Media bias towards Isreal?

Great Debates
1

Let me preface this by stating that I am neither Jewish or Muslim. I’m a fifth generation Irish/some German/some English American. I have no connection to the middle east beyond a friend that is on a six month stint working in the oil fields of Kuwait.

We keep in contact via e-mail and he kept on telling me about Al-Jareeza, and telling me about things he saw on the news that I hadn’t heard a peep of on the U.S. media. He said flat out that Al-Jareeza was pretty biased, and after some pestering he sent me a tape.

Even though I can’t understand arabic, it was fairly obvious that there was a bias towards the Palestinians. But I found myself a bit amazed at some of the stuff that I certainly would consider newsworthy that wasn’t covered in the american media at all.

There was a beating a Palestinian in Custody that made Rodney King seem tame (The LAPD tends not to crush in skulls with large stones). A tank round going into a building when children younger than ten can be seen running away (they weren’t in the kill zone of the blast, but my Army experience tells me that they were more than likely injured) And top of the list (this one garnered a blurb on US tv) the footage that appears to show rounds being walked over to the young boy and his father (who were both killed, that was very disturbing footage)

I don’t want to get into the Palestinian question here, and I’ll admit that after viewing this footage my opinions on it having changed dramatically. I can understand a little more why so many arabs feel that American coverage of the middle east is biased.

What gets me is that I have trusted the US media to give me an unbiased and complete telling of the news, so I am able to make up an informed and rationale opinion on matters. In this case, it seems clear to me that they have failed. But again, as I stated at the beginning, I have no connection to the Middle East. Does anyone with a closer contact or understanding of the conflict have an opinion on the US media coverage of said conflict?

2

For a lot of the older network honchos, it probably seems like only yesterday that they were watching Jim McCay report in real time about Arafat’s boys shooting unarmed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in '72. That pretty much tainted Arafat’s credibility from then on and painted an unsympathetic picture of Palestinians in general for the media as well as the world. While there has been a lot of propaganda from both sides in the last year, the picture of the classic Arab terrorist, painted by Arafat himself, is hard to erase. There, I believe, is a major source of the bias towards Israel and against Arabs.

3

::picks jaw up from floor::

I misread the topic… I thought this was going to be about how biased the American media is in favor of the Palestinians.

NurseCarmen, it sounds like your pal sent you some video of pretty rough stuff. Of course, you don’t know when the original footage was shot, who the people on screen are, where the events took place, who is doing the shooting, etc.

I don’t mean to over-simplify a complicated subject, but it seems to me that the honest observer has no choice but to conclude that the American media, in its (misguided) search for equity, leans much too far over in favot of Arafat and his “Palestinians” in their coverage of the current conflict.

For some more food for thought, look here.

4

Al-Jazeera are also the fine folks who aired claims about Jews being told not to report for work at the World Trade Center just before the 9/11 attacks. They’ve been the target of complaints over virulent anti-Israeli and anti-American coverage by various sources including the New York Times, which scarcely qualifies as a vigorous defender of Israel.

Given its history, I’d want to see how Al-Jazeera covered specific, independently verified incidents and how the American news media covered them, before concluding that American news outlets are biased on this topic. Over the history of this conflict, “straight news” coverage in the U.S. often has seemed to favor the Palestinian viewpoint, while editorial commentary is more evenhanded.

5

One element to consider is that we may see more news footage of Israeli actions because Israeli actions involving tanks and troops and whatnot are highly visible and typically slower-moving, which gives the international press a chance to get into position and get lots of video footage of kids running away from tanks.

Contract this to the typical Palestinian attack; sending an inconspicuous-looking person into a crowded restaurant and blowing himself (or, lately, herself) up. The attack is over in less than a second. By the time the press gets there, all there is to see are rescue workers and firefighters. The victims, wounded and dead, have usually already been taken away.

The Palestinians may appear more sympathetic (like sdimbert, I think the OP has the issue backward) only because we might see them caught up in a firefight instead of being shredded by a nail-bomb.

I have to admit, I liked the idea of Al-Jazeera, when I first heard about it on 60 minutes. Even a slightly moderate Arab news outlet would be a refreshing change, but they lost all possible credibility when they weren’t frank about Sept. 11.

6

Bull, the violenace on both sides are highly visible. And I have seen press on take both sides.

7

In general, I think your trust is misplaced.

All I know is that I kept my eyes open for a source in the media that would outline the basic facts of the Arab / Israeli conflict. Never found it. Finally, I picked up a textbook, (Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East). Quite illuminating.

8

NurseCarmen, since coming to the Middle East for the first time ever last year, I’ve experienced just the sort of eye-opening shocking thing your friend has. Even though I work in the western media, I had had no idea before I came here how Israel-biased it was.

Of course the regional media here are biased towards Palestine, to varying degrees.

But there is too much material to discount the veracity of it all. And much of this material is increasingly trickling through to the Western media too (at least in Europe, eg the BBC).

