Bias In Coverage Of War

Bias in Coverage of War
It’s true the media can shape the views of the public and can serve as a legitimate source that is empowered to analyze a situation and propose possible solutions because it allows the public to believe in its credibility and impartiality, at least that is what we seem to know. However, in reality, research and studies have shown that the media can generate dissent from the public by focusing or repeating information intended to sway the public. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been a topic of consistent debate for many decades, but in this paper, I will simply focus on what we don’t know about the hidden bias in coverage of this conflict.
In Arturo Marzano’s article, he explores the way in which media coverage of Islam

However, it does not stop Leon Barkho and Lisa Thomas from discovering bias stemming from stories on the war. Barkho‘s article centers around the discursive strategy and practices of the BBC and the ways these relate to their reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although Barkho does present a critical analysis of how the war is linguistically described, drawing specifically from Fowler’s take on transitivity, the article goes beyond these news reports, contextualizing their content through an analysis of the BBC’s editors’ blog, BBC editorial guidelines and extensive interviews with senior BBC editorial staff (281). The outcome is not only a critical examination of the way the news program reports this conflict, but also the most current understanding into the goals and practices of BBC news reporting in a post-Hutton, post-Neil Report era (290). In the end, Barkho claims that the “BBC’s choice of vocabulary” in reporting Palestine and Israel “reflects the unequal division of power, control, and status separating the protagonist and this inequality surfaces at several levels and is strongly backed by editorial strategy and policy

Despite its reputation for impartiality, BBC is frequently attacked with charges of bias. They took allegations of bias in its coverage (which had been coming from both the Arab and Israeli sides) seriously and commissioned research undertaken by Loughborough University in 2006 (524). Their research concluded that coverage veered towards Israel. Despite this, however, complaints have persisted from Israeli supporters and so Thomas’ builds upon the Loughborough research to establish whether or not charges of anti-Israeli bias are supportable (525). She carried out a content of analysis of the war coverage investigating the quantity of coverage, together with more qualitative features such as role of the reporters and whose voices were heard and the language used to describe the war by the two news programs (530). This wider concern for objectivity and bias implies a particular assumption about the possible effects of media coverage. The assumption being that the media does indeed yield enormous power in influencing public opinion and political