In this article we will to look into some of the constraints
shaping the mainstream mass media with regard to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and assess bias on both sides, as well
as a few of the wider implications for media freedom and democracy.
We will first examine the media in two of the most powerful
countries in the world, namely in the US and Israel, and then turn
to the Arabic-language media. Finally, we will look at the
structure of propaganda, and compare Israeli and Palestinian
efforts.
Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, has described
Israeli propaganda during the Al Aqsa Intifada as unprecedented in
terms of effectiveness.
"Never have the media been so influential in determining the course
of war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada...Israel has already poured
hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called
hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda).
This has included: ...lunches and free trips for influential
journalists...bombarding congressmen and -women with invitations
and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election
campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, harassing)
photographers and writers of the current Intifada into producing
certain images and not others...training commentators to make
frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament
today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and
praising Israel... Because so many powerful people in the media and
publishing business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is
made vastly easier."1
Pro-Israeli Bias in the US Media
Public broadcasters - by law required to be neutral and objective -
exhibit some deeply disturbing bias and misinformation about the
conflict, especially those in the US. The American media monitoring
organization, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has
repeatedly expressed concern about this. For example, a FAIR study
of six months of the National Public Radio (NPR) network's coverage
found that 81 percent of Israeli conflict-related deaths were
reported, but only 34 percent of Palestinian deaths. Strikingly,
NPR was even less likely to report the deaths of Palestinian minors
killed; only 20 percent of these deaths were reported, as compared
to 89 percent of Israeli minors' deaths. While NPR was more apt to
cover Israeli civilian deaths than those of Israeli security
personnel (84 percent vs. 69 percent), the reverse was true with
Palestinians (20 percent vs. 72 percent)2. With the current
relative death tolls (around 75 percent of those killed in the
Intifada so far were Palestinian, 25 percent Jewish), this bias
means that consumers of US public media are likely to believe that
nearly 50 percent of the people killed were Jews, and most of the
children killed were Jews, too.
The privately owned American media are even more biased. In a
separate report, FAIR analyzed the use of the terms, "retaliation",
"retaliate", "retaliatory", etc. in nightly news broadcasts from
September 28, 2000 through March 17, 2002 by the three main
broadcasting networks, NBC, CBS and ABC. The findings indicated
that 79 percent of the time the words were used to describe Israeli
acts of violence. Palestinian violent acts, however, were only
described with these words in 9 percent of the cases. (12 percent
were ambiguous or used to describe violent acts by both sides in
the conflict). The impression was thus fostered that Israel acts
violently in self-defense, in response to violence initiated by
their foes, almost nine times more than the Palestinians do. It
should not be forgotten in this context that in reality both the
first use of firearms, the first five deaths and the first hundreds
of gunshot wounds in the Al Aqsa Intifada were all perpetrated by
Israeli soldiers and policemen.3
When Israelis are killed by Palestinians, the acts are often
referred to by the US media as the end of a "calm" period, as a
"flare-up in violence". For example, on September 18 and 19, 2002,
six Israelis were killed in the first two Palestinian suicide bomb
attacks in six weeks. All major US news outlets referred to the
preceding six weeks as "calm". However, during that time, 54
Palestinians were killed by Israelis, most of them unarmed
civilians, totally uninvolved in resistance activities. At least
seven of the Palestinians killed during this time were children, at
least 15 were teenagers, and two were women.4
Similar bias was shown when the US and other Western media
commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the 1972 murders in
Munich of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes by Palestinian militants.
The anniversary story received blanket coverage by American media,
whereas the twentieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila
massacres, in which at least many hundreds, and probably thousands
of Palestinians were murdered due to intervention by then Defense
Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, was quietly passed over. That
anniversary fell 10 days after the Munich one, but it was almost
completely ignored by the US media, although the number of victims
was more than a hundred times greater, although it took place more
recently, and although one of the main perpetrators again, holds
considerable power in world politics and is commander-in-chief of
one of the largest military powers in the world. The few short
mentions that the twentieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila
massacres received in the US mass media all left out the
inconvenient facts that Sharon is now prime minister of Israel and
thus, apparently, that the US's closest ally, which receives the
most military aid and most overall aid from the US, is headed by a
war criminal.5
The Israeli Media and the Media in Israel
In Israel itself, the media are often not as biased as in the US.
