Media

Craven images: Israel obsessed with its PR image – not with morality

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 world is against us"

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 media war we are losing, but can win

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. 

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. 

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