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Bad News from Israel

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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

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.

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.

This book is a must-read for anyone truly interested in understanding the truth about the roots and causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and how this has been distorted by an irresponsible and sensationalist media under pressure by the ratings race and by lobbies and special interest groups. This book is an extremely important piece of work in outlining the power the media has to distort and misrepresent world events, particularly in a region as misunderstood as the Middle East. It is astounding that such a small group of people can have such a large impact on the way the majority of the population understands and views the world. This book is a seminal piece of work that will hopefully open the door to a better understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the world's most misunderstood conflict, and to the honest reporting of it.

This superb book studies 189 BBC and ITV news bulletins on the Palestine/Israel conflict, in September-October 2000, October-December 2001, March 2002 and April 2002. The authors analyse how the bulletins described the conflict's causes, the casualties and the motives of the contending parties. The authors also study how people received the news.

The authors found that the bulletins gave little background to the conflict's causes: in September and October 2000, when the second Intifada started, only 17 of 3,500 lines of text were on the conflict's history. Too often, the bulletins presented the conflict as a self-perpetuating cycle of revenge, as if World War Two happened because Britain and Germany kept bombing each other.

The bulletins often said that Palestinians `died', or were `reported killed', or were `killed in violence' or `in clashes with Israeli forces'; it was left to the Guardian to be direct, for instance, "six Palestinians were killed by close-range bullets at the mosque by Israeli police." Both BBC and ITV repeatedly repeated the Israeli claim that a twelve-year old boy, Mohammed al-Durrah, was `killed in crossfire', although their TV coverage clearly showed Israeli troops aiming at the boy: ITV even quoted President Clinton repeating the Israeli lie.

The authors found a consistent bias towards the Israeli government's perspective. In interviews, Israeli representatives had twice as many lines of text as Palestinians. The bulletins often accused Arafat, but never Sharon, of using violence for political ends, even though Sharon openly opposes the peace process. Bulletins reported Palestinian `claims' of torture and murder by Israeli forces, but never checked whether the claims were true. Bulletins sympathetically discussed the Israeli government's tactics, perspectives, security concerns and rationales, but not the Palestinians'.

The bulletins always presented the US government favourably. They assumed that it `even-handedly' seeks peace, never mentioning the frequent US vetoes of UN Resolutions, its massive annual gifts to Israel, or its open support for Sharon and hostility to Arafat.

Like all the Glasgow University Media Group's work, this is scholarship of the highest standard: it makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the conflict.

This book will not tell you all there is to know about the historical basis of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, but is an excellent portrayal of how influential the media has been in the conflict.

The veteran investigative journalist John Pilger has praised its authors as "pioneers in their field" and insisted that "every journalist should read this book; every student of journalism ought to be assigned it".

This book has obviously stirred up a lot, and well it should. But the text is much less accusatory than most reviewers acknowledge. The authors are content to expose the misunderstanding of the media's audience. The issue around pro-Israel bias is more implicit in their data than explicit - the confusion tends to swing in Israel's favor. For their part, the authors make it clear that they feel it arises less out of determined bias, and more out of reporter ignorance and media formats that reduce the scope for historical information.

With this in mind, I'll just try and describe what the book is and is not.

The authors used quantitative and qualitative data to analyze British news content and its effect on British news consumers. That means they tracked numbers of references in reports, but they also asked questions and inferred meaning from discussions that can't be quantified. Combined, this provided them with a good sense of what is reported and also how it is received and understood by its target audience. The real strength of this book is the focus groups they ran to ascertain how well various audiences understand the conflict. This blows other studies on coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out of the water, linking up the analysis of media coverage with an analysis of its actual impact. The results are certainly worth reading.

The book is primarily focused on British news and news consumers. There is a small American sample, but this is too limited and the vast differences in British and American media coverage of the conflict are not well covered.

This book describes the conclusions of their research. It is not exactly bedtime reading and I wouldn't recommend it for the casual reader. Nevertheless, for those interested in the conflict and its coverage by the media, this is definitely the most solidly researched report I've read.

