[Media-watch] Al Jazeera - Israelis better at manipulating media

[David Miller]

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0944B35C-4811-4F44-88EF-F96684DF85F7.
htm






Israelis better at manipulating media
By Dr Toine Van Teeffele
Monday 08 December 2003, 19:07 Makka Time, 16:07 GMT
Dr Toine Van Teeffele

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As a guide and consultant living in Bethlehem, Palestine, I have regularly
coordinated visits for groups of Westerners coming to see Palestinian
reality with their own eyes.


Almost always those visitors felt afterwards that what they saw did not
correspond with the image of Palestine they had before. Somehow the impact
and scope of occupation were never really understood except after
experiencing it first hand.

Why? Lots of causes are at play here, but perhaps none is so important as
the influence of the media. I think three main factors have to be considered
to understand the impact of the western media on the popular image of
occupied Palestine (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip):

*    The work situation and cultural background of Western journalists
working in Palestine and Israel
*    The presentation of the news about the region, and
*    The boundaries of the debate within the media.

A journalist's job

It is a journalist's job to collect facts and interpretations. In the case
of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, it is regrettable to note that from the
first days of the occupation in 1967 few western journalists had the will or
opportunity to live for a prolonged time in a Palestinian town such as Ram
Allah or Gaza. 

The large majority of local correspondents preferred to stay in Israel, West
Jerusalem and sometimes in Arab East Jerusalem as their base for work,
limiting their direct coverage of Palestinian affairs to brief outings to
the central West Bank. They thus developed a rather fragmentary knowledge of
Palestinian society under occupation and little understanding of the various
social and political contexts in which Palestinians tried to pursue their
lives despite the oppression.

This situation has not changed. During the second Intifada (from September
2000) it became impossible for almost all Israelis, including the great
majority of Israeli journalists, to travel or stay in the West Bank and
Gaza. Foreign TV crews became dependent upon Palestinian support staff who
were often unable to travel freely in the occupied territories, while
international crews had to acquire work permits.

Dangerous assignments

Moreover, it became quite dangerous to visit areas of tension, especially
after the Israeli army increasingly harassed and shot at journalists,
Palestinian and international alike. Further, the Israeli army began to
systematically close off areas to foreigners and journalists, such as during
the prolonged curfews of the Palestinian cities in 2002-2003.

"Israel's lies are much cleverer, more sophisticated. When an Israeli
government official provides information, it seems to come from a think tank
that has decided to offer its own brand of media 'spin'."

A French Channel 2 journalist

Nevertheless, despite these limiting circumstances, it still remains, in
principle, possible for foreign journalists to travel and live in the
Palestinian areas, a choice only a shrinking number has made. So their
access to the ongoing events of the Intifada and to the Palestinian
interpretations of the contexts in which the present-day events occur,
remains limited. 

To take one example: Western journalists are more quickly on the scene when
a Palestinian attack against Israelis happens in the streets of Jerusalem
than when Palestinians are killed in a clash in Hebron. Consequently, the
reporting on Palestinian victims lacks the salience, immediacy, drama and
contextualisation characteristic for the reporting of attacks on Israelis.

Apart from issues of access and presence, one also has to take into account
the cultural background of the western journalists, who are often more
familiar with modern Israeli life (including the Hebrew language, in the
case of the Israeli or Jewish journalists who report for international
media), than with the Palestinian or Arab way of life.

Stereotypical reports

It is hard to imagine that this does not have an influence upon the subjects
and ways of reporting. On an analytic level, it is not uncommon to see that
journalists resort to well-known and stereotypical labels such as
"fanaticism", "fundamentalism", "tribalism", and "Islam" as all-encompassing
explanation schemes for ongoing violent events on the Palestinian side, and
neglect the detailed influences of occupation, domination, history, and
local or personal context they would have better known when living there.

"When the Palestinians exaggerate or lie, it is apparent almost immediately"

A French Channel 2 journalist

It is also safe to say that journalists take interpretations of the Israeli
government and army more seriously - although not at face value - than
official or unofficial Palestinian comments.

A French Channel 2 journalist observed: "When the Palestinians exaggerate or
lie, it is apparent almost immediately. The lie is raw and it is basic.
Israel's lies are much cleverer, more sophisticated. When an Israeli
government official provides information, it seems to come from a think tank
that has decided to offer its own brand of media 'spin'." [Palestine-Israel
Journal, Vol. 10, no. 2, pp.19-20].

The official Israeli PR is also logistically better equipped and better
staffed in terms of checking out or following up stories than the
Palestinian PR, which has only recently become more helpful, and then
primarily at the NGO level (compare the increasing professionalism of media
services such as the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center and the
Palestine Monitor).

