Different Media Coverage of Israel-Palestine Conflict

The movie Wag the Dog is supposedly a fictitious impression ab bring out(p) a group of openity managers who fabricate a war in an unknow country in the bosom East and then release their publicity magic in order to create the persona of a president in charge. The movie was a highly comical yet fascinating look at how mass media easily manipulates the public into believing what they want the public to believe. What is highly disturbing is that the movie, made by Hollywood for the entertainment of the masses, is real based on reality.This reality is deeply embedded in the Israel heaven conflict that has been raging on for as far back as I can remember. Politics is a very dirty and secretive game. The government and its supporters depart utilize anything and everything in order to achieve their endgame. The public is the unwitting beget in this power struggle and the controlling method of choice is the mass media. The manipulation happens so high up in the government power pow er structure that even the media no longer elucidates that their supposedly independent and free thinking job of keeping the public assured is a well thought out and planned outcome of Washingtons needs.Media reportage of the Israel-Palestine conflict is considered an important alikel in understanding the source of their bad blood relationship. The media reports that are seen knowledge basewide are an prestigious source both semipolitical and social support for both nations. This is the reality that is presented to the world and it is the basis for the creation of a strong public imprint all in support of or against the goings on amongst the twain countries.In the opinion column of Sonia Nettnin that she entitled U.S. Media Coverage of Israel-Palestine passage of arms, she informed her hearers about the reality of who authentically controls the US Media when it comes to the reportage of the Israel Palestine conflict Few Americans realize that U. S. mainstream media re portage of the Israel-Palestine conflict passes through Americas political elites, Israeli public relations organizations and private American organizations, before it reaches the public. In other words, we get the sanitized version of the reports.Nothing we see on the nightly intelligence service, or hear on the radio reports, even what we read in the intelligence agency intelligence informationpapers, can be taken to be the unabridged truth of the goings on in that part of the world. She invites her readers to watch the film Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land U. S. Media and the Israel Palestine Conflict in order to realize how much our media is censored without realizing it. Nettnin specifically wants the viewers to understand how the director of the film, Sut JhallyExamines how these filters distort the realities on the ground. It demonstrates how through word choice, limited diachronic circumstance and unmatched-sided perspectives, U. S. journalists provide the Ame rican public with limited news reporting. The medias misinformation campaign is actually a public relations manipulation being masterminded by American corporations and lobbyist groups. The manipulation of the news allows the media and various interests groups to mold the public opinion towards beliefs that will be beneficial to those concerned.Simple word play can totally neuter the way news video footage is presented to the public. In reference to an actual event that happened in September 3, 2001, Nettnin relates that Through interviews with journalists, media analysts and political activists, the film explores the co-opted medias techniques for reporting the conflict and mobilizing public opinion. For example, on September 3, 2001, a news network did not want its journalists referring to the Israeli settlement, Gilo, as a settlement. Instructions given to journalists explained that ?We dont refer to it as a settlement? so in one of the networks news clips that followed, the journalist reporting from Gilo used the officially substituted word neighborhood. The word change altered the perspective of the news report drasttically because it removed an perception of colonization from the reports context. Clearly, replacing or eliminating words from a report can assist with removing skepticism about the nature of its pendant matter. Moreover, it helps modify public perceptions as to who is the aggressor.Last February 5, 2006, Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew (IAK) presented a compelling power point presentation titled Israel-Palestine What the Media Leave Out at the Meditation centre in Fairfax, California. Here, she showed her audience of 14 great deal her personal statistical analysis pertaining to the American media reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to her, their group research discovered that television reports lotion the conflicts between September 2000 2001 reportedIsraeli deaths at a ratio of three to four times gr eater than reports of Palestinians killed. In addition, Israeli deaths frequently would energize a prominent follow-up report, whereas Palestinian deaths were rarely reported even once. What further disturbs Weir is that this pattern of inaccurate and dark reporting continues to be the format for news reports of similar events up to the present time of the conflict. Basically, the whole world will depict the ongoing war between Israel and Palestine based upon reports coming out of the USA.This is because the USA is considered the World Police by majority of the nations thereby giving the country the right to dictate how other countries will be viewed in the context of a battle. According to a joint article entitled Americas One-Eyed View of War Stars, Stripes, and the Star of David by Andrew Gumbel and Donald Macintyre of The Independent at that place are two sides to every conflict unless you rely on the US media for information about the battle in Lebanon.Viewers suffer been fed a diet of partisan coverage that treats Israel as the good guys and their Hizbollah enemy as the incarnation of evil. American media has portrayed the Hisbollah as the bad guys in this ongoing religious war. This is not to regularise that