© Columbia University Press
Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Paper, 456 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13349-4
$27.50
/ £19.00
January, 2008
Cloth, 456 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13348-7
$79.50
/ £55.00
Copyright information
Excerpt from the chapter, “Toward a New Way of Reporting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”
The critique of American mainstream media reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presented in Pens and Swords repeatedly points to the missing context of the impact that U.S. Mideast policy has on the trajectory of the conflict. This is not to imply conspiracy theory. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the result of American foreign policy. Two peoples claim the same land as their own based on history, nationalism, religion, and culture. Nor can American policy be ascribed as the sole factor that drives Israeli and Palestinian actions, whether they are undertaken by governments, political and social groups, or individuals. Indeed, the direct parties to the conflict themselves have agency.
However, to ignore or minimize the profound impact that U.S. Mideast policy has had—and continues to have—on the trajectory of the conflict is to adopt and promote a tunnel vision that does more to discourage the prospects for peace than to encourage them. This, unfortunately, is an apt characterization of American mainstream media reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The omission of the policy factor—in particular how U.S. policy on the conflict relates, or chooses not to relate, to international law and consensus—is the single most significant flaw, over time and across media, in shaping and defining the coverage.
Variables relevant to the work process of reporting the story in the field—for example, the unequal strengths of official Israeli and Palestinian channels to convey their points of view to the media—can affect the tone and/or balance of coverage in some instances. The same is true of the pressures exerted in the United States by pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups, which in significantly different measures have had periodic short-term effects on coverage. Yet the credo and methods of professional journalism appear to allow it to adjust for such imbalances and to keep such pressures at bay over time.
However, the same cannot be said when it comes to the deep imprint that U.S. Mideast policy leaves on mainstream reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the evidence presented in Pens and Swords has demonstrated, the media do not begin to examine, much less question, the impact of U.S. policy on the trajectory of the conflict as a whole or on its key issues, particularly Israeli settlements and the Palestinian refugee question. This has had the dual effect of both polarizing and dulling American public opinion by limiting the scope of public discourse and thus inhibiting the potential of public opinion to constructively affect U.S. Mideast policy, which in its decades-long failure to be a constructive force in resolving the conflict has been detrimental to Israelis and Palestinians alike. As one scholar of U.S. Mideast policy observed, “If public discourse had not been warped, policy may have been quite different.” In plain terms, it is not the media’s role to deliver Mideast peace. However, it is nonetheless the media’s responsibility to do no harm in this regard either.
Like American mainstream journalism in general, coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict relies on the traditional news values of conflict, drama, impact, magnitude, and timeliness, among others. These values provide journalists with a useful set of formulaic guidelines for shaping daily news in a format that the public can easily recognize and digest. At the same time, these news values fit the media’s need to impart information within limited constraints of space and time. To accommodate the needs of both news con¬sumers and producers, the reporting focuses mainly if not exclusively on the empirical, producing dramatic yet superficial snapshots of that which can be easily observed, quantified, and commented on.
In essence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with its recurring dramas, cycles of violence, and repackaged formulas for peace—is much more than a daily story. However, U.S. mainstream media reporting routinely fails to get beyond the parameters of daily coverage. The current stage of the conflict, with roots in the events of 1948, has been most broadly marked by events since 1967. That year marked two seminal phenomena: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as a result of the Six-Day War; and the beginning of accelerated U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support for Israel during the height of the cold war. While any formula for peace will have to recognize the consequences of 1948 as they relate to the Palestinian refugee question, the essence of that formula—assuming it is to be based on a two-state solution—will have to focus on returning to a reasonable and mutually acceptable version of the status quo ante of 1967 to determine future borders and sovereignties that guarantee the safety and prosperity of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Taken together, the Israeli occupation and U.S. Mideast policy constitute the organic and systematic underpinnings of the current state of the conflict. Some would argue that Palestinian violence is yet another factor. Whether that violence is more effect than cause is open to varying interpretations. However, the fact remains that, unlike the fundamental and structural aspects of the Israeli occupation and their relation to U.S. policy, Palestinian violence does not fail to attract a significant share of media attention. The challenge before the American mainstream media, then, is how, over time, to report the conflict in this broader organic context—in addition to requisite coverage of daily developments—in an age when satellite broadcasting and the Internet, coupled with the economic imperatives of corporate-owned media, discourage deeper contextual thinking and reporting.