I personally know jewish people who have major problems with the policy and influence of the state of Israel. Not all Jews support the regime. Jewish people have contributed enormously to our society, in every possible way. Jewish people, like all groups of people, have good and bad among them. I hope these statements prove that I am not anti-Jewish. I note with disappointment that every single negative review of this book is penned by a reviewer with a Jewish name. How very, very sad. The book is timely (given Obama's genuinely-motivated attempt to make Israel wake up to the advance of history) and necessary. The authors' positions are not impartial, indeed if they were so, it would not be possible for them to see and comment upon the slanted media they describe. This book implores people to open their eyes, and be less credulous. Only a fascist (and I use that word correctly) would wish that educative process to be derailed.

This is a book that comes highly recommended. The veteran investigative journalist John Pilger has praised its authors as "pioneers in their field" and insisted that "every journalist should read this book; every student of journalism ought to be assigned it" (New Statesman, 28 June 2004).

In a remarkable and scientific study of the manner in which the main UK terrestrial news broadcasters (BBC and ITV) cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Professor Greg Philo and Dr Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group, have detailed how that news coverage tends to promote the Israeli perspective while ensuring that viewers remain ignorant of the actual causes that lie behind that long-running tragedy.

The most important of the omissions the authors found was the almost total lack of context and history in the reporting. Scant effort was made to provide information about the motives or rationale behind the actions of either side. The research reveals that television viewers are largely unaware of the origins of the conflict and are therefore confused by what they are told and see in nightly reports. There are substantial gaps in their knowledge, with few showing any awareness of the 1967 occupation let alone the 1948 founding of the Israeli state on Palestinian lands. Some viewers told the researchers they saw today's conflict as a border dispute between two countries instead of a modern regional superpower that had dispossessed much of the indigenous population and had been grabbing more Palestinian territory ever since.

During a focus group discussion a middle class male from Glasgow explains how shocked he was when he heard that the illegal Jewish settlements controlled over 40 percent of the West Bank: "I had absolutely no idea it was that percentage. I was gob-smacked when I heard it. I saw them as small, embattled and surrounded by hostile Palestinians - that's entirely thanks to watching the TV news" (p220).

In an area where there is so much disinformation and even calculated attempts to prevent the truth being given an airing, this is a vitally important book that will help remove the scales from a lot of peoples? eyes. Indeed, in an added bonus, the first ninety pages of this book are devoted to a superb concise history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of both Israeli and Palestinian sources. It is a gripping and frequently shocking read.

A RIGOROUS AND WELL DOCUMENTED ANALYSIS BY THIS BRAVE ACADEMIC OF THE CONSTANT AND BLATANT OMISSIONS AND DISTORTION OF REALITY BY THE SO CALLED MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND TV IN PARTICULAR WHEN REPORTING ON THE ONGOING BLOODY CONFLICT IN THE HOLY LANDS WHEREBY TO HIDE THE MISCONDUCT OF ISRAEL AND ITS CONTEMPT FOR JUSTICE AND THE RULE OF LAW , THE STRATEGY IS IF YOU CAN'T CONVINCE VIEWERS CONFUSE THEM.

AS A RESULT OF SUCH PRO-ISRAEL BIASED COVERAGE OF THE CONFLICT ONLY A MINORITY OF VIEWERS REGRETFULLY KNOW THAT ISRAEL IS ILLEGALLY AND BRUTALLY OCCUPYING AND EXPLOITING THE WEST BANK AND GAZA WHERE THE NON JEWISH PALESTINIAN POPULATIONS HAVE BEEN SUFFERING AT THE HANDS OF THE ISRAELI ARMY OUTRAGEOUS HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES OF ALL KINDS, INCLUDING ASSASSINATIONS OF THEIR POLITICAL LEADERS, SYSTEMATIC DESTRUCTION OF THEIR CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE, DEMOLITION OF THOUSANDS OF HOMES AND MOST RECENTLY AN APARTHEID WALL WHICH IS TURNING THEIR LIVES INTO MORE HELL AND DESPAIR ETC...

THIS IS IS A MUST READING FOR ANYONE WHO BELIEVES IN PEACE AND JUSTICE AND WANTS TO KNOW THE TRUTH OF WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE HOLY LANDS WHICH IS OFTEN AT VARIANCE WITH WHAT THE PRO ISRAEL MEDIA REPORTS.