;.cMedia bias, miscellaneous
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,10,75,192,2,15,20,25,127,10,0,
;.l2,15,75,192,2,20,25,127,15,0,
;.l3,20,75,192,2,25,127,20,0,
;.l4,25,75,192,2,127,25,0,
;.l5,30,75,192,2,127,30,0,
;.l6,12,90,192,2,18,24,127,12,1,
;.l7,17,124,192,2,34,127,17,2,
TO:    David bar-Ilan, Eye on Media, Jlem Post
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Kibbutz Haon, Jordan Valley, 15170 Israel.
       Telephone:  972-6-757572; FAX:  972-6-757554
DATE:  12/07/93
RE:    MEDIA BIAS
REF:
CC:    David Bedein, Israel Resource, Bet Agron 
------------------------------------------------------------------
MEDIA BIAS:  MISCELLANEOUS

English Radio News:  I do not at present have an impression ofmedia bias, apart from the fact that one hears Rabin, and lessoften Peres, almost daily, and practically never hears Netanyahu. Spokesmen for settlers interviewed at demonstrations etc. almostalways come across as calm, rational, and concise.  Interviewers'follow-up questins tend to have a pro-peace-process slant, tho notalways.  In the often-trivial "cultural" 1/4-hr. slot followingthe news, there have been human-interest interviews with Golan andGaza settlers; those programs seem to have been fair.
                                               
==================================================================
.p
MEDIA BIAS:

NEWSWEEK 12/06/93 (Mark Frankel/Dickey, Bartholet, Taher)
Business:  "The Best Peace Money can Buy"
Overall, reasonable and inoffensive in tone.

"But after decades of neglect, [underline added] the final bill torefurbish and replace the the antiquated housing, shcools,communicationsnetwork and public utilities on [sic] the West Bankand Gaza is bound to be higher -- more than $11 billion by someestimates."
l2

COMMENT:  The implication is the media cliche that Israelneglected the occupied territories during its occupation(with a secondary suggestion that the occupied territorieswere better treated in a prior undescribed Golden Age (thefact of Jordanian/Egyptian occupation 1948-1967 is rarelyspecified).  The suggestion is that now that Israel hasrelinquished control, barriers to economic improvement inGaza and the West Bank will fall.  The implication is thatthose barriers were imposed by Israel.

REACTION:  Briefly:  The non-Jewish sectors of the occupiedterritories have suffered economic neglect relative toGreenline Israel; but substantial economic improvementrelative to their status under Jordanian (West Bank) andespecially Egyptian (Gaza) occupation.
There have been barriers to economic improvement in theterritories, due to Israeli occupation, but those barrierswere imposed by the Arab bloc; Israel continually solicitedforeign aid from both Arab and western sources, even at thecost of reducing its political control. (Eg, acceptingJordanian control of the West Bank schools.)


The most glaring example, as David Bedein points out, hasbeen the perpetuation of squalor in the 'refugee camps', forpropaganda purposes and to motivate popular anti-Israelfeeling.

The likelihood of a major economic collapse when Israelrelinquishes control of the territories has barely beenaddressed in the media.  The unrealistic assumption continuesthat Israel will continue to admit Palestinian workersdespite drastically reduced security control, and despite astrong public desire -- perhaps the only real source ofpublic support for the piece process -- to be able to ignorethe Palestinian Arabs.

Corruption in Arafat's PLO has barely been addressed; butthere is increasing acknowlegement that no sane westerninvestor would give it money.  There still seems some hopethat a few cosmetic administrative reforms will quickly sikvethe problem; and an continuing but slightly diminishingreluctance to acknowlege Arafat's meglomania.
l1
"During almost three decades of military occupatino, the Israelishave slowly tightened their economic leashon the territories...Now is the time to relax those bonds; Gaza and the West Bank,which are still hindered [emph. added] from trading with eachother or with Jordan, will flourish only with access to largerforeign markets. ... the peace accord will founder if Israelmerely substitutes economic colonialism for its 16-year militaryoccupation...
l2
COMMENT:  As far as I know, the Palestinian West Bank,including East Jerusalem, is largely tied economically toJordan, which officially regards it as a part of Jordan. Stores in East Jerusalem carry few Israeli-made products.
L3

ANALYSIS OF BIAS TECHNIQUE:  'hindered from trading' isan ambiguous phrase, with 'hindered' serving as the'weasel-word':  the connotation is of a complete blockto trade, but the strict denotation of 'hindered' ismerely 'impeded'; 'hindered in trading' would be thecorrect phrase, I think.
L1

==================================================================
.p
MEDIA BIAS:

NEWSWEEK 12/06/93 "Breaking the Habit of War" (Bartholet)

"television viewers watched all-too-familiar scenes of bloodshed,including pictures of a Palestinian being shot in the head as hetaunted Israeli troops."
l2

REMARK:  I don't have a TV so didn't see the footage.  It'sat times like this that one misses Bedein's weeklyreview/critique of TV coverage, esp. on foreign networks, ofIsrael.

COMMENT:  The implication of the text was that the soldierover-reacted to a criminal extent:  that in response to aPalestinian yelling at him, he intentionally shot thePalestinian fatally.

One might at least expect the correspondent to seek andinclude IDF reaction to this incident.

ANALYSIS:  There is a need now to determine, with theassistance of professional Photo and TV news photographersand editors, principles of Photo and TV-news visual bias.
[SEE FOOTNOTE 1]
l3
The primary forces seem to be TV news (at the start ofthe intifada in 1988 this was dominated by the 3 USAnetworks; now that has been supplanted by theinternational cable news services, notably CNN, with thenew paramater of real-time coverage.  

The weekly news magazines seem to a strong secondaryforce in defining public opinon, and may be a primaryforce in defining public opinion within the"Establishment" community of decision-makers.
TIME and its clone, Newsweek, fill that roll forEnglish-speakers. [FOOTNOTE 1A]

Briefly:  Where the media is sympathetic to the subject,one should looked for both staged and contrived events(staged by photographers; contrived by demonstratorsprimarily to be broadcast by photographers).  
	Where the media is hostile, one should identifymisleading foreshortening of perspective by tele-photo,miseading editting out of spatial context, misleadingeditting out of temporal context (eg, preceedingprovocations to settler reaction).  
The interplay of photo-journalism, esp. TV, with popularmyths, including those expresed in popular movies andvideo, as well as those that influenced today'sreporters, editors, and decision-makers in their ownformative years (usually college) (eg, reaction to USAand UK imperialism).
l1
.p

MEDIA BIAS:
NEWSWEEK Dec. 6, 1993:  WORLD AFFAIRS:  The Birds of Palestine
	Christopher Dickey, with Caroline Hawley, Jerusalem.
                       
A:  MEDIA MANIPULATION

I think there's something to look into here.
Apparently collaborator stories are now in.
The first question is who is setting them up, and why.
	One might start by asking B'Tselem.

l2
That they have an intrinsic mass-media news value as macabreentertainment explains only why the stories are published,not why they are set up, much less how.
l1

Of course they show Israel in a bad light -- suborning informants,and then practically abandoning them -- but Israel-bashing is avery low priority nowadays, as long as Rabin keeps keep thecountry away in pieces.

B:  SPECIFIC ANTI-ISRAEL SLANTS

1)  Israel to blame for the collaborator killings

"In the first months of the Palestinian uprising, the Israeli Armyset up special units of Isrealis dressed as Arabs and guided bycollaborators.  Their goal was to make members of the Palestinianresistance [emph. added] believe 'nothing is secure, no one thatthey see around can be immediately identified as a friend or as anenemy.' [quote source not given]  The strategy worked.  But oneresult [emph. added] has been a witch hunt in which Palestinainmilitants killed about 1000 suspected collaborators over the pastsix years."

COMMENT:  This is well done, because it is plausible.
Accordingly, it requires some sort of rebuttal.
l2

More precisely, it is plausible on first reading (and foranyone as lazy as me, on 2nd reading), which is all that oneusually gives a weekly news-magazine.
l1

2)  Allegations of torture

A number of interrogation techniques are detailed; B'tselem isacknowleged, with "Birds interviewed by Newsweek" as a source forthat.  "PLO security officials" are also acknowleged as a sourcefor one rather incredible technique.

"Palestinian agents have also been involved in what the Israeligovernment calls 'moderate physical pressure' -- and what humanrights groups like B'Tselem [emph. added] call torture.  The moredangerous a suspect is thought to be, the rougher his treatment. Noor cited his own participation, along with Shin Bet agents, inthree very rough interrogrations.  In one, earlier this year, atop leader of the Hamas military wing was beaten repeatedly on thegenitals over the course of three days.  In another, a suspect wasdragged on a Gaza beach behind a jeep..."

COMMENT:
(a) There is an ambiguity about who is alleging; the implication,to a casual reader, is that it is B'Tselem; but a legalisticreader can note that Newsweek has only cited a group 'likeB'Tselem'.  And the indicated source for the specific allegationis only the informant who was interviewed.

(b)  A man who was 'beaten repeatedly on the genitals over thecourse of three days' would have become a eunuch within the firstfew minutes.

The next paragraph obliquely brings into question the informant'sreliability:

"In a third incident, Noor said he watched as a Palestinian karateteacher named Hassan Halawaneh was locked in a coffinlike boxduring an interrogation at Jerusalem's Russian Compound prison. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK last week, Halawaneh told of having ishead hit against the wall and losing consciousness.  There wasmuch he could not remember about those sessions.  But heconfirmed, 'They put me in a cupboard.'."

