Bad News from Israel [Paperback]

Greg Philo (Author), Mike Berry (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0745320619 | ISBN-13: 978-0745320618 | Publication Date: June 20, 2004

Based on rigorous research by the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, this authoritative and well-referenced book examines media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East and the impact this coverage has on public opinion. It begins with a history of the present crisis from the period of the British mandate in Palestine through to the creation of Israel, the refugee crisis, the wars, attempts at peace, Oslo and Wye Accords and the intifadas, In the largest study ever undertaken in this area the authors then examine media coverage of the conflict, focusing on television news. They illustrate major differences in the way Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and the presentation of the motives and rationales of both sides. This is combined with a very extensive audience study involving hundreds of participants from the USA, Britain and Germany. It shows extraordinary differences in levels of knowledge and understanding, especially amongst young people from these countries. The study also uses new techniques to identify trends in public understanding and belief. Uniquely, it brings together senior journalists and ordinary viewers who work jointly to examine how audiences understand the news and how public belief and opinion have been shaped by media reporting. The book includes sections on theory and methods and shows the processes which shape the news. It looks at patterns of ownership and at how public relations, information control and the close political links between the USA and Britain affect what we see and hear in the media.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A remarkable book, very comprehensive, with an innovative approach and full of interesting examples. -- Professor Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel, Universités de Lille III and Paris VIII

This superb study ... is extensive in scope, and scrupulously fair. It will be a landmark. -- Edward S. Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent

About the Author

Greg Philo is Professor at Glasgow University, and a member of the Glasgow Media Group. He is the author with David Miller of Market Killing (2000) and with Mike Berry of Bad News from Israel (Pluto Press, 2004). Mike Berry is Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham, and, with Greg Philo, is the author of Israel and Palestine: Competing Histories (Pluto, 2006) and Bad News from Israel (Pluto, 2004).

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (June 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745320619
• ISBN-13: 978-0745320618
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,228,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exposé of dishonest media coverage of the Israel-Palestin, September 15, 2004

By 

S. N. (Toronto, CANADA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad News from Israel (Paperback)

The Glasgow University Media Group's new book, Bad News from Israel, exposes the dishonest role the main TV news coverage in Britain plays in distorting the Israel-Palestine conflict and misinforming the public.
Far from explaining the origins of the conflict, most news bulletins function as little more than the overseas arm of the Israeli government's propaganda. Israel is able to mobilise the support of billionaire media owners, Zionist pressure groups and write-in campaigns to intimidate journalists who try to take a more objective stance.
The result is an alarming level of ignorance and confusion among viewers, a lack of interest in the conflict, and feelings of helplessness and the impossibility of change. Above all, poor and biased coverage plays a crucial role in preventing an informed public debate about how the conflict might be resolved.
These criticisms are far from new. But Bad News from Israel provides reams of evidence to back up such views.
The book's authors, sociologists Greg Philo and Mike Berry, monitored and analysed four separate periods of news coverage by the BBC and ITN, Britain's two main TV news channels, between the start of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and the spring of 2002. They examined around 200 news programmes and compared them against the national press and other programmes such as Channel 4 (C4) News and BBC2's current affairs programme, Newsnight. They interviewed over 800 people and brought well known broadcasters and programme makers to take part in discussion groups with ordinary viewers and find out what they thought about the conflict and its coverage.
Philo and Berry found that news items were reported with little explanation about the origins of the conflict, the United Nations resolution establishing the state of Israel on part of Palestine, and the subsequent war between Israel and her Arab neighbours. Neither did the news spell out how the establishment of the state of Israel and the subsequent war had led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes, both because of the horrors of war and the forced expulsions organised by the official Israeli military forces and Zionist terrorist groups sanctioned by the then Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. There was little or no explanation of how many had become refugees again after the 1967 war and had lived in squalid refugee camps ever since.
While news coverage focused on the day to day details of the Palestinian armed uprising, few reporters described how Israel had seized the West Bank and Gaza 37 years ago and illegally occupied it ever since in defiance of numerous UN Security Council resolutions. There was next to no explanation of the meaning of that occupation: that the Palestinians lived under military rule in all but name, had no civil rights and suffered enormous economic and social deprivation.
The figures are quite stark. In the period between September 28 to October 15, 2000, BBC1 and ITN devoted 3,500 lines of text to the uprising, but only 17 to the history of the conflict.
The lack of public knowledge closely mirrored the absence of such information on the TV news.
Without any contextual information, most viewers did not appreciate that the Israelis had seized the Palestinians' land to build the Zionist settlements, closed hundreds of roads, diverted their water supplies, uprooted their olive groves, assassinated their political leaders, detained people for years without trial, routinely used torture, and imposed collective punishment in the form of house demolitions and curfews.
If the journalists did make passing reference to such abuses, they failed to point out that all of this was illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Not surprisingly, therefore, viewers had little understanding of what had given rise to the uprising. Only 10 percent of the groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 knew that it was Israel that had occupied Palestine. Some even thought that the Palestinians were the occupiers. Many saw the conflict as some sort of border dispute between two countries fighting over land. A massive 80 percent did not know where the Palestinian refugees had come from or how they had come to be dispossessed.