the Hizbollas are not the bad guys, but the Israelis, the people viewed as the innocents may not really be all that clean either. But, the U. S. has made such a clear attenuated decision on who the bad guys are in this scenario that the attitude of the country has left no room for any sort of over bit on the report.While watching the cable news reports, I have come to realize that the reason we feel such empathy for the Israelis is because these networks all have their reporters in the buddy-buddy of the action within Israel and none in Palestine. There is also a lack of real interest in getting a professional opinion from a historical expert who is familiar with the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But, the report goes on to say th at A startling amount of airtime, meanwhile, is given to the likes of Michael D Evans, an end-of-the-world Biblical illusionist with no credentials in the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.He has shown up on MSNBC and Fox under the label Middle East analyst. Foxs default analyst, on this and galore(postnominal) other issues, has been the right- extension phone provocateur and best- conducting author Ann Coulter, whose main credential is to have opined, days after 9/11, that what America should do to the Middle East is invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. It is said that the Bush Administration has a solid view of the Hizbollah as, according to Gumbel and MacintyrePart of a giant anti-Israeli and anti-American terror network that also includes Hamas, al-Qaida, the governments of Syria and Iran, and the insurgents in Iraq. It is this view that the media of the world has interpreted and believed. Mainly because the conflict is presented i n such a cut and dried manner by the United States government that nobody will dare to ask questions such as what the difference between the 2 groups are or perhaps wonder aloud as to what their goals might be. Mainly because according to San Francisco rabbi Michael LernerThere is no major figure in American political life who has been willing to raise the issue of the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people, or even talk about them as human beings. The organised Judaic community has transformed the image of Judaism into a cheering squad for the Israeli government, whatever its policies are. That is just idolatry, and goes against all the warnings in the Bible about giving too much power to the king or the state. But just like everything else that has to do with war, the media has slowly come to realize that Palestinians are not just people across the border from Israel.They too have their own stories to tell about the atrocities of war, and, their story must be told as well. Ac cording to the video Der Yassin Remembered Westerners now realize that Palestinians, as a people, do exist. And they have come to acknowledge that during the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 were driven or frightened from their homes and lands on which they had lived for centuries. Deeper research into this topic led me to information about how the Czech media handles the reporting of the aforementioned events.In her article Are Czech Media Reports on the Arab World Objective, Dita Asiedu asked Jan Krecek, a force member at Charles University if the Czech media was providing the public with an truthful coverage of the events in the Middle East and the Arab World. The reply received was quite straightforward The media institutions are prevalent firms that are working on the market and you can see it in their content the news is somewhat biased. This is because they have to make a profit. He points out that the worldwide medi a exercises 2 different powers when reporting the news.That of a selective power when deciding what news feeds are newsworthy, and descriptive power, or the power to choose how a story is presented. These are the main moneymakers for the company and are therefore are the major factors in making their decisions. When Czech reporters are asked wherefore they report so little about the real status of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the usual reply is that Arab countries seem to have a closed door policy when it comes to information dissemination. According to Bretislav Turecek, reporter for Pravo, a paper in CzechoslovakiaEven Arab journalists who go to Israel see an openness of the Israelis its mathematical to call the spokesman of the Israeli Army 24 hours a day and its possible to reach the spokesman of the Prime Minister. This is really unusual in most of the Muslim countries in the Middle East, where there are so many restrictions for journalists, or principally for unknowners . So Israel knows use the foreign press for its purpose in both the positive and the negative way. As Mr. Turecek mentioned, the Arab community is not really interested in sharing their views and information with the rest of the world.Which is why my research turned up no Middle East media views on the media coverage of the Israel Palestine conflict. Instead, what I did turn up were the opinions of various Israeli and Palestinian citizens who have migrated to the USA and have shared their personal views with the western sandwich media. Thus, it is this viewpoint that will be thrust of my paper from this point on. Leon T. Hadar, author of Quagmire America in the Middle East is also a former New York correspondent attached to the Jerusalem Post. He related that during a conference discussing Is the American media coverage of Middle East biased? which he attended 2 years ago.He was hosted by the New York clock and Washington Post who allowed him to present various media reports rela ted to the Israeli Palestinian conflict to his audience and asked them to guess what particular newspaper covered the issue. He blow out of the water the audience when he told them that the articles were not from American, British, nor European based newspapers. Nobody could believe that The articles, however, were all published in the prima(p) Israeli Hebrew- voice communication daily, Haaretz, also known as the New York Times of Israel.Haaretz is read by government officials, business executives, and the professional and