Bad News From Israel [Paperback]

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. Read more ›

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 almost always tends to promote the Israeli perspective while ensuring that viewers remain ignorant of the actual causes that lie behind that long-running tragedy.

To compile their data, the authors brought journalists, academics and ordinary viewers together to study the influence of news on public understanding. More than 800 people were interviewed and researchers examined around 200 news bulletins.

According to the authors, television news is the main source of information on the Israel-Palestine conflict for about 80% of the population. Their research found that on British television, particularly on BBC1, there was a preponderence of official 'Israeli perspectives'. Israelis were interviewed or reported more than twice as much as Palestinians. There were also a large number of statements broadcast from US politicians who tended to strongly support Israel. These in turn were interviewed twice as much as politicians from Britain, with the strange result being that many British viewers will perhaps know more about the US position in the Middle East than their own government's position.

The most important of omissions the authors found was the almost total lack of context and history in the reporting.... Scant effort is made to provide information about the motives or rationale behind the actions of either side. The research reveals that television viewers - and one wonders, perhaps many British Muslims - 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. Many 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.

How did this situation arise where dedicated news organisations have failed to impart the most basic information to their viewers? Senior BBC journalists told Philo and Berry that they were explicitly instructed by their news editors at TV Centre in Wood Lane, London, not to give explanations about the causes of the conflict - the focus was to be on "bang bang action" (p102).

Because no historical background is provided - such as the Palestinians having lost their homes - in much of the news coverage there was a tendency for viewers to see the Palestinians as initiating trouble and the Israelis are then presented as "responding" or "retaliating" (p162). The viewer is not told about Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, the increasing number of illegal Jewish settlements that are designed to exert military and strategic control over the Palestinians or the hardship caused by the Israeli expropriation of scarce water resources. There is little mention of the daily humiliations and economic deprivation endured by the Palestinians.

This book helps remove many of the veils that have been drawn over our eyes by our very own media. Read more ›