Role of the Media

British television news is routinely biased towards the Israeli view of the conflict, according to academic research.

The US papers continue to cover the crisis in the Middle East in great detail, with most featuring the latest developments on their front page. However, the overall tone appears to be fairly balanced with most papers going out of their way to give a detached view.

Israel’s cable TV companies announced Thursday that they would quit carrying CNN news broadcasts in November, saying they could not longer afford it.

Television functions as a continuation of the fight by other means - the organizers of the Palestinian uprising are directors of genius and manipulators of public opinion; the army chief of staff gives out video cameras to soldiers, Israel perceives itself as the victim of a media ambush. The question that keeps coming back to “our” television stations who have been drafted “for our side” is how is it that only “we” see the outrageous gap between the way things appear to be and the way they are, between semblance and essence.

THE MOST popular Israeli pop song in the 1970s was The World Is Against Us. It was hardly a masterpiece: the rather simplistic message was accompanied by an equally banal tune. These were the halcyon days of the PLO in the international arena and the 1975 General Assembly resolution which defined Zionism as a form of racism.

The Government Press Office’s news and information section, which disseminates and translates information to foreign correspondents from a myriad of government sources, shut down for the whole of last week because its one remaining employee was on vacation.

‘Fear of being slandered as “anti-Semites” means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East’.

Despite a clear-cut case of massive human rights violations and the weight of international law on their side, Palestinians are losing the crucial war for international opinion, many political watchers and media analysts believe.

RECENT EFFORTS by the Israeli government and America’s pro-Israel lobby have focused extensively on media coverage of the current crisis between Palestinians and Israelis. From demanding that CNN replace reporters of Palestinian descent with “pro-Israeli reporters” to hiring three additional PR firms to deal with the US media, Israel’s allies have ratcheted up the media war. Go to any pro-Israel organisation’s website and you can find a plethora of action alerts charging that the Western media has it in for Israel. But the truth is, of course, quite the opposite.

ARAB STATES have reacted to Israel’s plan to launch a new Arabic-language TV channel with the announcement of their own proposal for a satellite channel to promote the Arab point of view in English and other languages.