The Media, New Wars and New Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
By Pedro Caldeira Rodrigues
On 29 March 2002, one day after the beginning of the Israeli Defence Forces’ massive military offensive against the autonomous territories of the Palestinian Authority, CNN journalist Chistiane Amanpour was able to get into contact with Yasser Arafat by phone. The Palestinian leader was surrounded by over 70 tanks at his headquarters which lay in ruins. Amanpour asked him whether he “could do more in order to stop the violence”, in an obvious reference to the Palestinian suicide bombing attacks. Arafat got angry, accused her of concealing the “crimes of Israelis” with that question, and that was the end of the conversation. “What a great journalist you turned out to be, you should have more respect for your profession…”, said Arafat to the astonished Amanpour.
Previously, in 1998, during the Kosovo conflict, about one year before the beginning of the NATO attacks, a CNN team also led by Amanpour went into Pristina for just two or three days. With amazing technical support, the sole objective of the large team was to interview a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Albanian armed group fighting the Serb forces. The report was made. A few days later, the then US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke visited the region and also had a meeting with the KLA’s leadership, which translated into the movement’s legitimisation by the US. The negotiated solution gave place to the military solution.
These two examples disclosure a specific and persistent way of doing journalism, where a tendency towards simplification and Manichaeanism is revealed: the tendency to blame, almost exclusively, one of the sides in a conflict for the worsening of the situation, and to juggle the information on the possibilities of negotiable solutions.
These are examples that keep on repeating themselves, as in the Middle East. In early April, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a US observatory on the media, released, a study on the use of the word “retaliation”, and its derivations, on ABC, CBS and NBS’s main nightly news between the beginning of the second Intifada, in September 2000, until 17 March 2002.
The study concluded that 79 percent of those references were related to Israeli “retaliation” against the Palestinians. Only 9 percent referred to Palestinian “retaliation” against Israeli. With both parts justifying their attacks as retaliation for past actions, US’s main TV channels chose to characterise Israel’s violence as “retaliation”, far more often than it did violent Palestinian actions.
Why this example? Because the term “retaliation” suggests a defensive attitude, a response to a specific aggression. It also implicitly places responsibility for the cycle of violence on the side that is suffering retaliation; notwithstanding the fact that the number of Palestinian civilian casualties was always higher than those of the Israelis.
As such, FAIR concluded that the disproportionate use of the word “retaliation” —79 percent against 9 percent— reveals a tendency to define Israel’s action as defensive, and the Palestinian one as aggressive. Once more, the main US broadcast media were able to “simplify” a rather complex conflict.
In the face of a very radicalised situation, where both parts have several propaganda weapons, the media, mainly the US televisions, rarely broadcast information on how to solve the long-time contentions in the Middle East area. Peace proposals or plans that were, or still are, under discussion are omitted, and the consquential is privileged by comparison with the essential. To make things worse, the media are deliberately excluded, often through violence, from areas where human rights abuses occur.