First and foremost, media commentators who are not Jewish and who
are outside Israel have a harder time criticizing Israel for fear
of being accused of "anti-semitism".6 Moreover, in Israel, it is
impossible to avoid some of the basic facts about Israel and its
occupied territories to the same extent that this is being done
abroad, especially when it comes to geographic and demographic
facts. This does not mean, however, that the Israeli media or the
elites' treatment of them or of foreign media are superior to their
counterparts in the US in any moral sense.
Israeli state restrictions on reporting in areas under its rule
have eased with increasing military power and self-confidence, but
the restrictions are still severe. Compared to earlier conflicts,
journalists are now allowed to get closer to the action during
small-scale military operations, but not during large-scale
operations. By the summer of 2003, our own research at the
International Press Institute showed that the Israeli harnessing of
the media, oreign and domestic, was highlighted by over 240
incidents of journalists being obstructed, harassed, attacked or
shot by Israelis during the first 32 months of the Al Aqsa
Intifada. In this context, it should not be forgotten that the
Palestinian Authority (PA) also violates the basic human right to
freedom of expression, especially in order to silence radical
anti-Israeli journalists, columnists and publications. This,
however, is mainly due to political pressure on the PA from the
Israelis and the Americans, who, above all, wish for Palestinians
to silence radical Palestinians.
Still, we found that at least 82 percent of all the press freedom
violations so far in the Al Aqsa Intifada were perpetrated by the
Israelis themselves. Aside from the targeting of journalists,
including at least eight shooting deaths, this also comprised air
force bombings and missile attacks on Palestinian media outlets,
which are accused by the Israelis of spreading propaganda. There
are no corresponding attacks on Israeli media outlets perpetrated
by Palestinians.7 Indeed, many experienced war correspondents have
reportedly stated that they have never encountered such rough
treatment as they are receiving from the Israeli army.8
Newspapers Under the Influence, a book on Israeli daily newspaper
coverage of the initial weeks of the Al Aqsa Intifada, concludes
that objectivity did exist in that coverage, but mainly in the back
pages.9 In an article on similarities and differences between South
African and Israeli apartheid with regard to newspapers, Raymond
Louw - the former editor-in-chief of the main anti-apartheid
newspaper in South Africa, the Rand Daily Mail - recalled the
similar financial pressures that Haaretz, the main liberal daily in
Israel, faced during the beginning of the most recent Intifada. Due
to financial withdrawals, readers canceling subscriptions and
companies canceling advertisements, the Rand Daily Mail had to
close down in 1985, at the height of the South African uprising.10
Although censorship, harassment and brute force against the media,
perpetrated by the privileged ethnic group, was (is) present in
both apartheid societies, these extreme measures were found by the
elites to be less efficient, and less objectionable to the
international community, than financial pressures combined with
propaganda.
The Cable News Network (CNN), part of the largest media corporation
in the world, Time Warner Turner, reported on its website on the
first day of hostilities that Palestinian protesters had pelted
Israeli worshippers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with stones11,
whereas in reality they had thrown stones at some 1,000 Israeli
policemen and soldiers who had accompanied the rightwing Likud
party leader and subsequent prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to the
Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. The armed Israeli forces had
provocatively taken up sniper positions on street corners, squares
and the roofs of buildings, etc., on a Friday of all days, the
Muslim religious day of rest and prayer. Five Palestinians were
shot dead and hundreds were wounded, at least 32 of them seriously,
by the visiting soldiers, who thus sparked the outbreak of the
second Intifada, and the ensuing intense hostilities. Not a single
shot was fired by Palestinians on that first day. Nor were any
Israeli killed, although a few soldiers were injured by stones.12
In the following year, Hamas and Islamic Jihad resumed a
retaliatory suicide attack campaign, dormant since 1996, targeting
Jewish soldiers, settlers and civilians in the occupied territories
as well as in "Israel proper".13
Meanwhile, the propaganda machines continue to mix their
information with half-truths and lies: Israeli armed forces on
occupied foreign soil are mostly referred to in US as well as
European media as "security forces", Palestinian demonstrators on
the other hand as "rioters" or "militants". The Israeli occupation
army, which has created the largest mass of refugees in the world
and is responsible for the longest period of military occupation in
post-World War II history, is habitually referred to by its
