Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2004, page 78

Book Review

Bad News From Israel

By Greg Philo & Mike Berry, Pluto Press, 2004, 340 pp. List: $19.95; AET: $15.

Reviewed by Paul de Rooij

GREG PHILO and Mike Berry, researchers at the Glasgow University Media Group, have written an important study on news media coverage of the Middle East. Bad News from Israel will have wide-ranging repercussions at a time when many people question the interrelationship of the media and political forces, the media’s dulled critical edge and its role in trumpeting recent wars. The book’s key conclusion is that a public exposed to current-day news coverage will be poorly informed on the important issues it faces—and that such ignorance often has stark consequences.

Many people criticize the news coverage of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. While it is easy to suggest that news coverage of this contentious issue is biased, it is significantly more difficult to clearly articulate one’s objections. Most criticisms in the form of letters to the editor are of limited use because they refer to selected news items; although editors may acknowledge this criticism, it is mostly ignored. To exert pressure on news organizations so that they will take notice, it is necessary to go beyond the piecemeal critique. What is necessary is to obtain a behavioral critique based on a broad analysis of news coverage and on how this coverage affects the understanding of an issue by a large segment of the population. Such a critique cannot be ignored by news organizations, and will likely be more effective in eliciting a corrective response. Because Bad News from Israel addresses the insidious and dominant pro-Israeli perspective of most major media, it is an important book.

The book is divided into three parts: an overview of what the media should cover, how the media does cover the issue, and what understanding an audience derives from this news coverage. The first section is an historical overview of Israel’s occupation of Palestine; ideally, one would hope that news coverage would make an audience aware of this history. The historical discussion sets the stage for the second section of the book, a “content analysis” of news coverage. Here the authors document general patterns arising in the coverage of the Israeli occupation. They have taken a large body of news media output, mostly British TV news, and sought to classify broad patterns of exhibited dominant perspective.

The last section deals with “audience studies,” a study of various focus groups to determine their general knowledge of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. For a large segment of the population, TV is the primary source of information, and it is therefore important to research focus groups to determine how this TV news/information translates into an understanding of a given issue. In particular, it is of interest to determine an audience’s overall knowledge of an issue, how it interpreted events, and even whether it was interested in the issue at all. The results of the audience studies are very important, and clearly the most valuable section of the book.

Content Analysis

Philo and Berry analyzed the output of Britain’s BBC, ITV and Channel 4 News over key selected periods during the second intifada. Some of the TV news output is compared to that available in other media, e.g., newspapers. A detailed analysis then was undertaken of the TV news content. The content analysis proves that “accounts carry with them assumptions about cause, responsibility and consequences that connect directly to wider social values.” In the context of the Israeli occupation, the conclusion is that most of the BBC or ITV news is Israeli-centric, favors the Israeli narrative, and often justifies Israeli actions. At the same time, the BBC or ITV invariably distorts and slights the Palestinian condition and the reasons for their resistance.

The content analysis examined simple quantitative measures of the news output to find: “There is no evidence from our analysis to suggest that Palestinian views were given preferential treatment on the BBC. The opposite is in reality the case.”

The news from the area also was analyzed qualitatively, and several patterns of an Israeli-centric bias in the news coverage are given. For example, BBC news tends to present most Israeli violence as “response” or “retaliation,” thus justifying its violence against Palestinians. Invariably, the authors found, BBC reportage adopted the Israeli rationale and justifications. The language when describing violence against Israelis is markedly different than when referring to violence against Palestinians. The former tends to use emotive language, e.g., “atrocity,” “horrific,” etc., but the language describing the latter tends to be exculpatory of Israeli action and uses a sedate, almost inert, language. The key findings in this section have to do with the scarcity of context—i.e., there are minimal references to the origins of the conflict or to the reasons the second intifada broke out. Remarkably enough, Philo and Berry also document some BBC news accounts that are factually incorrect. In other words, even BBC journalists aren’t clear about the history of the region. If journalists are mixed up, it’s no wonder that an audience may be confused too.

Audience Analysis

The groups interviewed for the book are shown to have a dismally low level of knowledge of the situation in the Middle East. In 2001, only 4 percent of a British student sample knew that Palestinians had been driven from their land. Similarly, few had any knowledge of the link between the wars of 1948 and 1967. Some respondents thought the “conflict” had to do with a border dispute; most didn’t know who was occupying whom, or the nationality of the settlers. Of particular interest was the perception by a significant segment of the focus groups that many more Israelis than Palestinians had died during the second intifada. These results are indicative of the overall population’s knowledge of an important conflict, and it suggests that the major media in the UK have failed their audience.

Of Chickens and Eggs…

The BBC produces news that is often referred to as “snippets” or “bang-bang” stuff. News editors actively discourage their journalists from doing “explainers,” maintaining that their audience has only a “20-second attention span.” Using this rationale, major news organizations consistently “dumb down” their output. They argue that there is no market for more meaningful news, and have a very low, patronizing opinion of their audience. An often-heard media refrain is that there is a “chicken and egg problem.” News editors suggest that if there were more demand for meaningful news, they would supply it. And audiences often state that they would watch more news if it were more meaningful.

Philo and Berry have an answer to this conundrum. An important finding of the book is that context-less news turns an audience off—or, conversely, the more understanding an audience obtains from news, the more interested in the news coverage it will be. In other words, dumbing down of news coverage inevitably will lead to an alienated and less informed public.

The alternative is the virtuous cycle where contextualized news coverage will yield audiences seeking to obtain more news and information. Philo and Berry’s book is important to making this case, and demanding better news coverage for a range of issues. Although the book is based on the British experience, its lessons are universal, and it should be a must-read for American audiences as well.

In order to have a meaningful democracy it is necessary to have an informed body politic. If the media fails to educate the public to have a better understanding of key issues, then there are grounds to demand remedial action. Bad News From Israel is an important contribution to what eventually will be an important debate in our societies regarding the role of the media, and news coverage in particular.

Paul de Rooij is a Dutch economist, mathematician, activist and writer living in London. He can be reached at <proox@hotmail.com>.