The American public, which depends on the mainstream media as a vital source for news and information on international affairs, faces a challenge of its own. That challenge is how to obtain sufficient contextual information to be able to understand the emergence of a critical triangular relationship: the impact that U.S. policy has on the trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the impact that the conflict has not only on the attitudes of the majority of the world’s Arabs and Muslims toward the United States but also on the actions of a minute minority among them who seek out American targets; and how these two factors have begun to dramatically and negatively affect the safety of individual Americans and American interests as a whole in the twenty-first century.
It is time for a new approach to reporting that, over time and across media, investigates and illuminates the organic essence of the conflict as a much-needed complement to the easily obtained snapshots of the daily drama unfolding between Israelis and Palestinians in the field. The four elements of this new paradigm are:
1. Reframing the frame used to define the conflict by acknowledging and analyzing the impact that U.S. policy has on its trajectory
Given the patterns and tendencies in U.S. policy and related events—and in media coverage of them—it is clear that American mainstream reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is imbued with the assumptions of the Washington consensus, chief among them being that the United States is not a party to the conflict but merely plays the role of honest broker. The deeply flawed notion implicit in the Washington consensus and adhered to by the media—namely, that the United States assumes an objective role in the conflict—dovetails seamlessly with the approach of American journalists, who see their role as reporting “objectively” on what Israelis and Palestinians do and say. If true objectivity were indeed possible, it would require acknowledgement that the conflict is not binary, that is, between Israelis and Palestinians alone, but tripartite, involving the United States as well.
Thus, the mainstream media’s first and perhaps primary task in formulating a new way of reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to reframe the conceptualization, as it presently exists, to include U.S. policy as a major factor in the conflict’s trajectory. The media must also investigate how the United States continues to maintain its own geopolitical interests in the outcome of the conflict, allowing it to proceed along a course that contra¬dicts stated U.S. policy. Furthermore, the media must challenge the inherent falsity of the postulates of the Washington consensus that address Israel and the Palestinians as if they were of equal standing (versus having equal rights and obligations) in the power equation of the conflict.
2. Broadening the parameters of mainstream media discourse by expanding the pool of sources who can contribute broader and deeper interpretations and analyses of key elements of the conflict
In order to inject critical reporting of the conflict squarely into mainstream discourse—that is, beyond the editorial and op-ed pages and into the news columns and on news broadcasts not dominated by partisan shout-downs—the media will have to rely less on facile, contrapuntal use of Israeli, Palestinian, and official U.S. sources. They will have to do more investigative reporting that cultivates a much broader range of live sources, including nonpartisan experts, and documentary evidence.
It is abundantly clear that Israelis and Palestinians view their histories and rights differently. What is not clear is why so much American mainstream media reporting on the conflict is limited to a superficial balancing of these beliefs and claims.
Testing the legitimacy of historical claims and interpretations of rights and obligations according to international law and consensus can indeed be done. However, such reporting must be invested with two critical elements. The first is time, the precious resource that would allow correspondents to do their own basic research on important historical issues, points of international law and consensus, and U.S. policy, and then to seek out nonpartisan experts—at least some of whom should be far removed from the arena of physical conflict and/or the United States—to help explain and interpret the issues in these fields as well as others, including development, economics, and foreign policy.
The second critical element with which such reporting must be invested is a dedication to serving the public’s right to understand these issues more broadly and deeply than what point-and-shoot journalism (“Israelis say, Palestinians say”) will allow. Realizing that critical coverage of the issues is bound to elicit objections from domestic pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian constituent groups, news organizations must have the vision and fortitude to absorb negative reac¬tion as a natural part of reporting the story and not view it as a reason to limit the depth and parameters of the reporting process itself.
3. Reconsidering the role of audience reaction to critical coverage of the conflict.
If Americans had a detailed and contextual understanding of how U.S. policy undermines international law and consensus on key issues of the conflict—particularly Israeli colonization of the West Bank and the rights of Palestinian refugees—it is questionable whether the majority of Americans would support such a policy even passively.
