What’s up with both sides claiming that the Western media is biased against them? For example, Wikipedia says “Commentators on both sides have claimed that the media is biased either for or against Israel”. And it seems that they are not just saying it for the sake propaganda either, both sides seem to genuinely believe the media is biased. Not just slightly biased either, I have personally seen an Israeli and a Turkish coworker (in separate occasion, of course) reacting genuinely angry when listening to daily NPR news, claiming that the coverage is so grossly unfair, that they feel offended by that.
It’s as old as news itself. I’m sure the city fathers of Ninevah were complaining about how the town crier was biased in his coverage of the construction cost overruns of the latest ziggurat.
I am reminded of an Art Buchwald column, during one of the major Arab-Israeli Wars, parodying the complaints from both sides about biased news coverage. The specific joke was that, as the U.S. had said it would only replace aircraft from either side that had actually been shot down…
The Israelis released news reports: “Hundreds of our planes have been shot down, but not one single Egyptian plane has fallen.” Meanwhile, the Egyptians denied this, insisting, “Hundreds of our brave pilots had to bail out when their planes were destroyed, whereas the Israelis have not long even one airplane.”
For those of us who remember the actual claims made at the time during those wars, it was bitingly funny.
I used to work for a major channel here in the uk with a highly respected news team. (Despite the bright neckties!)
All staff would get an email copy of the overnight log which recorded phonecalls, emails and letters to the station. Any article about Israel would see a huge spike in calls and most would be complaining about bias. As you say, people from both sides would be claiming the same report was biased against them. We worked on the basis that if it was a roughly equal number from both sides then we had done a good job.
It’s very simple: Their world-views on this story are so far apart and their feelings about it so strong that any report not written from their own side’s POV inevitably will appear unfair to them.
The propanganda war is more important to Hamas than to Israel, which is why Hamas uses human shields, and are so much worse than Israelin their efforts to intimidate journalists. Hamas isn’t going to win militarily, so they need to jack up the number of civilian deaths and injuries to make Israel look like the bad guy.
Regards,
Shodan
Linda Ellerbee and Tom Brokaw have both said that’s one of their thumbnail metrics for coverage of the abortion issue. So long as they get accusations of bias from both sides, about equally, they figured they were doing quite well.
That assumes levels of support (at least, support by complainers) is about equal for both sides. Not always a safe assumption, even on a thumbnail basis.
I agree with Shodan.
In Operation Protective Edge, every batch of IDF soldiers had a professional cameraman with them with impeccably high-resolution cameras by their sides, in order to capture Hamas’s atrocities including in the war fields (which can be named as anywhere in Gaza, unfortunately…) Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Abuse of Human Rights including the usage of human civilian human shields, the relocation of civilians to Israeli military targets (obtained through satellite) and the usage of civilian clothed militants in war, making it unclear who is a civilian and who is not.
As said before, Hamas in now way can win this war militarily and is starving Gazans to death in order to achieve some superficial coverage. The people Hamas is trying to “liberate” are dying because of it.
Western media is tending to be biased for Israel as Hamas is perceived as a terrorist organisation for Western powers, although, Israel takes much of the criticism for her usage of disproportionate force in Gaza which is very compact, causing more civilian casualties.
After understanding these, it’s easy to know that Hamas has to have a good source of propaganda which is in this case it’s death, which is why most recently there was been news sternly biased against Israel.
A long, meticulously researched, very in-depth article documenting amazing media pro-Hamas bias:
I think both sides on any issue can justifiably claim media bias against them. The Israel Palestine confllict being no different.
I look at this in terms of the UK media’s output on British politics. Both Left and Right can be rightly pissed off at a number of UK media outlets who deal in politics. These outlets need not be biased towards one side, but they can have default political positions. Positions that they seldom change.
Just once I’d like to see a side claim that media bias is in their favor, and they love it
That’s golden mean bullshit. Sometimes things really are open and shut. People for and against Wakefield and his false advertising masquerading as a scientific study, for example - if you claim that the anti-vaxxers can justifiably claim the media is biased against them, you are wrong.
Well, it’s a wonderful propaganda tool to claim the media is biased against you. So, if word-of-mouth is that the media is biased against your opponent – in this case, Israel – you need to jump up and down and say that the Jews who own the media are biased against YOU, the peace-loving Hamas freedom-fighters.
True. It only works in very highly polarized cases.
But in non-polarized cases, when there is a clear majority that favors one side over the other, there isn’t as great a need for bias-free coverage. The press doesn’t have any need (or desire) to show perfect fairness to, say, overt racists. When one side has a significant popular advantage, then the free market – or democracy – handles the matter.
My post was meant to deal with more political than scientific issues. Though no doubt anti vaccination groups are also subject to some very dubious reporting. It would go against every principle of media and human history to suggest they do not recieve unfair coverage at times. You may think they do not recieve enough of such coverage, but they will get it.
A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters
Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)
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There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
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The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on.
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In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.
Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.
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Much more at the link