Imperfect Media - Israel and Palestine

Today's Age contains an opinion piece by Michael Gawenda, former editor at large, about flawed media coverage of the Israel Palestinian conflict, in light of the recent election. The piece is not terribly polemical, but it definitely tries to disguise where he's going. At the start of the piece, Gawenda hedges in defence of broad journalistic practice, and the knowledge base that informs it, but he then goes on to take a broadside at, what is in his view, a one-sided narrative about the conflict. That is, this familiar idea, that by focusing on the immediate victimhood of the Palestinian situation, the media encourages a kind of fatalism and responsibility free environment for the leadership, which robs the conflict of symmetrical accountability.

When it comes to reporting this conflict, not only do a lot of journalists know little about these narratives, but for obvious and non-malign reasons, they quickly conclude that the Palestinian story, whatever the history, is one that has led them to great suffering and dispossession, which means the Israeli story must be about conquest and occupation of stolen land.

The paradigm is one of victims and victimisers, helpless and hopeless Palestinians on the one hand and brutal occupiers and oppressors on the other. One narrative is true and tragic and one narrative is false, an example of the colonialist's lies and propaganda.

One result of seeing the conflict through this paradigm is that by reducing Palestinians to victims, their leaders are reduced to victims as well and are excused from taking any responsibility for their political failings, for the corruption that they encouraged and from which they personally benefited, from taking responsibility for the opportunities they passed up to improve the lives of their long-suffering people and perhaps even give the Palestinians the state that is so clearly their right.

Leaving aside the facts for a moment, I can certainly agree with the sentiment here in a wide sense, that we should not try to lock people in to victimhood and whitewash their leadership's responsibility. But what about this?

Why is it that for all the hundreds of journalists covering the conflict, there was no great attempt to expose the massive corruption of Fatah under Yasser Arafat, which most journalists knew about and which led to the squandering of billions of aid dollars that could have been spent, should have been spent, to give the Palestinians an economic future?

Contary to this account, basically every mainstream press article I've read covering the Palestinian election has mentioned the well-documented corruption of the Fatah regime, as either a background history, or through political analysis, as a direct antecedent reason for the victory. If you accept that, and I think I'm media junkie enough to have a decent idea of how the western press generally covers big news items, then it would seem this alleged bias only existed generally prior to the election coverage. But does that not then beg the question, that the victim narrative explanation is hardly exhaustive? What of the obvious point, which Gawenda overlooks, that perhaps the motives of commercial media makes continually re-accounting for well-established facts untenable, as only new and controversial things are newsworthy? The election provided a reason to go over this territory, that wasn't there before. Moreover, what of the basic fact of western consumer self-identification, within which the media is necessarily enmeshed, which dictates that the news is going to be intrinsically focused on the 'like' Israel, more than the Arab 'other'?

I think it's obvious Gawenda has gone for the easy answer here - rather than trying to address any of the other explanations for the media asymmetry he sees.

Though I don't deny that the victim thesis has some merit, it's an interesting time to allege this bias, when we're arguably at the apex of post-9/11 Arab=terrorist hysteria. Furthermore, how might we square this supposed anti-Israel orthodoxy with the analysis of Walt and Mearsheimer? These two senior realist foreign policy academics have recently concluded a press survey which tries to demonstrate the presence of an Israel lobby, which is said to be strongly affecting and distorting American perspective and policy, such that it countervails against their strict, realist view of US national interests?

I'll leave that one for the punters.