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Wiedergabe des Nahostkonflikts in den Medien

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Almost every mass media outlet has been accused of reporting the Arab-Israeli conflict in a biased manner toward either Palestinians or Israelis. Often the same outlet is accused, by different people, of being both at once.

This article, Media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attempts to address this controversy. It addressses some of the allegations of bias that persistently surround media coverage of the conflict. It should be noted that editors and writers are often working under tight deadlines and mistakes made under pressure do not necessarily reflect personal or institutional political biases. However, there are also allegations made of systematic bias in the mainstream media.

Terminology

For editors and journalists, who often struggle to describe complicated and controversial situations impartially on short notice, the Arab-Israeli conflict poses many problems of terminology. Consider, for instance, the implications of choosing between the following words:

Some media critics say that media consistently use certain loaded terms in order to provoke an emotional reaction. In order to stave off such accusations, publications such as the The Economist deliberately alternate between equivalent terms where appropriate. [1]. In other cases, the media is acccused of avoiding certain terms which are thought to reflect an uncomfortable reality.

Inaccurate reporting

Many smaller newspapers and television channels cannot afford to have correspondents stationed in the Middle East on an ongoing basis. As a result, they must base their reports on releases from newswire services such as the Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Reuters. It is claimed that these newswire services mainly employ Palestinians as journalists, due to their knowledge of the Arabic language and culture and easy access to the Palestinian population. Because of this, the newswires (and the media outlets that depend on them) are biased towards the Palestinian perspective.

Others point out that major media outlets, particularly in the West, tends to portray the Israelis as victims.

The misidentification of Tuvia Grossman as a Palestinian, the alleged massacre of 500 at Jenin, and the controversy over whether a bulldozer operator deliberately ran over Rachel Corrie are cited as several examples of media error. In each case, early reports were shown to be inaccurate both in substance and detail.

Omissions

On November 8, 2003 the Associated Press released a list of "Recent terror attacks around the world" which cited 15 terrorist incidents during the five-year period between August 1998 and August 2003. During that period, more than 800 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks, but not a single of the incidents in Israel made the list. When AP released its Year in Photos 2003, six of the 130 photos chosen related to human suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All six were of Palestinians. Sources: [2], [3] On November 9, Reuters released its list of "Worst guerrilla attacks since September 11" that entirely omitted attacks in Israel.

Frequently, news stories include the death toll statistics for the two sides of the conflict without breaking it down to militants (such as suicide bombers) vs. civilians, or counting the Palestinians killed by their own for being "collaborators" as victims of Israeli violence. See An Engineered Tragedy: Statistical Analysis of Fatalities, The IDF's Code of Conduct.

Sometimes Israeli checkpoints are described as a device designed to humiliate Palestinians, ignoring the fact that security concerns heightened around the world as a result of terror threat.

Alleged government influences

Israeli

In November 2000, the Israeli newspapers Maariv (11/8/00) and Haaretz (11/13/00) reported that Israel's foreign ministry established a special public relations office in New York to reinforce Israel's PR strategy, as an answer to organized efforts to undermine and delegitimize Israel and its image. The office was said to be headed by a former director general of the Israel Broadcasting Association, who was to coordinate with the foreign ministry's PR department, a steering committee formed of senior officials of US Jewish organizations, and six public relations firms that had been hired at a cost of $1 million.

A transcript of a conference call by researcher Phyllis Bennis in which Israeli government spokesperson Nachman Shai explained Israel's media strategy to a group of thirty to sixty US Jewish leaders and other leading Israel supporters revealed that CNN in particular was a target, and that his office was pressuring the network to shift its coverage in a more pro-Israel direction. Shai drew particular attention to CNN's Occupied Territories correspondent Rula Amin, who is herself Palestinian, and he told the group: "We are putting real pressure on the heads of CNN to have [Amin and other reporters] replaced with more objective pro-Israel reporters that are willing to tell our side of the story." (Amin was also the subject of many attacks in the US media. Amos Perlmutter, the Washington Times foreign affairs columnist called her a "purveyor of Palestinian propaganda" (10/30/00). His only example was to claim that "with no evidence, she reported the false Palestinian argument that the two Israelis who were lynched in Ramallah were Mossad agents." In fact, in her live report on the lynching (10/12/00), Amin had merely reported that the mob that attacked the Israeli reservists had "assumed that these were undercover units.") [4]

The government of Israel has also tried to influence media coverage in other ways. In 2002, Ha'aretz reported (5/31/02) that at the behest of a Likud party minister, the Israel Broadcasting Authority had banned its editorial departments from using the terms "settlers" or "settlements" on radio and TV. According to Ha'aretz, it wass not clear whether the editors would obey the order. FAIR concluded that the West Bank settlements are such a contentious issue within Israel that the Israeli government would like to stop reporters using the terms. It nonetheless noted that:

the opinion pages of an Israeli paper like Ha'aretz often show a franker debate over Israel's aggressive settlement policy than one can generally find in mainstream US media. Direct government interference [however] doesn't seem to have been necessary to convince some major US news outlets to avoid honest investigation of settlements, and sometimes even to avoid the word itself.[5]

Palestinian Authority

Jean Pierre Martin of the Belgian television RTL-TV1 filed the following report about the events of October 5, 2000 in Ramallah:

"We were filming the beginning of the demonstration. Suddenly, a van pulled in hurriedly. Inside, there were Fatah militants. They gave their orders and even distributed Molotov cocktails. We were filming. But these images, you will never see. In a few seconds, all those youngsters surrounded us, threatened us, and then took us away to the police station. There, we identified ourselves but we were compelled to delete the controversial pictures. The Palestinian Police calmed the situation but censored our pictures. We now have the proof that those riots are no longer spontaneous. All the orders came from the Palestinian hierarchy."

In May, 2004 PA Chairman Yasser Arafat promised to investigate a string of recent assaults on Palestinian journalists, including the killing of a magazine editor in the Gaza Strip. Veteran journalist Khalil al-Zebin was killed in March, and eleven Palestinian journalists have been attacked in the Palestinian territories in the past year. Sources: [6], [7]

See also

Media watchgroups

Pro-Palestinian

Pro-Israel

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