though, reporters run the risk of being tagged as an Israeli or Palestinian sympathizer, depending on the circumstances.
Assumed bias is difficult to avoid with such an emotional topic, especially when people don’t understand the true meaning of “balance and fairness.” Most people expect that “balance and fairness” means equal representation of both sides in a story, which is not the case. In a story where three Israelis are killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber, some sources don’t need to be contacted. For example, there would be no need to speak with a Palestinian about the event — he would say the Israelis got what they deserved, and this would further fan the flames without adding anything of value to the story. At the same time, though, Palestinian sympathizers would say the Western media has once again thwarted them. Still, there is not much a journalist can do to quiet these people.
What then is the role of the media? Clearly there is a large problem facing international news media, as there will be fewer and fewer pages for fewer and fewer staff to devote to such coverage. And, if you’re an international news reporter who needs to get published, you’re going to write about what is traditionally eye-catching — inhumane violence, terrorism, war. As Gradstein mentioned, it’s already hard enough to publish a human-interest story, and it’s only going to get harder given the constraints the news media has to deal with.
The media’s role is generally understood as unbiased observer. The media takes information from various sources, pieces them together in an entertaining and informative way, and then presents them to readers in a logical manner. There is no real room for interpretation, as that would present a sort of bias.
But when you have the pen, when you have the public’s eyes and ears held captive, should you do more, as a journalist, to shape the way the world works? In some ways, journalists accomplish this through editorials. Generally, though, editorials are about more localized or national issues — hardly ever will international events be discussed in an editorial, unless it is giving the American government advice. Therefore, editorial content about the Israel/Palestine conflict is absent unless the U.S. is involved.
There are hardly any stories about terrorist attacks in Israel that mention peace negotiations. It seems to me that such a mention would flow logically in such a story, yet the connection is rarely made. In fact, had second the bulldozer attack not occurred, I doubt I would have even known it was on the same day Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert were meeting to discuss peace. There was no coverage about such a meeting before the attack, only a mention about it after the attack — but no separate story for the meeting was published.
It could very well be that the media has no business sticking its nose in peace talks. Obviously, publishing peace negotiations or progress (if one were lucky enough to retrieve such information) could derail such negotiations or progress. But, at the same time, it could also expedite them. Unfortunately, there are not enough historical examples to point to one direction or the other.
Maybe, though, that means it’s time to start writing about peace in the Middle East instead of violence — however infrequent both of them are.