Role of the Media

Media wars

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. 

The Middle East's war of words

Last week The Independent’s Robert Fisk accused the BBC of buckling to Israeli pressure to drop the use of ‘assassination’ when referring to Israel’s policy of knocking off alleged ‘terrorists’. Not true, blustered John Simpson, auntie’s world affairs editor in The Sunday Telegraph. The corporation, he insisted, had simply reaffirmed its house rules that only prominent political figures could be assassinated -though he didn’t offer an alternative term for the killing of ordinary folk. He bitterly resented Fisk’s allegation that the Beeb had been got at. 

Reform and the Palestinian media

News about reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA) come from Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, the only remaining section of the bombed out Mukata’a, the sixty-year old British built military compound in Ramallah, which has become an easy target for any Israeli offensive and a symbol for a nation under siege. 

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