The other very important thing to remember in terms of media representation Israel v Palestine is the huge force of things like PR. We talk about Israel being a “western-style” country - and it is, which means they have a much more sophisticated understanding of how to use and manipulate the international media.

Palestinians on the other hand are traditionally “less developed”. In much of this part of the world national telecoms sectors are generally far less developed, internet infrastructure is less, advertising and PR industries are embryonic, the media is developing rapidly but it lags far behind the West in terms of sophistication and freedom-of-speech.

Westerners in this part of the world often get frustrated with the Palestinians failure to represent themselves better, as they are painted so badly in international media. True - some are terrorists. But most are just suffering, terrified, empoverished, displaced, totally desperate people.

Were they able to promote this image to the world, they might get more sympathy. But then again they are not westerners, why should they be forced to play out their conflict in Western terms, (media war, propaganda)? So while they do not actively court Western support in the way Israel does, it seems unfair that this results in further Western condemnation of them.

9

Well, congratu-freakin’-lations. And if you’ve seen press on both sides, doesn’t that cancel any possible bias out? My point is that you may not see a lot of terrified Israeli children running away from a Palestinian tank because that doesn’t fit the relative armnaments and tactics of the combatants.

Anyhoo, accusations of “media bias” are like accusations of air-breathing.

10

If you are saying that the press sides with Palestinians because kids throwing rocks at tanks make good pictures, I will say the carnage after a bomb blast also makes a good photo opp. So again, your threoy doesn’t hold up.

11

I dunno about elsewhere, but the Chicago Tribune is so biased in favor of the Palestinians that it’s almost amusing. Because, of course, they have to claim that they are unbiased and fairly reporting the news. (There have been several meetings with Tribune representatives in area synagogues to protest this bias, which the Trib of course denies.)

However…

  • The front page pictures of the aftermath of violence against the Palestinians almost always show crying women and children; the front page pictures of violence against the Israelis almost always show the Israeli police or soldiers roaming through the wreckage afterwards.
  • A recent editorial had a headline about how Sharon himself ordered massacres of Palestinians; a few days later, a tiny paragraph (no headline) “regretted the error.”
  • Pictures of Palestinians are almost always of children; pictures of Israelis are almost always of tanks and soldiers.

“Unbiased”, my arse.

The Chicago Trib aside, is there a general bias favoring Israel? Probably. And for several reasons:

  • First, the Western media have pretty much free access within Israel to anything they want, as they would in the U.S. Israel has a free press. The Palestinian press is not a free press, but is tightly controlled: the Western press sees and hears what the Palestinian Authority arranges, nothing more, nothing less. There is therefore considerable doubt about undocumented footage. I do not doubt that Western reporters feel more comfortable reporting a story that they themselves saw/found/uncovered, rather than a story that was fed them by a press-controlling authority. (We saw the same phenomenon under Communist Russia, where the Western press was dubious about any stories coming from the government-controlled Russian press.)

  • Second, the Palestinians are seen as terrorists while the Israelis are seen as an occupying army. The Western world thus has considerable sympathy towards Israel – they are dealing with Hamas and other terrorists the same way that the U.S. dealt with Al Quaeda.

  • Third, Israel is a staunch U.S. ally. The Arab states, for decades, were allied with the Soviet Union and opposed U.S. interests at every turn.

Is there a bias favoring the Palestinians? Certainly, and for several reasons:

  • In David-vs-Goliath conflicts, the news always tends to side with the little guy. It’s better news to report the poor little guy who is being oppressed, than to report police procedurals. Thus, the press go out of their way to find people (in the U.S. as well) who are abused by the police; you rarely see the headling “20 arrests this week with no problems and no violation of rights.” That’s not news.

  • The press does want to appear unbiased. They can’t just rely on the footage they shoot – they’re only allowed to take pictures in Israel. In Palestinian-controlled areas, they’re not allowed to take pictures except of what the Palestinian Authority shows them or tells them to do. However, the western press does feel obliged to appear even-handed, and so is compelled to use the government-controlled “news” … which tends to be extremely sympathetic to the Palestinians.

So, there’s reasons for bias on both sides. I suspect that most networks and newspapers do their best to be “balanced” but I’m not sure what that means.

FOOTNOTE: In order to avoid being tedious, I use the term “the press” or “the western press” to mean “the majority of…” Obviously, there are lots of exceptions. Both the Jewish United News and the Arab-American Free Press ares heavily biased, and make no pretense not. I am generalizing for the sake of simplicity.

12

By coincidence, my colleague just forwarded me an email from her boyfriend, who works for the Dubai office of a Western news organisation that has access to newswires (ie the instant breaking news from around the world that media organisations pay to receive, from which they pick and choose what they want to publish). I’ve removed the names, but FYI the guy who sent it is a white non-Muslim expat working here for a major international news organisation that you would have all heard of.

AFP=Agence France Press, which is accessed by many major Western media. It remains to be seen how many of these stories will be seen in tomorrow’s newspapers. Doubtless they will be splashed all over the papers here in the Middle East. But I wonder if they will be published in US/UK/Europe? Interesting to wait and see.

