Rating: 
Summary: A guide to misunderstanding Israel-Palestine
Review: Greg Philo, Professor of Communications at Glasgow University, carried out a three year study into the relationship between television and the construction of public knowledge - how we understand foreign events etc. What he found was that 80% rely mainly on TV news, and that people (esp. young people) were very confused about events.
Philo DOESN'T claim that reporters and news organisations are deliberately biased, but that a lack of historical perspective causes confusion. A huge majority of the British public thought that the 'settlers' were Palestinian, and that the 'occupied territories' were Israeli land being occupied by Palestinians. They thought that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just another border conflict - they didn't realise that a people had been dispossessed.
This loss of the origins of the conflict has interesting consequences. Palestinians were always seen as initiating violence, and Israelis as responding. Palestinian action was never understood as a 'response' to occupation and repression and loss of land. People assume suicide bombs are the result of 'mad-men', rather than emerging from a particular set of social conditions.
Reporters' subconscious use of words like 'hit-back', 'retaliate', 'pay-back time' were only used in terms of the Israeli action; while 'atrocity', 'murder' and 'cold-blood' were only used to refer to Palestinian action. This use of words tacitly endorses Israeli action while condemning Palestinian action. Can you imagine a suicide bomb being described in a news report as 'Palestinians hit back for 35 years of occupation? Or an Israeli raid into a refugee camp being described as 'cold-blooded killing'?
This different semantic treatment for the Palestinians and Israelis produced some odd results. A group of people were asked to write a script for a set of pictures used in a news report a few years ago. The pictures were of Mohammed Al-Dura, the 12 year old boy, who's father claims was shot by Israeli snipers, but who Israelis claim was caught in the crossfire. The group said that 'this boy was caught in the crossfire' and worryingly, they went on to say 'in retaliation for a Palestinian suicide bomb'. But Mohammed Al-Dura was shot at the start of the current intifada, before the first suicide bomb!
Philo is NOT a pro-Palestinian campaigner, he makes it clear at the outset that he is not endorsing any killing - Israeli or Palestinian. He is interested in how people misunderstand events, and what the cause of that knowledge was. Despite this, he has been the target of letter-writing campaigns, and malicious reviews in international publications which have clearly not read his work.
An eye-opening insight into how the public misunderstands Palestine, and how reporters are subconsciously responsible.
Rating: 
Summary: Books and reviews
Review: I am a moderate "left-wing" Israeli Zionist and I ran into "Bad news..." by reading its review in the July 31, 2004 issue of the "Economist" ("The long fall from grace"). It was written as one item reviewing two books about Israel. (The other book was "Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel" by Daphna Baram a "left wing" Israeli journalist). Unfortunately this review of "Bad news..." did not make the Amazon Editorial Reviews list. That's unfortunate because mainly in the free world the Economist is regarded as a very respectable weekly. I sent the Economist review of "Bad news..." to friends and I shall take the liberty to quote from it. After all I often buy and read books merely on the recommendation of the Economist.
Wrote the Economist:... BAD NEWS FROM ISRAEL... is a pretty dismal production... a waste of its producers' time and effort... After reviewing British TV programs...the researchers conclude that the Israeli point of view is over-represented... The method of the book is to label as "pro-Israeli" any piece that does not conform to the particular anti-Israeli narrative of the researchers from Glasgow [i.e., Mr. Philo and Mr. Berry] ...it is taken for granted that the present intifada is a war of liberation against a brutal and illegal occupation and that any journalist who fails to hit the audience over the head with this point of view... is falling down on the job. NOW HEAR THE DEFINITION OF PRO-ISRAELI BIAS: "It is pro-Israeli bias, for example, to use the word 'terrorism' to describe the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians at bus stops".
My own conclusion is that the authors of "Bad news..." agitate for terrorism. The Economist ends its review with the following three words: "Read something else". I myself am about to take that advice.
