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The Coverage--and Non-Coverage--of Israel-Palestine
For all of these reasons, it is essential that Americans be fully and accurately informed on Israel/Palestine, without bias in either direction. STATISTICAL STUDIES To determine how well the American media are fulfilling this critical function, our organization has undertaken the laborious but essential task of conducting statistical studies of media coverage of this issue. Our methodology is to examine clear, significant categories that are as impervious as possible to subjective bias. It is our view that the media’s job is to report as accurately as possible the facts on a topic. Indications about the extent to which the press is accomplishing this can be objectively measured. Specifically, we look at the extent to which certain media outlets—e.g., The New York Times or ABC World News Tonight—cover the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians in the conflict. This approach allows meaningful statistical analysis that would be impossible in a qualitative study and provides a yardstick that allows us to determine whether media demonstrate even-handed respect for human life, regardless of ethnic or religious background. We decided to count the number of reports of deaths for each side during a given period, and then compare these to the number of people actually killed. It is our view that deaths among both populations are equally tragic. Fortunately, reliable data for both populations is available from the widely respected Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem (go to www.btselem.org. for a full analysis of their findings). In our studies we only include Israeli deaths directly caused by the actions of Palestinians, and vice versa. In addition to analyzing coverage of all deaths, we specifically examine reporting on children’s deaths. These tragedies represent an especially human side of the uprising, and one that lies outside of most people’s views of acceptable violence in armed conflict. The killing of children is especially repugnant to most people, and these deaths elicit extreme disfavor for those responsible for them. Therefore, we felt that studying how the media covered children’s deaths would be particularly significant. In spring 2005, we completed studies of The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” and three of the major television network evening news shows, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News. Not only are these news media the major sources of information for millions of Americans around the country, they are also the windows through which editors and producers of smaller newspapers and broadcast news stations throughout the nation view the conflict and gauge the accuracy of their own coverage. Their significance in forming Americans’ views on Israel-Palestine cannot be overemphasized. For each of these media outlets we examined coverage of deaths over two separate year-long periods. First, we analyzed coverage for the first year of the current uprising, September 29, 2000 through September 28, 2001. This period was selected for study in order to evaluate viewers’ and readers’ first impressions, which are crucial as they continue to try to make sense of the conflict. Coverage of this year set the context within which all subsequent reporting on the conflict is viewed, forming viewers’ and readers’ opinions as to who was initiating the violence and who was retaliating. Second, we studied the coverage for 2004 to discover whether the patterns we found for the first year had continued, diminished, or increased several years into the intifada. We looked into two types of reporting on deaths. The first and major focus of our study was on timely/specific reports and mentions of deaths; e.g., “four Palestinians/Israelis were killed yesterday.” It is this ongoing reporting of deaths that provides people with their impression of a conflict. We also counted follow-up stories, so that, in theory, numbers of death reports could surpass actual number of deaths, giving percentages that exceed 100 percent. We were surprised to find that this frequently occurred—but only for one population. Secondarily, we examined cumulative reports, e.g., “The violence has left 200 Palestinians dead” or “200 Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings.” While we believe that such summaries of deaths can provide useful information, especially when numbers for both populations are given in the same report (which, sadly, rarely occurred), it was our view that such mentions are not the equivalent of 200 individual reports on each of these deaths, and needed to be enumerated in their own, separate category. For The New York Times we studied prominent reporting on deaths—i.e. deaths reported in headlines/lead paragraphs—and then conducted a month-long sub-study on deaths reported in the entire article. (Interestingly, we found that the patterns discovered in our study of prominent reporting essentially held true.) For the television networks we studied transcripts of the full newscasts in addition to introductions by anchors.
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