self-styled naming, the "Israeli Defense Force." In a June 2002
special on Jewish victims of Palestinian attacks, CNN's website
again blatantly ignored coverage of Palestinian victims of the
conflict and referred to illegal Jewish settlements as
"neighborhoods". The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip was perversely related by CNN to the US's
"War on Terrorism", implicitly equating all Palestinians with
terrorists.14
Heavy pro-Israeli pressure is also exerted on what to many must
seem to be very unlikely targets. Powerful media that display deep
pro-Israeli bias, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN,
and the BBC, are subjected to a barrage of criticism, even
(temporary) boycotts, for being pro-Palestinian as soon as there is
the slightest hint of criticism of Israel voiced within these
media.15
The Palestinian and Arab Media
Commenting on the systematic destruction of the Palestinian media
in this Intifada, Captain Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army (IDF)
spokesperson, said: "We cannot underestimate the role of
Palestinian media in the incitement of people to violence, and it
is this belief - that the Palestinian media air programs that
glorify violence and suicide bombings against Israelis - that leads
the IDF to attack Palestinian media outlets repeatedly." In a
letter of protest, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists
said that it had analysed the Voice of Palestine broadcasts and
found them to be non-military in purpose, thus challenging the
Israeli attempt to justify its attacks on the station.16
As far as we have seen, it has yet to be proven that Palestinian
and Arab media promote violence, although it is evident that they
sometimes provide biased news and generally feed the Arab street a
diet of anti-western and anti-Israeli propaganda, and that the
Palestinian Authority occasionally restricts media freedoms.
Palestinians and Arabs in general are well aware of the power of
the mass media. According to the Palestinian journalist and media
critic, Daoud Kuttab, "Al-Jazeera has been for this Intifada what
CNN was for the Gulf War."17 On the global stage, however, the Arab
media are preaching to a minority of converts, whereas the Israelis
are able to appeal to the absolute majority as well as to the most
powerful audiences.
Conclusion
This, then, is how the wide concept of hasbara, or propaganda,
works, and why, as Said indicated, it costs Israel hundreds of
millions of dollars to practice, i.e. why it is one of the most
expensive propaganda enterprises ever undertaken: On a first level,
words, expressions and images are carefully selected and
manipulated to give both reporting and commentary a pro-Israeli
spin. Lies do not necessarily appear at this stage, but reality is
often bent out of recognition, due to extreme bias and selectivity.
The people carrying out this manipulation are not necessarily being
paid by the Israeli state or by any other Israeli apartheid
institutions. Some are even doing it unconsciously, taking over
bits of propaganda directly from pro-Israeli spin-doctors, or
second-hand, from news agencies and other powerful media,
reorganizing them superficially, and passing them on to the public
without even realizing their deep bias. Once you have seen the same
phrase a few times, e.g. "Israel retaliates", from a small number
of trusted sources, you do not stop to question them any more. That
is simply part of common journalistic practice, even if it goes
against most journalistic standards. Public relations professionals
have made sure that Israeli spokespersons charm journalists and the
public into believing that army operations are necessary and as
humanitarian in execution as possible. The character and extent of
human rights violations perpetrated by Israelis are thus downplayed
severely. Violations perpetrated by Palestinians, on the other
hand, are, as we have seen, habitually and vastly exaggerated.
Secondly, there is in hasbara a great deal of lobbying, courtship
and even bribery of important information-brokers. These two first
levels are expensive and labor-intensive kinds of propaganda
activity, which the Israelis and their allies can afford, but the
Palestinians and theirs generally cannot.
Thirdly, there are misleading official Israeli statements of
denial, suppression of the truth and lies that are spread and
upheld as much as possible, and then often again denied, i.e. the
Israelis lie a second time by denying that they ever told the
original lie, which is by now old news. Because of that,
journalists are often too confused and weary to follow up on the
story, and media consumers mostly too tired or too distracted to
follow.
Fourth, if they should persist with trying to show the world some
of the ugly truths about Israeli apartheid - even if unintended -
writers, reporters and cameramen are obstructed, intimidated,
beaten, shot at, often wounded and sometimes killed by Israeli
armed forces, with almost total impunity. Cameras, film, videotapes
and other kinds of records of human rights violations are also
confiscated and/or destroyed by the Israeli powers that be.