Moreover, Arab newspapers appear only in Arabic while some major Israeli
newspapers (Jerusalem Post, Haaretz) appear in English, thus allowing for a
daily stream of Israeli-oriented reports and analyses easily accessible
through the internet.

In fact, most western journalists are more familiar with the realities of
occupation through the critical accounts of the Israeli Haaretz journalists
Amira Hass and Gideon Levi than through accounts from the Palestinian or
Arab press.

The final edit

The journalists in the field are only partially responsible for how their
accounts appear in the press or on the screen. The final, edited accounts
tend to further filter out elements that challenge the expectations of
western readers, advertisers and political elites.

There have been several pieces of research by organisations such as FAIR,
the International Press Institute and the Electronic Intifada about
selectivity and bias in western (especially American) media reports of
violence by Israelis and Palestinians. Palestinian victims are less (and
less prominently) reported than Israeli victims. (Compare the tendency in
the western media to report about a period of "calm" when there are no
Israeli victims while there may at the same time be scores of Palestinian
victims.) 

Israeli actions of violence are more often described in terms of a neutral
or routine operation of a state army and also as a response to Palestinian
violence ("retaliation" and the use of the Israeli term "Israeli Defence
Forces" or "security forces" instead of, for instance, "Israeli army").

The vehicle in a US diplomatic
convoy blown up in the Gaza StripPalestinian violence is dramatised and
looks somehow aggressive by nature. On the other hand, the structural
violence and illegitimacy of the occupation is less emphasised in most
western accounts. Mainstream news media refer to the settlements which are
part of "greater Jerusalem" as "neighbourhoods", while - importantly - most
accounts, especially in the US, employ terms such as "disputed territories"
or "the [Palestinian] territories" rather than "the occupied [Palestinian]
territories" or "occupied Palestine" when referring to the West Bank, Gaza
and East Jerusalem.

Such linguistic representations of the conflict steer the reader's or
viewer's attributions of blame and cause-effect relationships, in other
words their interpretations and viewpoints of the conflict.

Viewpoints

The media also provide space to more elaborate viewpoints through their
op-ed pages, background interviews, or in solicited comments from experts,
spokespersons, or the public.

What range of viewpoints is allowed for? There seem to be three major
paradigms that appear in the opinion pages or programmes of the western
media with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

a) Israelis have the right to security and Palestinian violence against
Israel is illegitimate;
b) the conflict represents a vicious circle of violence that has to be
broken down through negotiations and mediation;
c) the conflict is essentially one between an unlawful occupation and an
occupied, unprotected people.

Most western opinion, I suspect, can be placed, with fluctuations, within
the continuum between a and b, whereas opinions on the continuum between b
and c are less available, especially in the US.

This limitation has to do with the familiar causes that in general prevent
an open democratic debate: the closeness of the mainstream American media to
political elites, the concern for the acquisition of adverts, and the impact
of a celebratory group of conservative opinion-leaders within the
prestigious media. 

In the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an influential role in the
opinion business is also played by Israeli hasbara (state propaganda).

Camp David coverage

Yasir Arafat, portrayed by
Israeli TV as a conspirator For instance, after the breakdown of the
negotiations at Camp David in summer 2000, and the beginning of the
subsequent Intifada, Israeli media specialists undertook a concerted effort
to disseminate a narrative which foregrounded on the one hand Israeli
generosity in the negotiations (on Jerusalem especially) and on the other
hand the supposed betrayal by Arafat who was presented as a conspirator
whipping up an armed insurrection.

Significantly, the story undermined the Palestinian narrative in so far as
that the Palestinian demands were presented as unreasonable (rather than
justified by international law) while the reason for rebellion was
considered not to be located in the difficult circumstances of occupation
but in the dictatorial powers of one person. The same applies to the
identification of Arafat with Saddam Hussein by many opinion leaders in the
media. 

So the general conclusion must be that the mainstream western media, even
more so in the US, do not provide an empathetic, coherent, insightful,
factual, contextualised and detailed account of the Palestinian narrative as
rooted in the daily life under occupation and arising out of a collective
longing and striving for freedom in a national state.

Obviously, the power of the media is such that an underdeveloped
representation of the Palestinian story influences politics. Having
international law and a worldwide consensus about the need for a Palestinian
state on one's side is not enough when the main influential political actors
and their audiences do not fully understand one's basic narrative.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dr Toine van Teeffelen received his PhD in discourse analysis from the
University of Amsterdam on the subject of images of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict in western popular literature. He presently is an educational
consultant as well as a representative of peace movements in Palestine. His
letters from Bethlehem are distributed by, among others, the Electronic
Intifada.

-----------------------------------------------------------
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.


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