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

in Italy has been linked to a prevailing terror discourse since 9/11. Thus favoring a bias toward ‘democratic, western-oriented’ Israel over Palestine (64). Through analysis, Marzano traces this narrative, which has woven Islam and terrorism together, and how terrorism has come to be presented as a religious act, rather than a political one (66). He goes on to claim that in order to understand and begin to address this unfair bias, the media needs to understand terrorism in political terms, instead of violent acts on Italian culture and values (76).
BBC is ranked one of the most objective and credible news source outlet throughout the world and it prides itself on that.

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

(291).”
Like the previous article, Thomas delivers a detailed content analysis of BBC’s coverage of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 against Channel 4’s.

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

action.
On the other end of the spectrum is Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya’s alternative bias. In this article, the Arab-Israeli conflict was chosen for analysis because it is an effective example of global sourcing imbalance, since most Western mainstream news media have a tendency to subscribe with the Israelis (751). It was noted that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya had a higher number of Palestinian sources than CNN and BBC, and the most Palestinian officials invited to express their opinions in statements and interviews. Second, they both had the least official government sources on all sides of the conflict and instead the most civilian voices and source diversity than the other two (753). Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya’s systematic emphasis on the ways in which the official Israeli information campaign diverged from the realities inside Gaza exposed the political spin of Israel’s information campaign and distinguished the channel from its western counterparts (764).
The media’s natural proclivity towards sensational journalism of violence propagates the notion that there is reason to engage in militaristic attacks for self-defense. In his article, Mohammed Daraghmeh supposes that the brutality of the Israeli occupation lets Pro-Palestinian journalists to write articles that border on extremism and exaggerate the actions of the Israeli military (14). Such reporting then leads the Palestinian people to seek revenge. However, Pro-Israeli media also employs this tactic by displaying gruesome scenes of bombings and by emphasizing the suffering of the victims’ families following such terrorist attacks by Palestinians.
Due to the media’s bias, Israeli and Palestinian negative perceptions are constantly reinforced. When the public’s only encounter with either side is through violent images and reporting, and the only depiction they see on their television screens dehumanizes them, they are left thinking that there will never be peace. If the media’s potential instead of bias is used for lessening hostilities rather than fueling them, Israelis and Palestinians and everyone else involved may be influenced to act on their hopes for a violence-free region. To stop such hostilities, however, the media is one of the first factors that will need to change.