intellectual elites in Israel. In addition to its exceptional coverage of current events, which has garnered the newspaper many national and international awards, Haaretz carries editorials and commentaries that help set the public agenda in Israel. It is a must read among diplomats and foreign correspondents stationed in Israel, who receive a more accurate and balanced picture of what is happening there than the one presented by most leading American newspaper s.Haaretz unconnected the Times or the Posteven employs a full-time correspondent who is stationed in the West Bank and Gaza and who provides the Palestinian perspective on the conflict, which explains why the articles by correspondent Amira Hess were considered so pro-Arab by my hosts. Additionally, he mentions that Questioning the credibility of news reports from the Middle East has been one of the major tools of American Jews trying to cope with the inveterate cognitive dissonance.I am amazed sometimes that, even in this age of the internet, with Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers maintaining English-language websites and cable news networks broadcasting around the clock, for many American Jews (and for many Christian evangelicals), Israel still remains a fantasyand they would like to keep it that way. Meanwhile, Remi Kanazi of the Palestine Monitor author if the article US Media prejudice Covering Israel/Palestine and was really troubled by the marked discrepancies between reports from CNN and Haaretz regarding an encounter between Israel Palestine troopsThe contrast in coverage between CNN and Haaretz is staggering. The CNN headline was written in absolutes 5 militants shot in raid. The CNN article continues by stating only the Israeli claim that five militants were killed, making the headline biased and misleading. The Haaretz headline read U. S. urges restraint after IDF raid that killed 5 Palestinians. This headline refers to the people who were shot as Palestinians and not solely militants. The Haaretz article covers conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims, which made it impossible to determine whether or not all five killed were militants or civiliansHe mentions that he considers CNN and The New York Times . as left wing media outlets and wonders why they never present the Palestinian side of the war. He claims that the answer is that both companies are neither liberal nor honest. They are simply out to sell a product and will only cover a story properly if covering it does not pose a risk of losing readers or advertisement revenues. But, it is not to say that the only reason there is a slant in the coverage of this war is for financial or political reasons. Both Israel and Palestine accuse the media of being bias although these accusations have never been proven.One of the main reasons that Israel gets more news coverage in both print and television news the world over is because Israel knows how to play the lobby and public relations game. Israel has put together a highly impressive public relations team that speaks English, has knowledge of western media, and is very much at home being interviewed in front of the camera. The same public relations department also insures that informative emails are practice to various news wires everyday. On the other hand, Palestinians, due to their intense secrecy, prevents itself from presenting their side of any given situation.Their grasp of the English language is so poor t hat the language ends up a mangled mess when they try to communicate in it thus opening themselves to misinterpretation each time anybody from their side is interviewed. The roads leading to and from Palestine are also hard to traverse making the best way to get an interview from them over the phone. They also do not have an efficient public relations team and only manages to send out about 5 emails a week to keep the international press informed of their situation.These are but a few reasons that explain why the Western news teams rarely get assigned to cover such country territories. There is so little for the other world media to go on when covering Palestine so that they instead spend their time explaining to their readers and viewers about why they dont have any information that is necessary to explain what is going on to them. For far too long, Israelis have been using the term war against terror in a manner that exploits the current actions of Palestine against Israel.It is t his Israeli battle cry that has gotten the most media coverage over the decades much to the detriment of the Palestinians who are seemingly unavailing to express themselves effectively to the world. Quite recently though, there seem to have been observable changes to the way the Israel-Palestine conflict has bee playing out. With the support of British 24 hours news channel BBC, once formally accused of bias leaning towards the side of Israelis, there has been a slowly developing trend towards improving news coverage in the area. Nachman Shai an Israeli spokesman was asked about how he viewed the media coverage of the war and he repliedIt (meaning the media coverage of the Israel Palestine conflict) has gradually become more balanced than in the graduation exercisethe media are now seeing more of the complicated issues than at the beginning, because of the indiscriminate violence of the suicide bombers against the Israeli population. The bottom line is that the varying difference s in the medias coverage of the ongoing Israel Palestine conflict is due to the very conflicting reports coming out of the opposing camps. Reporters are seemingly welcome only on one side of the border and this certainly affects the way they present the information they gather to the public.There is no bias or hidden agenda on the medias side. It is simply a matter of using the information that they can get their hands on in the best way they know how. Perhaps in the future, all of this will change and their will finally be a balanced and unbiased view of the events as they unfold in the Middle East. After all whether he is a television or print journalist, the main objective of a news reporter remains the same. To present the events as they happen in unbiased reporting styles.