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Who is the Enemy?The Portrayal of Arabs in Israeli Television News
Abstract
This study focuses on the portrayal of Arabs in Israeli news during the beginning of the Palestinian Intifada. At that time, there was only one news television programme in Hebrew - Mabat - which was (and still is) owned by the state. This was the only source of information and images which constructed and represented Israel-Arab relations and legitimized the contemporary power structure. We have found after conducting a content analysis of 54 news broadcasts that coverage presented a negatively biased portrayal of all Arabs. Arabs tend to be underrepresented, unidentified by name or profession and engaged in oppositional activities. The coverage also distinguished the Palestinians from the other Arab groups in ways that tended to undermine or trivialize their struggle. This finding can be best understood in the context of a conflict between two nations where each is trying to draw the boundaries of its own `imagined community'.
... Similarly, the Israeli authors tend to do the same. An example of this is illustrated by First (1998), who shows how Arabs are represented in Israeli children's books as uneducated and savages. In this regard First (1998, pp. ...
... However, Jews are represented as modern people, describing them as the people of the future. First (1998) investigated the representation of Arabs in Israeli media during the beginning of the Palestinian Intifada. The researcher conducts a quantitative content analysis for the investigation. ...
... The Middle East is in turmoil. 9. and said that the Middle East is in crisis 10. the Middle East is in a state of utter instability. ...
Media is considered a reflection of society and at the same time, it uses language as a power. The present study investigates the
representation of Arabs in the Israeli newspaper, ‘The Jerusalem Post’, which is published in English. In other words, this study
seeks to show how the Israeli press represents Arabs to the world, especially the West. Accordingly, we chose the Jerusalem Post
since it is one of the most popular Israeli newspapers. Moreover, this study focuses on the articles that contain the word ‘Arab*’
and its variants from January 2017 to December 2021; this period represents the time span before and after the recent official
normalization of relations between some Arab governments and Israel in order to shed light on the change of Israeli
representation of Arabs during this period, if any. We draw upon a corpus of over 22 million words to conduct this study. Both
corpus linguistic and critical discourse analysis are used to achieve the study goal. The analysis has shown that Arabs are
negatively represented in pre-normalization period, and although the second period (2020-2021) witnessed the official
normalization of relations between some Arab governments and Israel, Arabs are still represented negatively in the newspaper.
... The IW grew higher as the physical distance between the rival populations decreased, remaining stable and effective after occupation of the territories. Despite the unmediated encounter between Israelis and Palestinians, information about the adversary continued to rest chiefly on an aggregate of stereotypes and images rather than facts and data (First 1998). However,, routine encounters and interpersonal contacts between the two communities could topple the wall and weaken the tension required to maintain the conflict (Maoz 2006: Maoz & Ellis 2008. ...
The impacts of lasting occupation:
... A number of studies investigated the presentation of Palestinians in the Israeli mass media during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation that took place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1987. First (1998 During the period investigated, the news broadcasted 496 events dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In these broadcasted events Israeli Jews appeared most often (65%), the Arabs constituted 15% of the appearing persons and 20% were from other nations. Most of the appearing Arabs (75%) were presented anonymously, especially the Arabs ...
Representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish society.
... Several scholars have pointed out to the colored treatment of U.S. media in favor of Israeli supporting the findings of this study (First, 1998;Zelizer, 2002;Viser, 2003;Ross, 2003;Korn, 2004;Downey et al., 2006;Rinnawi, 2007;Aziz, 2007;Elmasry, 2009;Ismail, 2010). On the other hand, there are studies concluded that the U.S. media outlets were biased in favor of the Palestinians depicting their uprisings as struggle against the Israeli occupation (see Muravichik, 2003), or showing balance in reporting both sides (Wu et al., 2002). ...
This study compares between the performance of the U.S. and Arab mainstream media following the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The textual coverage of the CNN and Al Jazeera of the 2017 Al Aqsa Mosque/Temple Mount Crisis is under examination through operationalizing Wolfsfeld’s (1997b) meta-frames. A set of reasoning and framing devices have been employed to identify the labelling of involved actors and committed actions, the degree of reliance and personalization of news sources, the victimization of casualties and the legitimization of violence. This study concludes that the Law and Order frame, which is communicated with the Israeli perspective is dominated in the related CNN coverage. On the other hand, the Injustice and Defiance frame that represents the Palestinian perspective has chiefly appeared in Al Jazeera related coverage. In the CNN, the Israeli actors and actions have been almost labelled positively in contrast with the Palestinian actors and actions that have been labelled in a negative manner. The degree of personalization and reliance on Israeli news sources is notably greater than the Palestinian ones. Likewise, the Israeli casualties have been remarkably victimized and individualized more than their counterparts. Moreover, the Israeli violence and killing have been legitimized, whereas the Palestinian similar actions have been criminalized. Almost the opposite has been found in Al Jazeera related coverage.
... to continually narrate the collective national identity of Israel, and the complex negotiations over inclusion and exclusion in this multiethnic state, are well attested (Peri 1997;Weiss 1997;First 1998;Shinar 2000Shinar , 2005Bourdon and Kligler-Vilenchik 2011). Palestinians have made extensive use of new media to assert "counter-imaginations" to official discourses (Aouragh 2011: 25), but also to escape the physical immobility imposed on them by Israeli crackdowns. ...
The multiple uses of social media during the Arab uprisings of 2011 drew global attention to the Middle East as a key site for understanding the relations between electronic networks and social networks, and for examining the ways in which information and communication technologies can be creatively put to use toward political and social goals. This chapter briefly considers the roles played by media in one of the Arab uprisings in Egypt. After offering a brief definition of new media, it presents an Egyptian example to consider a series of key themes that scholarship on new media has tended to focus on: media ecologies, new media practices, nationalism, and global diasporas. Studying new media as a moving target becomes important because it places media in relation to the larger project of modernity in the Middle East.
Dieser Beitrag betrachtet Eigenschaften der Konfliktkommunikation im digitalen Zeitalter. Dabei wird zunächst das Verhältnis zwischen Medien und Politik in der Kriegsberichterstattung analysiert. Anschließend werden aus existierenden inhaltsanalytischen Studien zentrale Tendenzen der Kriegsberichterstattung abgeleitet. Schließlich wird der Wandel der Konfliktkommunikation durch die Digitalisierung beleuchtet und dessen Relevanz für zukünftige Forschung skizziert.
In the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflected in the wave of lone wolf terror attacks during October 2015 (and following months), the attacks were presented by the three leading Israeli news site media outlets (Ha’aretz, Ynet and Walla). The online newspapers represent different approaches – however they are still considered major Israeli media outlets. This study focused on whether they share the same narrative with one national consensus or differences exist. The findings suggest there is certain uniformity but it is partial and limited. The differences raise ethical questions and expose the inability of the media to be objective and balanced. The media does not fulfil its mission to be professional and it reflects the worldview of its owners, editors, journalists and audience. We found the coverage influenced by the ideology and political bias of the media outlet and did not conscript on behalf of a national and hegemonic narrative.
In its search for media influences in violent conflict, most existing scholarship has investigated the coverage of specific, salient conflict events. Media have been shown to focus on violence, sidelining concerns of reconciliation and disengaging rapidly as time proceeds. Studies have documented ethnocentric bias and self-reinforcing media hypes, which have been linked to escalation and radicalization. However, based on the existing studies, it remains hard to gauge if the unearthed patterns of media coverage are generally pervasive or limited to a few salient moments, specific conflicts or contexts. Likewise, we cannot say if different kinds of media apply similar styles of conflict coverage, or if their coverage is subject to specific contextual or outlet-specific factors. In this article, the authors compare the contents of both domestic and foreign opinion-leading media coverage across six selected conflicts over a time range of 4 to 10 years. They conduct a diachronic, comparative analysis of 3,700 semantic concepts raised in almost 900,000 news texts from 66 different news media. Based on this analysis, they trace when and to what extent each outlet focuses its attention on the conflict, highlights specific aspects (notably, violence and suffering, negotiations and peaceful solutions), and presents relevant in- and out-groups, applying different kinds of evaluation. The analysis generally corroborates the media’s tendency to cover conflict in an event-oriented, violence-focused and ethnocentric manner, both during routine periods and – exacerbated merely by degrees – during major escalation. At the same time, the analysis highlights important differences in the strength and appearance of these patterns, and points to recurrent contingencies that can be tied to the specific contextual factors and general journalistic logics shaping the coverage.
Much attention has been given by media researchers to the news representation of minorities over the last four decades. Numerous studies over the years have shown that the coverage of minorities in the news is rife with negative stereotypes and generalizations. This chapter aims to discuss major issues and questions raised by analyzing trends in 40 years of studies of news representation of minorities. These include: What is the image of minorities in the news? Why is the news coverage of marginal groups so biased and which factors explain their coverage patterns? How and why has the image of minorities changed over the years? Which theories and research methods were used in order to analyze the news representation of minorities? And how do the leaders of minority groups and regulators work to change the negative stereotypes and the problematic images of minority groups in the news?
Acknowledgements Glossary Map: Israel, The Palestinian Authority and their Arab Neighbours 1. Introduction 2. The Partition of Palestine and the Creation of Israel 3. The Problem Consolidated 4. From War to War 5. The Search for a Settlement 6. An Uncertain Path 7. Stubborn Realities 8. Conclusion Bibliography Index
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
Ever since Benedict Anderson introduced the idea, it has become a common- place of social theory, communications and cultural studies that 'the nation' is an 'imagined community', and that the mass media are primary though by no means exclusive agents of its imagining (Anderson famously emphasized the novel, the newspaper and 'print-capitalism' (1991: 24-46)). The phrase 'imagined community' has become hard to avoid, either in one's reading or one's writing about the ways in which individuals experience their relation- ships to social, cultural, political and economic collectivities. As Schudson puts it: 'All societies are fictive. Personal identification with any grouping of people beyond those one encounters face to face in daily life (and perhaps, even there, too) depends on an imaginative leap' (1994: 24). The question remains, however, as to the character of the imagining at work in these imagined relationships, and the mechanisms by which different com- munications media, in various contexts, facilitate and constrain its performance. Key factors in these imagined social relations obviously include the shaping of temporal and spatial experiences by media output and consumption. The ways in which, for instance, broadcast television and radio schedules reflect and give shared coherence to daily, weekly and seasonal routines (Ellis, 2000; Scannell, 1996; Silverstone, 1994), and how universal access to broadcasting produces a temporally and discursively unified public out of a geographically dispersed populace (Morley, 2004; Thompson, 1995). Such attributes of spatial, temporal and communicative (usually linguistic) connectedness through mass media clearly contribute to the sense of belonging to a larger collectivity.
This study compares the representation of Arabs in Israeli television news in 1988 (the beginning of the first Intifada, a year of intense conflict between Israelis and Palestinians) and in 1998 (five years after the Oslo Agreement, a year of relative calm in which ongoing negotiations were held). Its purpose was to determine (1) whether a change could be detected in the representation of Arabs in the Israeli television news coverage at the two points in time; and (2) whether there was a substantial difference between the representations of Arabs on two different television channels. The study traces the changes in this representation in relation to the "symbolic reality," or the media sphere, and the "social reality," or the political sphere. Images of four Arab ideological groups were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results of the study suggest that representation is fickle and fluid, subject to changes in the symbolic reality itself, but more importantly, to actual changes in the sociopolitical reality. Also, there was no substantial difference in the representation of the Arabs on the two television channels.
updates the current state of social research on minorities and the mass media, particularly as it relates to the media and television's particular potential for young people to acquire social information about minorities
mass media content is analyzed to facilitate hypotheses about what may be learned from such programming, what may be believed, and what behavioral orientations may develop / examines cross-race portrayals and interactions within the same shows and compares those portrayals with ones that occur in shows that feature single-race interactions / [examines] the content and character preference differences between minority and majority viewers (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)