13

Well, we could test this.

While we pick up facts from the media, we also pick up more general perceptions of what’s going on.

I know polls belong in IMHO, but this is specifically related to this thread.

Without looking it up, what would you say the ratio is, in the past 18 months of conflict, of Palestinians killed to Israelis killed?

A. 1-1
B. 2-1
C. 1-2
D. 3-1
E. 1-3
F. 5-1
G. 1-5
H. 10-1
I. 1-10

14

Here’s another question we could ask: If one is interested in measuring media bias, which is the best thing to ask about?
[list=1][li]the ratio of Palestinians killed to Israelis killed[/li][li]the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli civilians intentionally targetted for killing[/li][li]Who started the killing[/li][li]Degree of compliance with prior agreements[/li][/list=1] BTW, my answer to RTFirefly’s question would be a guess of B. 2 to 1.

15

:rolleyes:
Rufus, disregarding its ability to prompt risible responses, I question whether your poll is going to be valid as a measure of US media-fed perception.

16

So what we have from this e-mail is a description, with no specifics, of accounts which could come from a reliable on-the-spot reporter, a Palestinian “observer”, or God knows who, which the sender reports as “murders”. Yeah, very authoritative stuff.

Since the Western media have not been loath to publish accounts of Palestinian civilians caught up in the violence (deaths due to the unexploded shell incident, the father and son trapped in crossfire, etc.) in terms very unflattering to the Israelis, claims of bias in this regard do not ring true.

17

Gee, my local newspaper recently ran a letter to the editor denouncing “ragheads” and “camel jockeys.” would you call that a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian bias?

As my man Zbignew Brezniewski (sorry 'bout the spelling, Zbig) pointed out on Jim Leher’s News Hoedown the other day, either every single nation on the Earth besides Israel and the US has greatly misunderstood the situation, …or we have.

thread hijack-avert your eyes…
(Gee, if a superpowerful, rich-beyond-comprehension band of aliens decided to return the Potowotami Indian tribe to its “holy land” of Cumberland County, IL, then supported them while they bulldozed homes, shot anyone who organized anything, and beat and tortured suspects on the slightest pretext, I’d prolly be trying on gelignite waistcoats right about now also)

18

No, these aren’t from “God knows who” they are headlines or summaries of stories that came on the Agence France Press wire AFP a HIGHLY reputable and reliable international news service - on a par with AP, PA, Reuters or Bloomberg - which would use reliable, qualified and experienced on-the-spot reporters. Because international media organisations pay for wires, they have to be able to rely on their accuracy, immedicacy, freedom from bias, and legal problems (libel, court reporting restrictions, etc). In the rare instances the wires make a mistake they instantly run heavy and repeated retractions of it.

And the point isn’t the senders judgment of “murder” - the point was how many stories there are of Palestinians being killed. Some of which will and some of which won’t be reported in the international press. I believe the death toll ratio is currently 3:1, if so, you woudl expect to see three times as many reports of Palestinian deaths/casualties as there are of Israeli ones (more or less, given that people are killed in groups too which would be just one story).

Besides which, currently Israel is expelling and blocking masses of journalists, including western ones.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020403/ap_wo_en_ge/israel_journalists_12
So very soon, none of us will be able to know what is really going on there, because there will be no independent observers left.

19

istara, 3:1 is correct.

xenophon41, I brought this up because it surprised the hell out of me to find that out. From my headline-skimming, I would have guessed, until two days ago, that the carnage was roughly equal.

Then I read all the way down to the last line of a long AP story on the Washington Post site, where it gave the 18-month death toll as 1272 Palestinians and 415 Israelis. (And then I couldn’t link to it, because the Post replaced that version of the story with a later version that dropped the numbers. :rolleyes:)

You can derive your own conclusions about the meaning of those numbers with respect to the conflict itself, but I was certainly deriving a false impression of the facts on the ground from the “liberal media”, primarily the Washington Post.

But I’m just one data point. Was this just me, or were others coming away with a similarly biased impression of the facts? That was my hoped-for object - to get a larger sample, however nonrandom it might be, that might shed some light on this debate.

20

What you’re citing is still anonymous third-hand stuff from someone who throws the word “murder” around in a highly casual fashion. If there are specific charges to be leveled, provide specific cites so they can be analyzed.**

It’s unbelievable how “death toll ratios” are being held up as evidence of which side is in the right in the Mideast. No doubt there are respected historians who’ve concluded that Japan was in the moral right in WWII, since it suffered much heavier casualties than its opponents (as well as using suicide bombers). I just haven’t heard of any.
And RTFirefly, we must be reading different press accounts. I’ve heard comparative figures of Israeli and Palestinian casualties provided constantly and prominently (it’s obsessively utilized by many pro-Palestinian press sources). It’s difficult, in fact, to find any front-page story on the conflict that doesn’t list comparative casualty stats.

I’m personally upset that the U.S. media doesn’t refer to suicide bombers as “martyrs”, like Al-Jazeera does. Such bias!