By Jean Shaoul

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A guide to misunderstanding Israel-Palestine, September 9, 2004

By 

Mr. S. Al-makhadhi "amazonukukuk" (London, UK.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad News from Israel (Paperback)

Greg Philo, Professor of Communications at Glasgow University, carried out a three year study into the relationship between television and the construction of public knowledge - how we understand foreign events etc. What he found was that 80% rely mainly on TV news, and that people (esp. young people) were very confused about events.

Philo DOESN'T claim that reporters and news organisations are deliberately biased, but that a lack of historical perspective causes confusion. A huge majority of the British public thought that the 'settlers' were Palestinian, and that the 'occupied territories' were Israeli land being occupied by Palestinians. They thought that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just another border conflict - they didn't realise that a people had been dispossessed.

This loss of the origins of the conflict has interesting consequences. Palestinians were always seen as initiating violence, and Israelis as responding. Palestinian action was never understood as a 'response' to occupation and repression and loss of land. People assume suicide bombs are the result of 'mad-men', rather than emerging from a particular set of social conditions.

Reporters' subconscious use of words like 'hit-back', 'retaliate', 'pay-back time' were only used in terms of the Israeli action; while 'atrocity', 'murder' and 'cold-blood' were only used to refer to Palestinian action. This use of words tacitly endorses Israeli action while condemning Palestinian action. Can you imagine a suicide bomb being described in a news report as 'Palestinians hit back for 35 years of occupation? Or an Israeli raid into a refugee camp being described as 'cold-blooded killing'?

This different semantic treatment for the Palestinians and Israelis produced some odd results. A group of people were asked to write a script for a set of pictures used in a news report a few years ago. The pictures were of Mohammed Al-Dura, the 12 year old boy, who's father claims was shot by Israeli snipers, but who Israelis claim was caught in the crossfire. The group said that 'this boy was caught in the crossfire' and worryingly, they went on to say 'in retaliation for a Palestinian suicide bomb'. But Mohammed Al-Dura was shot at the start of the current intifada, before the first suicide bomb!

Philo is NOT a pro-Palestinian campaigner, he makes it clear at the outset that he is not endorsing any killing - Israeli or Palestinian. He is interested in how people misunderstand events, and what the cause of that knowledge was. Despite this, he has been the target of letter-writing campaigns, and malicious reviews in international publications which have clearly not read his work.

An eye-opening insight into how the public misunderstands Palestine, and how reporters are subconsciously responsible.

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another perspective, October 17, 2004

By 

C. Bulstrode (Oxford UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad News from Israel (Paperback)

There are lots of reviews of this book, mainly politically partisan and strongly pro- or anti- the political conclusions drawn. Sad really - because this was not, I think, what this book was really about. Palastine was merely the context of the study.
This book exposed to me something I had sort of known about myself but hadn't really dared admit.
It is therefore important because I suspect that most readers will also be left with this same enlightening discomfort, and hopefully a determination not to let this situation continue.
The focus group studies reported in the book showed that a significant proportion of us do not know enough about the background of a currentl political situation to be able to interpret the significance of a short (20 second) news report.
The reporters who live day by day with a situation whether it is Afghanistan or Palastine fall into a trap of assuming that their listeners(viewers) are as deeply immersed in the subject as they are. Even if the reporters did want to give some background, the news programme producers would cut out this part of a report, because they work on the assumption that the viewing public have an attention span of around 20 seconds. There is therefore a real danger that the snap-shots produced as news items will become misleading. This puts the onus on any half intelligent member of a democratic society to make sure that they do not base their opinions only on the news however hard that organisation tries to present it fairly.