Just this week I was interviewed by a Rome-based news agency, Inter Press Service News Agency. Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutiérrez sent me a set of questions about the global media coverage of the Gaza conflict. I was asked to weigh in as a propaganda/media analyst. Here is the URL to the interview.
I am always a bit sheepish about analyzing anything in the Middle East because (a) I'm an international relations Ph.D. generalist and not a regional expert; and (b) the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a political and media hot potato. Whatever one says in an interview, it can be easily misinterpreted as either anti- or pro-Israeli or anti- or pro-Arab. One risks being labeled an anti-Semite, racist, or bigot. Choose your weapon of name-calling.
Over the years I've heard smart people I know refer to Arabs and Palestinians in the most bigoted language that I won't repeat here and I've heard some Arab and Palestinian friends refer to "my enemy" Israel. I'm always left speechless by these outbursts of myopia. I often try to interject something along the lines of "Have you considered..." or "Have you looked at it from their point of view," which generally gets me nowhere in the conversation.
Nevertheless, as a U.S. global citizen who cares as much about what is happening to people 10,000 miles away as she does here, I did respond to the IPS interview request and tried my best to share what I've found in media and propaganda research without coming across as favoring one side or the other. I don't even look at conflicts generally as one side or the other, unless you can include "our side," that is, the victims and innocents who are mowed down in the middle of the destruction path.
From my vantage point, which is to say from my perch as a watcher/listener/viewer of mostly American media, it appeared that Israel's use of force in Gaza was excessive from the start. Let's not call this conflict a battle of equals when Gaza's Palestinian casualties were in the thousands (1,300) and Israeli deaths were in the teens (13 confirmed by both sides). All loss of life in this conflict is lamentable, especially if one believes that the ceasefire will not hold.
My octogenarian mother was very pro-Israel early on and kept the station tuned to Fox News Channel as I wrote my short book about Obama, Persuader-in-Chief, in the second bedroom of her retirement home. My mother's preference for Israel and the IDF was of interest because she has not been particularly politically minded over my lifetime. I asked her why she supported Israel and she said that it had a right to defend itself from the terrorists residing in Gaza. When I told her it seemed that innocent civilians and not Islamic terrorists were being killed in action, she agreed that this was unfortunate but unless Israel acted with force, it would continue to be attacked on its borders.
It seems that the American people agree with my mom. CNN released a poll today that said 60 percent of Americans supported Israel over the Palestinians in the Gaza conflict and believed that Israel's use of force in the Gaza strip was justified. Significant was that such a poll was conducted before Israel instituted its ceasefire on January 17, 2009.
On the other hand, Newsweek reports that Israel has never been so isolated in the world following the Gaza conflict.
One of my former students whose viewpoint I respect very much has been playing a bit of Facebook Ping-Pong (Wall-to-Wall) about the media coverage of the Gaza conflict. I posted this article translated into English from Arabic (Source: Alarabiya.net) about Israel's hiring of bloggers to improve its overseas image
In response to this posting, she wrote:
Considering the biased source, I can understand the reason behind the comment. On the other hand, the worldview of the war has been twisted by the media, depending on which channel we choose to watch. Whatever happened to unbiased media in order to inform the people?
I wonder which media today are completely unbiased? You have to search for the truth among varied media sources and always question what you know to be true. I'm a huge fan of C-SPAN for its unfiltered approach to public affairs coverage and for its format that allows regular folks from left, right, center or none-of-the-above to weigh in on these issues.
Anyone out there want to help this media professor make sense of all this?