NBC news vs Aljezeera news vs ABC news

Aljazeera News (English) published a piece by freelance journalist and media analyst, Habib Battah, based in Beirut and New York.

The piece analyzes news reports on the war on Gaza comparing the (biased pro-Israel) US media to the Arab news media.

Battah made a few interesting observations on how a US newspaper for example juxtaposed the images of a Palestinian woman who just lost her children and an Israeli woman being distressed by the fighting; how the media avoided the exact figures of dead Palestinians in its reports; how it dedicates a relative small amount of air time to the war on Gaza.
And that overall the Palestinian side is given much less voice as featured in Aljazeera news for instance.
Similar things were already witnessed and criticized during the war on Iraq.

One point in terms of news value is pretty obvious however: of course for the Arab media the only current news item is the war on Gaza. On the other hand nobody has yet dared to question if the daily flood of injured and dead people, children as preferred victims, should be truly regarded as the yardstick for accurate quality reporting.

A rather delicate and complicated matter is the comparison of the two women on the front page. What Battah consciously or subconsciously states is that the one suffers less than the other. Without doubt it is much easier to portray the dead and their weeping community members than mental distress. It might well be that the Palestinian woman suffers „more“ than the other but how does one measure „suffering“? Whose suffering is worth more?
It would have been interesting to read in Battah’s article how many times the Arab media portray suffering Israelis on their front page or feature their side in a broadcast news item.

Appreciating his sober news reality check his report left a question unanswered: Are we really talking about human beings here or just about Israelis and Palestinians? Not only that – do we really mean it?
How valid or justified are arguments about victims and offenders without having ever experienced being either of them?

Also worth your while is browsing through the many answers from the international blogger community following Battah’s article.
In response to one of them talking about the interpretation of „objective“ (meaning biased) reporting in a democratic country I would like to say the following: isn’t it great for us (living in relatively protected and free countries) to have a choice of zapping through various channels and reading (or skimming through) at least through two papers every day to form our own opinion on issues. Being equipped with this choice it is almost our duty not to rely on anybody or a sole source of information!


Another blogger, from the US, Bob Hogan commented on the propaganda machine in his own country: ...“pro-Israel propaganda (is) not different from Al-Qaeda’s anti-American propaganda“.
One should seriously try to evaluate first before starting to judge. Most of the so called ordinary people all over the world (let’s take the the average 9-5 working US citizen or the barely educated women in the Middle-East) obviously believe what they hear and see on TV or read in the paper. That is matter of fact. And most of the people who are not engaged in the media or who are self-confessed news junkies will rarely question the bias of the media. What reason could they possibly think of to do so. A good proof for that was the „surprise-effect“ after Michael Moore's documentary on 9/11 came into the mainstream cinemas.

Battah’s comment on sound bites being reinforced by pundits is another interesting observation. It makes aware about the „dangers“ of only relying to broadcast media in those events. Naturally you get sound bites and expert opinions that ideally try to cover both sides of the story. But in the end the broadcast media is what it is: a fast moving medium, not an instrument providing aid and relief.

The benefit of getting the news from a (quality) daily paper is that it takes time to absorb and process the given information. How many words hysterically shouted at you by foreign correspondents wrapped in a bullet proof jacket and helmet in their sixty second reports really stick in one’s memory longer than a few minutes after hearing it?

While Aljazeera has a few journalists in the war zone about eight foreigns journalists are desperately waiting at the border for permission to get in. All of them eager to feed their readers and viewers with more (verbal) images of suffering people equivalent to publishing any fresh sordid detail of a celebrity couple divorce.

A great deal of this war is carried out via the media and both sides, Israel and Palestine/Hamas, are very well aware of that. Even more than the televised War on Iraq, the War on Gaza is fought by the media. Where is the voice of the Hamas leaders - that also is missing on Aljazeera news. All they have said so far is to retaliate the bombings on the Israeli community worldwide (indicating a rather dull and even more suffering ahead of us in the future).

There has always been bias in war reporting and documentation. Anybody who read Susan Sontag for example knows about how bodies in the Crimean War got dragged from the actual battle field to different surroundings for a „better picture". Although this meant distorting reality for writing history.

Battah’s conclusion on the indirect war of Western vs Arab media reads as follows: „ While American analysts map out Israel's strategy, Arab broadcasters are drawing their own maps, plotting the expanding range of Hamas rockets, and predicting a strengthened hand for opposition to Israel, rather than a weakened one."

So, how much of the daily news are actually propaganda? This question might be best covered by Aljazeera's great program Listening Post.


http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/20091585448204690.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/05/israel-palestine-gaza-attacks1
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp