Hillel Nossek

Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee · Head Dan Shomron Kinneret Research Institute for Society Security and Peace

This study examines the theory of media systems and the models offered by Hallin and Mancini (2004) by focusing on critical junctures in which changes occur. Based on critical political economy and historical institutionalism, we analyzed the Israeli media system transition in the 1980s and early 1990s, seeking to understand the nature of this chan...

The chapter will analyze government media policy and information campaigns in dealing with the spread of the COVID-19 (commonly named in Israel the Corona Virus) from its discovery, through the closures, vaccinations, and exit from the latest closure. The analysis of the policy will be based on the actual communication with the population in Israel...

This study examines how members of a cultural minority perceive their representations in the mainstream media, using immigrants to Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as a case study. The research applies Jaspers' psychological theory on boundary situations to media consumption to provide a theoretical conceptualization and empirical implemen...

This article seeks to examine whether, in an age where anyone ostensibly can become a journalist without the backing of any professional and responsible system, a single journalist can bring an important topic, related to a central security issue in a given society, to the attention of the media and of decision-makers. To this end, this study compa...

This study focuses on how Israeli Arab citizens perceive their media representations on Israeli television and why they consume television broadcasts even though they are marked mostly by negative representations. A new concept – “Communication Boundary Situation” – a development of Jaspers’ “Boundary Situation” theory, is the theoretical framework...

This study investigates the cross-media repertoires of news consumption of young adults in today’s fragmented multi-media environment, and examines the interactions between those repertoires and the consumers’ civic engagement and political participation. By using a Q-sort method, the respondents were asked to sort a number of elicitation cards on...

Climate change communication in Israel is primarily practiced within the environmental communication field and less so in the science communication field. Communication about climate change is fairly benign compared to the war and terror that are part of everyday life in Israel. Only in the 1970s did environmental communication emerge in various me...

This article examines how Mizrahim perceive their media representation on Israeli television. Using Karl Jaspers’ psychological theory of boundary situations, the article seeks to explain the seeming disparity between the negative depiction of Mizrahim on Israeli TV and Mizrahi consumption of these representations. Having conducted in-depth semi-st...

Community media organisations are famously difficult to define, as this media field is highly elusive and diverse, even if there is a certain degree of consensus about a series of basic characteristics. One key defining component is the objective to serve its community by allowing its members to participate in self-representational processes. Yet t...

This article explores news consumption repertoires in Israel. It is a part of a cross-cultural research project of European audiences in nine European countries, Israel, and New Zealand, conducted as a joint effort by communications researchers from different countries in the context of EU COST Action (IS0906), and continued after the formal end of...

This chapter uses the framework of journalistic professionalism to explore how the specific challenges of climate journalism are affecting the profession. In particular, we consider how some key journalists from around the world reflected on the task of reporting climate change in general and on the IPCC AR5 in particular. 16 prominent professional...

Jensen and Helles’ model for studying the Internet as a cultural forum describes six prototypical communicative practices based on synchronicity and number of participants. This study seeks to examine the validity of their model in a broader intercultural setting. Using data from a large-scale, cross-European research project, the study reveals tha...

The controversy concerning the future displacement of print media is an ongoing dispute among stakeholders and academic experts. Based on the model of displacement or resilience of a given medium, this study explores the print media audience, primarily by comparing the time spent reading print media with that allotted to consuming their digital equ...

This paper focuses on complex interactions involving offline and online activists, new and mainstream media audiences, during the Israeli "Social Justice" peaceful protests ("July 14th"- October 2011); based, amongst others, on theoretical frameworks as social agency (Bourdieu, 1998), media political economy (Couldry, 2010; Mosco, 2009), new media...

This article investigates the function of book reading in a society consisting of a multiplicity of ethno-cultural communities, asking whether book reading functions as a unifying factor within each ethno-cultural community or as a dividing factor and as a signifier of boundaries between them. It is based on multiyear survey data among representati...

Although the state of Israel is a democracy, military censorship has been in use since its establishment in 1948 and is still imposed. The chapter analyzes the theoretical and practical grounds for military censorship in Israel based on an agreement between relevant parties: the government, the army, the media, and the public. Analysis of Israeli m...

The main question addressed in this chapter concerns the function of book reading in fulfilling personal psychosocial needs, such as knowledge acquisition, aesthetic pleasure, entertainment and escapism in the multi-channel media environment. We will first describe the two main approaches to date exploring communication research — the functionalist...

Audience research in Israel Communication research in Israel, including audience research, emerged during nation-building processes beginning about half a century ago, as a result of both the development of high education and new media organizations – especially Israeli radio and television. Since that time, audience research had grown and undergon...

This article seeks to ask the question why, when and how the BBC World Service Hebrew Section broadcast became part of British media diplomacy towards Israel and integral to British foreign policy towards the Middle East and the Cold War. It also seeks to understand why it was closed down and how it became a professional training ground for Israel'...

Based on longitudinal research on the media coverage of terrorist attacks, this article suggests a model of how the coverage of these attacks may be conceptualized as a media event and explores the function this serves within society. The main assumption of the model is that journalists change their ritual of news coverage when dealing with excepti...

Since Israel became a state, the country’s media institution has leaned toward the continental European model, displaying remnants of both a British colonialist and a local European one adapted to Israeli reality. The theoretical significance of this framework is such that it swings between authoritarian characteristics of a media institution with...

Since Israel became a state, the country’s media institution has leaned toward the continental European model, displaying remnants of both a British colonialist and a local European one adapted to Israeli reality. The theoretical significance of this framework is such that it swings between authoritarian characteristics of a media institution with...

The central point of this article is that journalists accomplish their work through a narrative duality. During everyday news, journalists apply a professional narrative that represents a balance between their core journalistic values and the social pressures from their working world. When society's core values are under threat—such as with physica...

Although the apocalyptical vision of mass upheaval envisaged at the time of Y2K (the "Millennium Bug") did not come to pass, the utter fear provoked by the prospect of the Bug’s consequences generated a potential panic effect −when effectively nothing had happened! The paper asks whether, in the case of Y2K people’s perceptions of the risk, their...

This paper examines the changes in reading as a cultural behavior in a multi-channel media environment.

The theoretical assumption of this paper is that when a foreign news item is defined as ‘ours’, then journalists’ professional practices become subordinate to national loyalty; when an item is ‘theirs’, journalistic professionalism comes into its own. Thus, the article argues that there is an inverse relation between professional news values and th...

This article examines the Palestinian media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to understand how censorship functions in an environment of changing political realities and the impact of censorship on matters related to freedom of the press. These questions are examined both in relation to the period of Palestinian self-governance under the Pa...

The article presents an active research model linking community television theory with praxis, ensuring that the activities are compatible with the values and principles espoused in the theory. The model was developed for a research group, which accompanied a community television project. The project involved organizing and coordinating the activit...

The proliferation of cable television in Israel through independent infrastructures has provided a unique opportunity for a quasi-experimental study on audience response, and Israeli families in particular, to a new media technology. Cable television subscription in Israel differs from noncable households in the sense that cable television provides...

This paper looks at the displacement potential of the new convergent technologies and whether PCs and the Internet have significantly reduced the consumption of 'old' media that require traditional literacy, defined as command of basic reading and writing skills, and media literacy connected to audio-visual media. It also explores whether these new...

Comparative research across cultures provides a fruitful terrain for research into myths and narratives that are embedded in news content. The study of news as myth or narrative helps to examine the enduring values that a culture tells about itself. This perspective suggests that news is a social construction, but it also suggests that news amounts...

One of the characteristics of democratic regimes is the absence of censorship and other prepublication control over the content of the news media. Although the state of Israel is considered to be a democratic state, military censorship has been in operation since the nation's establishment in 1948. The central question discussed in this article is:...

The present study deals with the social implications of cable broadcasting and explores the possible links between the spread of global media and the development of individualistic and globalistic orientations. The study examined the function of television in strengthening individuals' cognitive and affective connections with their own selves, with...

The mass media convey dominant values and attitudes through stories and myths that they circulate within a specific culture. As a narrative form, news coverage places events into social reality by retelling them within the framework of known stories or myths. Events acquire meanings and reactions by the ways in which these stories are told. In Isra...