P.S. One of the authors (Mr. Philo) had the temerity to write a letter to the Economist which the free and fair weekly printed last week (August 7, 2004). Unfortunately, the letter fails to address the question whether blowing up civilians riding rush-hour buses in Jerusalem is terrorism or not.
Rating:
Summary: A surprising perspective
Review: I have absolutely no doubt that Greg Philo is totally sincere in his belief that his research came up with the conclusion that the media is biased in favour of Israel
I am equally sure that the findings are completely wrong!
Totting up the number of minutes devoted to Israeli or Palestinian spokespeople does not amount to the words actually relating to support of the particular group you represent.
To those of us who believe the bias is completely the other way, Greg Philo's findings come as a complete surprise and even a spokesperson for the BBC has questioned the veracity of the way the research has been interpreted.
There are so many examples of anti Israel journalists and electronic media reporters, that it is truly hard to understand how this book has used the evidence available
Joy Wolfe
Manchester UK
Rating:
Summary: Bad Book about News from Israel
Review: I was very exited when I received this book, because something like this is very needed. And as a reporter working in the Middle East and as a teacher of Journalism I am dreaming of having good, critical quality media research as I hoped that "Bad News from Israel" would be. But as I read it, I became increasingly frustrated and disappointed. Here just a very small parts of my criticism. (Apologizing in advance for English not being my mother tongue). The first 90 pages of the book is a rewriting of the history of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. That part is the Achilles Heal of the book. We are told that there are two narratives of this conflict. And you might expect to get a loyal rundown of these two (or more) versions of history. But you don't. What you get is a new history full of mistakes and so biased that when it is later used to calibrate the instrument - so to speak - that will evaluate the quality of the journalists reporting, any relatively neutral, fair and balanced reporting of the Middle East Cinflict will inevitably come out as pro-Israel. Just two of many examples of clear mistakes: Already on page 2 we are told that early European religious Zionists as rabbis Jehuda Alkalai and Zvi Hirsh Kalisher saw the return to Zion as "a necessary prelude to the Redemption and the second coming of the Messiah." Jews are not waiting for the second coming of the Messiah - Christians are! And if you check Howard Sachar's "A History of Israel", that Philo and Berry are quoting from, you will find, that the writers of "Bad News..." got it wrong. Later when dealing with the armed conflict leading up to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 we are told about one of the leaders of the armed Arab irregular groups: Fawzi al-Kawakji, who, we are told, "led the Arab League". He did no such thing. The group he led was called "Jaish al-Inqadh" in Arabic, which means "Army of Deliverance". The Arab League on the other hand is not some armed gang but the organization for Arab political cooperation founded in 1945. A few examples of bias and omissions: It is criticized as almost a kind of racism that the early Zionists tried to use Jewish labor rather than local Arabs. It is not explained that part of early Labor Zionism exactly was to "return the Jew to the Land" and that hard physical labor was part of that process. While much later when Israelis are using underpaid Palestinian workers to do their hard and dirty work, then that is criticized too. Which is much more understandable - but it does become kind of a "dammed if you do, and dammed if you don't". In explaining us about the well known documents of British imperialism in the Middle East during The First World War - the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement we are told, that the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence was "British assurances of Arab independence..." and a "pledge" of that. We are not told that it was neither. That there was no agreement and no signed final document. It was an exchange of views in - as the title says - a correspondence. The validity of the Balfour Declaration to the Zionists on the other hand - problematic as it may be - is doubted. Some unnamed "members of the British establishment", we are told, believes that the Balfour Declaration's promise to the Jews "...were directly violating the terms of the mandate." We are not told, on the other hand, that exactly a fulfillment of the promises given in the Balfour Declaration to the Zionists is part of the exact same mandatory regulations given by The League of Nations in 1922. Though that is an important piece of information. And I could go on like this for the rest of the historical part of the book. And the problem is that the historical chapters are the cornerstone for a lot of the criticism later on in the book of the media's coverage of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. And flawed as it is - the rest suffers. So why give "Bad News..." any stars at all? Because there are interesting observations about some journalist's obvious lack of knowledge in reporting from the region and of how viewers understand what is shown in television news very differently from what was indented. Most often because of the lack of context and background in news reports.
Rating:
Summary: A review of reviews and one more review
Review: It is interesting to note that most of the positive reviews are simply parroting the back cover of the book. Everyone makes the same handful of points and then expounds upon false histories.
Two people reference the tragic death of Muhammed al Dura:
> TV coverage clearly showed Israeli troops aiming at the boy
Amazing what film editing can do, isn't it? Obviously, with the distances involved, no single camera could focus on the distant Israeli troops and the boy to show such a thing. Thank you for pointing out a very salient example of anti-Israel news bias.
Furthermore, investigations by several sources, including The Atlantic, have written that the evidence conclusively shows that the boy was shot by Arab gunmen and suggests that he may have been intentionally "martyred" for media effect.
> Only 10 percent of the groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 knew that it was Israel that had occupied Palestine.
Following the Jordanian attack on Israel in 1967, Israel gained "The West Bank of Jordan"... which the Kingdom of (previously) Trans-Jordan (Palestine across, to the east of the river Jordan) had annexed nearly 20 years earlier.
How come for 20 years no one claimed that Egypt (in Gaza) and Jordan were "occupying" "Palestine"? And why wasn't Arab Palestine created during that time? (The PLO was created in 1964 not to establish a Palestinian state but to terrorize Israel. This before the "occupation").
> [Israel] illegally occupied it ever since in defiance of numerous UN Security Council resolutions.
Entirely false. The only UN Security Council resolution is 242 (and 338 which reaffirms it). It authorizes Israel to hold these territories until a comprehensive peace settlement is achieved and stopped short of calling on Israel to withdraw from "all" of the territories. Israel accepted UNSCR 242, the Arab League rejected it. (Egypt was the first nation to embrace it and, for making peace with Israel, was expelled from the Arab League. UNSCR 242 is also the basis of the Oslo Accords and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty.)
Curious, isn't it, that those who peddle these false histories are the ones who like this book?
In stark contrast, the criticisms of the book are bona-fide and original points. Let me add one more:
Journalists should report the NEWs. History is best left for historians.
Rating:
Summary: An exposé of dishonest media coverage of the Israel-Palestin
Review: The Glasgow University Media Group's new book, Bad News from Israel, exposes the dishonest role the main TV news coverage in Britain plays in distorting the Israel-Palestine conflict and misinforming the public.
Far from explaining the origins of the conflict, most news bulletins function as little more than the overseas arm of the Israeli government's propaganda. Israel is able to mobilise the support of billionaire media owners, Zionist pressure groups and write-in campaigns to intimidate journalists who try to take a more objective stance.
The result is an alarming level of ignorance and confusion among viewers, a lack of interest in the conflict, and feelings of helplessness and the impossibility of change. Above all, poor and biased coverage plays a crucial role in preventing an informed public debate about how the conflict might be resolved.
These criticisms are far from new. But Bad News from Israel provides reams of evidence to back up such views.
The book's authors, sociologists Greg Philo and Mike Berry, monitored and analysed four separate periods of news coverage by the BBC and ITN, Britain's two main TV news channels, between the start of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and the spring of 2002. They examined around 200 news programmes and compared them against the national press and other programmes such as Channel 4 (C4) News and BBC2's current affairs programme, Newsnight. They interviewed over 800 people and brought well known broadcasters and programme makers to take part in discussion groups with ordinary viewers and find out what they thought about the conflict and its coverage.
Philo and Berry found that news items were reported with little explanation about the origins of the conflict, the United Nations resolution establishing the state of Israel on part of Palestine, and the subsequent war between Israel and her Arab neighbours. Neither did the news spell out how the establishment of the state of Israel and the subsequent war had led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes, both because of the horrors of war and the forced expulsions organised by the official Israeli military forces and Zionist terrorist groups sanctioned by the then Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. There was little or no explanation of how many had become refugees again after the 1967 war and had lived in squalid refugee camps ever since.
While news coverage focused on the day to day details of the Palestinian armed uprising, few reporters described how Israel had seized the West Bank and Gaza 37 years ago and illegally occupied it ever since in defiance of numerous UN Security Council resolutions. There was next to no explanation of the meaning of that occupation: that the Palestinians lived under military rule in all but name, had no civil rights and suffered enormous economic and social deprivation.
The figures are quite stark. In the period between September 28 to October 15, 2000, BBC1 and ITN devoted 3,500 lines of text to the uprising, but only 17 to the history of the conflict.
The lack of public knowledge closely mirrored the absence of such information on the TV news.
Without any contextual information, most viewers did not appreciate that the Israelis had seized the Palestinians' land to build the Zionist settlements, closed hundreds of roads, diverted their water supplies, uprooted their olive groves, assassinated their political leaders, detained people for years without trial, routinely used torture, and imposed collective punishment in the form of house demolitions and curfews.
If the journalists did make passing reference to such abuses, they failed to point out that all of this was illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Not surprisingly, therefore, viewers had little understanding of what had given rise to the uprising. Only 10 percent of the groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 knew that it was Israel that had occupied Palestine. Some even thought that the Palestinians were the occupiers. Many saw the conflict as some sort of border dispute between two countries fighting over land. A massive 80 percent did not know where the Palestinian refugees had come from or how they had come to be dispossessed.
By Jean Shaoul
Rating:
Summary: Another perspective
Review: There are lots of reviews of this book, mainly politically partisan and strongly pro- or anti- the political conclusions drawn. Sad really - because this was not, I think, what this book was really about. Palastine was merely the context of the study.
This book exposed to me something I had sort of known about myself but hadn't really dared admit.
It is therefore important because I suspect that most readers will also be left with this same enlightening discomfort, and hopefully a determination not to let this situation continue.
The focus group studies reported in the book showed that a significant proportion of us do not know enough about the background of a currentl political situation to be able to interpret the significance of a short (20 second) news report.
The reporters who live day by day with a situation whether it is Afghanistan or Palastine fall into a trap of assuming that their listeners(viewers) are as deeply immersed in the subject as they are. Even if the reporters did want to give some background, the news programme producers would cut out this part of a report, because they work on the assumption that the viewing public have an attention span of around 20 seconds. There is therefore a real danger that the snap-shots produced as news items will become misleading. This puts the onus on any half intelligent member of a democratic society to make sure that they do not base their opinions only on the news however hard that organisation tries to present it fairly.
Rating:
Summary: Asks for even more bias
Review: This book does note that news about Israel is often spiced with editorial remarks. But rather than asking for better journalism, it merely pleads for even more anti-Israeli bias.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book if you truly want to understand
Review: This book is a must-read for anyone truly interested in understanding the truth about the roots and causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and how this has been distorted by an irresponsible and sensationalist media under pressure by the ratings race and by lobbies and special interest groups. This book is an extremely important piece of work in outlining the power the media has to distort and misrepresent world events, particularly in a region as misunderstood as the Middle East. It is astounding that such a small group of people can have such a large impact on the way the majority of the population understands and views the world. This book is a seminal piece of work that will hopefully open the door to a better understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the world's most misunderstood conflict, and to the honest reporting of it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent insight into the Arab-Israeli conflict
Review: This book will not tell you all there is to know about the historical basis of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, but is an excellent portrayal of how influential the media has been in the conflict.
The veteran investigative journalist John Pilger has praised its authors as "pioneers in their field" and insisted that "every journalist should read this book; every student of journalism ought to be assigned it".
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