The American mainstream media have the potential—and the power—to facilitate such understanding. However, in order to do so they must be guided by journalistic ethics and best practices, which would permit them to adopt a critical approach to reporting the underlying issues of the conflict. In addition, they must resist the apparent tendency to calculate potential audience response that such critical reporting may elicit and then opt not to undertake it if the “cost” is deemed to be too great.
Despite the facts that U.S. policy tilts heavily toward Israel, and that the organized pro-Israel camp in the United States is far stronger than its emerging pro-Palestinian counterpart, there are credible indications that sentiment already exists among the American public that U.S. Mideast policy should be evenhanded. A study of U.S. public opinion on a host of international issues released by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in October 2004 found that three-quarters of Americans think the United States should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Letters-to-the-editor pages of newspapers also reveal a broad range of public sentiment. While there is significant American sympathy for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, there is also widespread understand¬ing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S. role in it cannot and should not be viewed within the narrow parameters of the terrorism issue alone.
4. Rethinking the concept of journalistic objectivity as it relates to reporting the conflict
Given the virtual absence of reporting on the impact of U.S. policy on the trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is it not reasonable to argue that the time-honored, almost mythic concept of jour¬nalistic objectivity may have outlived its usefulness?
Rather than focus on the amorphous if not impossible standard of objectivity, to what sources can journalists turn in order to find values and guid¬ance not only for their work in general but also to formulate a new way of reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
One source is academe. Working journalists do not make a habit of consulting media theorists about how to do their jobs or the consequences of their method. However, journalists who report, edit, and produce news of the conflict—both from the field in the Middle East and in newsrooms back home—might do well to understand that scholarly ideas can transcend the realm of theory.
At its very essence, the paradigm for a new way of reporting the conflict can be shaped through an understanding of critical theory, which goes beyond a problem-solving approach to superficial issues to actively examine the organic systems that underlie them. As Canadian political scientist Robert Cox has written, “Critical theory does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.” As such, critical theory may be applicable to journalistic investigation of U.S. Mideast policy and could perhaps serve as the basis of a new “critical journalism” approach to American mainstream media reporting of international affairs, particularly in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Such an approach would be as grounded in the reality of interests and power relations as it would be in questioning them.
This is not an obscure construct but rather a compatible theoretical equivalent of best-practice measures that journalists themselves have recognized and codified in a second source to which they can turn for guidance in formulating a new paradigm for reporting the conflict, namely their own Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. The code, which dropped the word “objectivity” in 1996, advises journalists—under the rubric of “seek truth and report it”—to “tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so.” Journalists are encouraged to “give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.” The code advises that reporters “support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.” Perhaps most important of all, according to the code journalists should “examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.”
While a code of ethics can provide inspiration and aspirational values, working journalists have still other practical and immediate channels through which they can ponder and formulate a new paradigm for reporting not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also related matters of international import. There are hard questions to be asked, but there are also venues in which to ask them.
Professional conferences and established institutions devoted to media ethics and practice can serve as natural venues in which editors, producers, and reporters can engage in constructive discussions and healthy self-criticism on these topics. In the words of one American media observer, “Getting outside one’s own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning.”
The numbing, senseless, and seemingly endless harm inflicted by Israelis and Palestinians on each other has caused one American correspondent to lament: “Whether the casualties on any given day are on one side or the other or both, there is also, in a dark space, somewhere, a reality. There is a dead child; there is an exit wound. How many dead children is too many is a question often asked by Palestinians and Israelis, but it shows no hint of being resolved.”
Beyond pathos and poetics, the true work of reporting the conflict remains to be carried out by asking and investigating the difficult question: Why is this so? To understand why there is no hint of a resolution in sight requires getting beyond vivid and artfully crafted word pictures based on empirical observation and superficial balancing of adversarial perspectives. To accomplish this would be to realize what American journalism has for so long aspired and claimed to be, as well as to fulfill the promise of what it can, indeed, still do: contribute truths, clarity, and hope toward the resolution of a conflict that in its continuum of tragedy has all but ceased to produce news, despite the illusion of it.
****
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Columbia University Press and copyrighted © 2008 by Marda Dunsky. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail us or visit the permissions page on our Web site.