COMMENT:
(a)  As a rule of thumb, the more detailed an allegation, the lesslikely it is to be false.  
(b)  Note that the article features the informant's description of'a coffinlike box', where the victim describes it as 'a cupboard'.
.p
FOOTNOTE 1:

	The public is often sceptical of spoken statements, on radioon TV; far less sceptical of statements written in the press; andalmost entirely credulous of photographs and TV footage, to thepoint that these have determined Presidential reactions.  
l2
(Again, I would suggest that Israel should acknowlege thatvisual news, esp. TV, have become a major component in inwhat is increasingly a made-for-TV mini-war with Israel's USAarms suppliers as referee.  I would suggest that thePalestinian nationalists, esp. the PLO, have very skillfullyexploited the shift from decisive physical confrontation to asort of "virtual reality war".  And I would suggest thatIsrael ought to re-evaluate 18th-century axioms of democraticfreedom-of-information in the context of 1990's `globalvillage virtual reality'.  
l3
(I am clumsily trying to coin temporary phrases toearmark significant but generally overlooked  causalpatterns in contemporary international politics. ) 
l1
In a media bias memo last spring, I noted how Newsweek had croppeda photo to suppress the 'CONTEXT' of the incident, and so createthe impression that what may have been a staged or contrivedincident was (as the viewing public almost always assumes)spontaneous.
l2

Indeed, the over-riding myth in photo and TV coverage ofPalestinian nationalism is that this an authentic popularmovement by (and here the myth comes in) 
l3
a sort of innocent people, unspoiled (as we all wish wewere -- 
l4
and here the role of myths as wish-fulfillment orcompensation for selling out to one's society comesin) by Western Civilization. 
l5

Ahmed the Camel-Driver's Boy; 
Lo the Noble Revolutionary.  
L4

the sort of sentimentally radical myth so popularwith post-adolescent radicals from good familiesrebelling against their inevitable bourgeois future
l5
(Most of us intellectuals and opinion-makers,presumably including much of the press, grewup in that atmosphere while the rest of youwere snapping on bow ties.)  
l1

The role of fore-shortening is not acknowleged; few TV viewers andreaders of the photo-journalism magazines 
l2
(for English-speakers, TIME and Newsweek; the Jerusalem Postapparently aspired to that level, but with essentially nonews staff, it comes closer to coffee-table entertainment forUSA liberals)
l3
are even aware of the distance between photographer andobject made possible by expensive equipment.

l2
It would be most sobering if TV coverage of public eventsshowed the photographers as well:  that would shatter themyth, and destroy most of its political efficacy.  
l3
Again, I come back to that Star Trek image of a neoRoman civilization staging the games of the Colosium,with real killings, but this time on a TV studio setwith canned audience reaction.

l4
It is our loss that McLuhan was not taken seriouslyenough in his time, and that his insight intoculture-wide paradigm-shifts has not been appliedto the shifts occurring since his time.

l1
TIME and Newsweek are the significant U.S. weeklies.  Note thatthey depend on good independent news staff, lots of high-impacttop-quality photos, and an up-to-the-minute sense of theirreaders' scarcely-unadmitted entertainment needs and less-admittedtaboos.  
l2
(Cf. Bob Dylan:  'Your debutante knows what you need, but Iknow what you want'.  But that's now dated; wants are againnow restricted within the demands of socio-economic upwardmobility, good taste as the last consumer item.  Escobarbought a Van Gogh.)  
l1
These weeklies, with their admixture of palatable culture, andalways a slight dash, but no more, of cheesecake, may now fill therole -- which doth not TV -- 
l2
increasingly degenerating, perhaps because both of itsshallow format, and because a necessarily-overbookedprofessional cannot pick it up and put it down at will -- ofsocial arbiter to the upwardly-mobile.  
l3
(Playboy briefly held that niche in the JFK era; now, ofcourse, sexism is declasse.  
l4
Curiously, Playboy never kept up with its readingclass; ("What sort of a man reads Playboy" -- then,the answer was a pre-yuppie yuppie; now, the answerwould probably be comicly appalling.)

FOOTNOTE 1A: 
l4
(The Jlem Report tried to join that pack formatters affecting Israel, but, though it remains ausually-empty display-case for leaks, quickly fellto coffee-table status, 
l5
inevitably (since it must primarily address areadership of Diaspora ostriches)
l3
I don't know what the analogs are in Germany -- DerSpiegel?.  England has a far older structure ofmechanisms for defining class structure; and the Frenchare from another solar system.  The rest of the worlddrinks Coke and reads TIME.

