U.S. Media Coverage: Gaza vs. Tel-Aviv
Press Action
Friday, December 26, 2003
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/bouzid12262003/
By Ahmed Bouzid
Coverage by U.S. newspapers of events in the Palestine-Israel conflict during the four bloody days of Dec. 23-26, 2003, vividly illustrates just how closely wedded the U.S. media have become to a very clear-cut narrative neatly framing U.S. coverage of the violence there: Palestinians instigate and Israelis react. Even when the sequence of who provoked what is plainly obvious, the U.S. media still insist on clinging to the usual, established (and safe) storyline.
On Dec. 23, 2003, the Israeli army raided a Gaza refugee camp and as a result killed at least eight Palestinians, five alleged “militants” and three civilians, and wounded at least 41 Palestinians, nine of whom were children. The attack marked the bloodiest death toll in Gaza for a single day in the past two months.
Two days later, on Dec. 25, Israel helicopter gun-ships fired missiles at a car in Gaza, killing a commander of Islamic Jihad.
Then, less than an hour later, a suicide bomber struck in Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Aviv, killing four Israeli civilians.
And yet, the New York Times reported on Dec. 26, 2003, that “the suicide bomb attack in Petah Tikva broke a tense sort of relative calm that has existed on both sides since October.”
To be sure, the suicide bombing was the first such attack to claim Israeli civilian lives since Oct. 4, but during that same period at least 85 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, were killed by the Israeli army. This is not counting the number of wounded, the houses demolished, the endless checkpoints, the illegal arrests, etc. So, one would be fully justified to ask, in what sense can a respected newspaper claim that a “tense sort of relative calm ... has existed on both sides since October”?
But worse than claiming that there was a “lull” in violence within a story, is blaring that falsehood in a large headline on the front page. Which is precisely what the following papers did do: the Boston Globe ("Two attacks break lull in Mideast"), the Houston Chronicle ("Bloodshed in Israel, Gaza breaks calm"), the Miami Herald ("Bomb, airstrike re-ignite Mideat violence"), and - what is perhaps the worst headline by a major paper - the Los Angeles Times ("12-Week Lull in Mideast Ends"). Worth noting is how the sequence of events is also either blurred ("Two attacks"), reversed ("Israel, Gaza”, “Bomb, airstrike"), or simply ignored ("12-week lull").
Of course, there is also the matter of which of the two events, the Dec. 23 raid or the Dec. 25 suicide bombing, received front-page attention. Not surprisingly, not a single paper of the 14 major dailies we surveyed front-paged the raid on Gaza, while 11 out of the 14 did front-page the suicide bombing with large headlines: the Boston Globe (’Two attacks break lull in Mideast"), the Chicago Tribune ("4 Israelis killed by Arab bomber"), the Hartford Courant ("9 Die in Mideast Violence"), the Houston Chronicle ("Bloodshed in Israel, Gaza breaks calm"), the Los Angeles Times ("12-Week Lull in Mideast Ends"), the Miami Herald("Bomb, airstrike reignite Mideast violence"), the New York Times ("Suicide attacker kills 4 in Israel"), the Seattle Times ("Mideast attack, bombing kill 11"), the USA Today ("Terror strikes in four nations"), the Washington Post("Suicide bomber kills four Israelis"), and the Washington Times ("Palestinian bomber slays 4 at Israeli bus stop"). The three exceptions (i.e., papers that front-paged neither event) were: the Charlotte Observer, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and the St. Petersburg Times.
The issue here is not simply a matter of fairness - important as that is - but a matter of professionalism. These papers are grossly misleading their readership when they present events in such disfigured and shorn contexts. They are simply not doing their job right.
Ahmed Bouzid is president of Palestine Media Watch and author of Framing the Struggle.