Articles and books are rejected due to their contents by
pro-Israeli editors and publishers. Journalists are harassed,
intimidated and/or fired.
Finally, if all else fails, media hardware and infrastructure,
including whole broadcasting stations, are destroyed with heavy
military means.18 The atter three levels of violations of the
freedom of expression and of the right to free access to
information are basic human rights according to Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other conventions and
treaties to which both Israel and the US are signatories. They are
also are the easiest and cheapest means of oppression. Journalists
and writers are unarmed, non-combatant civilians. Much of the
Israeli weaponry and ammunition, in contrast, comes entirely free
of charge from the US federal budget. This is the cheapest and
easiest form of hasbara, but, interestingly, the Palestinians
hardly employ it at all, compared to the Israelis.19 In our
opinion, this could be because the Palestinians have less to
hide.
1 Said, Edward W.: Propaganda and War, ZNet, September 2001,
http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/propwar.htm. See also Pilger, John:
Why My Film is Under Fire: The Pro-Israel Lobby Intimidates
Journalists to Ensure that Most Coverage Remains Biased in Its
Favour, The Guardian, September 23, 2002.
2 FAIR, Action Alert: For NPR, Violence Is Calm If It's Violence
Against Palestinians, January 10, 2002,
http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-israel-quiet.html.
3 FAIR, Action Alert: In U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel
Retaliates, April 4, 2002,
http://www.fair.org/activism/network-retaliation.html
4 Brown, Michael and Abunimah, Ali: Killings of Dozens Once Again
Called Period of Calm by US Media, Electronic Intifada, September
20, 2002, ZNet,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2364.
See also FAIR, January 10, 2002. According to FAIR, this action
alert prompted 'at least several hundred people' to protest the
biased use of 'calm' by contacting NPR and complaining about its
flagrant misuse of public funds for pro-Israeli propaganda. Yet in
spite of this campaign no improvement with regard to this bias in
the NPR coverage of the conflict could be detected a month later.
See FAIR: Activism Update: NPR Continues Distortion on Mideast
'Calm', February 5, 2002,
http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-calm-update.html.
5 Abunimah, Ali: How the US Media Forget and Remember an
Anniversary, The Electronic Intifada, September 18, 2002, ,
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article686.shtml. See also
Eltantawi, Sarah: US Media Turn a Blind Eye to the Israeli
Occupation, WACC, Media Development Journal, 3, 2002,
http://www.wacc.org.uk/publications/md/md2002-3/eltantawi.html;
Dunsky, Marda: What Constitutes Full and Fair Media Coverage of
Israeli-Palestinian Issues? WACC, Media Development Journal, 3,
2002,
http://www.wacc.org.uk/publications/md/md2002-3/dunsky.html.
6 Fisk, Robert: How To Shut Up Your Critics With A Single Word, The
Independent, October 22, 2002, Herman, Edward S.: Anti-Semitism,
Swans, ZNet, November 25, 2002,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2663
7 Bathish, Nisreen; Khalidi, Natasha; Larsson, Charlotta; Leaper,
Glenn; L?wstedt, Anthony; Mahdoun, Husam; Orlova, Diana Varghese,
Reena: Press Freedom Violations in Israel and Occupied Palestinian
Areas, September 28, 2000 - May 20, 2003, Vienna: International
Press Institute, http://www.freemedia.at/intifada.htm, 2003
(forthcoming)
8 Perlmutter, David D.: Spin Doctors in the Middle East, IPI Global
Journalist, Second Quarter, 2002. Observers who are not
journalists, e.g. representatives of the UN and other
intergovernmental, as well as non-governmental organizations, human
rights activists, etc., are also hindered and in some cases even
killed by the Israelis. See N.N.: WHO Assembly Condemns Israel,
Associated Press, May 21, 2001; N.N.: Amnesty Says Israel Shutting
Out Foreign Scrutiny, Reuters, May 9, 2003; Gershberg, Michele:
Israel Steps Up Crackdown on Foreign Activists, Reuters, May 9,
2003.
9 Dor, Daniel: Newspapers Under the Influence (in Hebrew), Bavel
Publishers, 2001: 19, reviewed in Lavie, Aviv: All the News that
Fits, Haaretz, October 19, 2001. See also Harrer, Gudrun: Konflikt
findet auch in den Medien statt, Der Standard (Vienna), August 9,
2002. On the concept of democratic journalism, see Kunczik, Michael
(Ed.): Ethics in Journalism: A Reader on their Perception in the
Third World, Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1999.
10 Louw, Raymond: Dealing with Hostile Readers, IPI Global
Journalist, Third Quarter, 2001: 29. The main differences related
by Louw are, again, differences of degree rather than of kind: the
intensity of censorship in South Africa and the whole-hearted
rejection of apartheid in the wide sense by all members of his
staff, as opposed to members of the staff at Haaretz in Israel.
Nevertheless, Louw's visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories
was sponsored by the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, Hanoch Marmari,
and Louw recounts how some of the newspaper's Jewish reporters did
criticize Israel for implementing 'apartheid' during a visit to the
West Bank that Louw undertook with them.
11 CNN, September 29, 2000. It is symptomatic that CNN chose white
South Africans for their two senior correspondents from Israel and
Palestine, Jerold Kessel and Mike Hanna, during the beginning of
the low-intensity Israeli-Palestinian war from September 2000. The
bias in its reporting did not diminish in any way, rather the
opposite.
12 Miftah: Statement: Israeli Massacre of Palestinian Civilians
Continues, October 2, 2000,
http://www.miftah.org/PrinterF.cfm?DocId=57; see also Shalal-Esa,
Andrea: Israel's Sharon Again Rejects Blame, Regrets Deaths,
Reuters, October 4, 2000 and Ackerman, Seth: The Myth of the
Generous Offer: Distorting the Camp David Negotiations, Extra! The
Magazine of FAIR, August 2002, Vol. 15, No. 4,
http://www.fair.org/extra/0207/generous.html. Amnesty International
criticized Israel for using military rather than policing methods
in the fighting, though the international news media and world
leaders on the whole paid scant attention to this side of the
story. For a rare exception see N.N.: Amnesty Slams Israel's
"Excessive Force", Reuters, October 22, 2000.
13 N.N.: Israel and the Palestinians: Yes to a Ceasefire, No to a
Halt on Settlements, The Economist, May 26, 2001: 47f
14 Abunimah, Ali & Parry, Nigel: CNN Negates Victims And
Ignores International Law, Electronic Intifada, June 27, 2002,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2043
15 Herman November 25, 2002
16 N.N.: Israel: IDF Troops Destroy Palestinian Broadcast
Facilities in Gaza, Committee to Protect Journalists, February 21,
2002, http://www.cpj.org/news/2002/Israel21feb02na.html; Campagna,
Joel: Picking Up the Pieces, CPJ Special Report, New York:
Committee to Protect Journalists, June 13, 2002,
http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2002/West_Bank_june02/West_Bank_june02.html
17 Quoted in Schleifer, S. Abdallah: Egyptian Media Waxes and Wanes
in Its Attacks Against Al-Jazeera, TBS Archives, No. 5, Fall/Winter
2000, http://www.tbsjournal.com/ rchives/Fall00/news.htm
18 Campagna June 13, 2002. Israeli government 'inquiries' into the
violence against journalists perpetrated by Israeli soldiers during
the Al Aqsa Intifada left all soldiers blameless, except one verbal
warning and one suspended jail sentence, both for attacks on Jewish
journalists, one American and one Israeli. The inquiries, if any
were opened, into the killings of six Palestinian journalists, one
British and one Italian journalist by Israeli troops thus far found
no one guilty, as was the case with scores of other shootings of
journalists. Non-lethal crimes against Palestinian journalists,
including scores of near-lethal attacks, were not even considered
in any of the inquiries. See also Bathish et al. 2003.
19 See further Solomon, Norman: Media Spin Remains in Sync with
Israeli Occupation, ZNet Commentary, October 14, 2000,
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-10/14solomon.htm; Fisk,
Robert: When Journalists Forget that Murder is Murder, ZNet, August
18, 2001, http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/fiskmurd.htm; Schechter,
Danny: Perception vs. Reality In The Middle East "Press War", ZMag,
no date, http://www.zmag.org/schechtermideast.htm.