In this book, Nitzan Ben-Shaul engages in audiovisual analysis of how three distinct television media outlets – namely, Israeli mainstream television, Palestinian Authority Television (PATV), and Cable News Network (CNN) – covered 9/11 and the subsequent U.S.-led war on terror as well as Al Aksa Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israel that broke out in September 2000). The theoretical premise from which the author proceeds and attempts to build his argument is that in the contemporary post-Fordist, globalized world, core-periphery relationships are so drastically altered that peripheral states are disadvantaged more than ever. These negative repercussions, he suggests, are partly manifested in how media cover political violence and, if anything, end up rendering news media as potential agents of fueling war and tension rather than fostering peace and harmony.

Economic-political dependence by peripheral states upon core states, according to the book, not only "devastates" peripheral states’ economic-political conditions but also consequently "leads to heavy migration from peripheral to core states and to awakening dominance of ethnic and religious frames of reference earlier subsumed under the dominant ideologies of nation-states" (p. 12). Indeed, this claim represents the centerpiece of the author’s theoretical understanding that informs his study’s rationale, methods, and critique.

According to Ben-Shaul, CNN covered 9/11 and the war on terror in ways that promoted U.S. official interests and essentially justified the war. Israeli and Palestinian coverage of the same events was found to be "highly ethnocentric and therefore minor and disengaged" (p. 88). As for CNN’s treatment of Al Aksa Intifada, the author found it to convey "the notion of a vicious circle," as "criminal-appearing violence" and "blurring the different positions held by different groups within Israel and Palestine" (p. 100) characterized the coverage. The author also relays Israeli and Palestinian coverage of the Intifada in unfavorable terms, describing both as "highly ethnocentric" and "revengeful" (pp. 107 and 122, respectively).

Perhaps the primary flaw within this research study is that the author did not make a convincing case that coverage patterns across the media outlets are directly reflective of the larger, overarching framework of the post-Fordist status quo. While the author makes such valid claims as CNN’s political economy being "emblematic of post-Fordism in its being a privatized global satellite network owned by a huge core-elite corporation" (p. 57), we cannot presume in good conscience that observed coverage patterns are a ripple effect of post-Fordism.

The author sums up what he perceives as the linkage between this predominant political-economic system and examined media coverage as follows:

This linkage is fundamentally flawed partly because Israel is categorized as a peripheral state (p. 60). The question here is the basis upon which Israel is designated as peripheral. According to a leading Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, Israel is among the world’s developed countries (Sa’ar, 2007), one whose main exports include military equipment and computer software, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, 2007). Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline even references Israel’s "military might to dominate its neighbors" (PBS, 2006). Thus, arguing for Israel’s peripheral status becomes unfounded.

Additionally, it comes as no surprise that Israeli and Palestinian television would each cover the other side in explicitly ethnocentric, love-lacking ways. Decades of fermented hatred on both sides as a result of contesting the land would suffice, one would think, to be brought to bear on media coverage. Media, after all, are the cultural arms of any modern day society (Gerbner, 1992). The media’s connection to culture/society is thus inevitable. Schudson (2003) has argued that journalists abandon their purported neutrality at three types of junctures: moments of tragedy, moments of public danger, and threats to national security. The case studies tackled by the current book are wrought with such moments. Besides, when the news story involves the journalist’s own nation-state, "professional" frames of coverage tend to subside to the advantage of "national" frames, and so, bias for one’s own nation-state emerges in the news (Nossek, 2004).

For the above reasons, I do not conceive of the utilized theoretical framework as appropriate to the given case studies.

Like much news discourse we consume, the author in his audiovisual analysis expresses the fallacious soldier/civilian dichotomy as far as the Israeli population is concerned (e.g., p. 97). Since Israeli citizens who are 18 years or older are obligatorily members of the Israeli reservist army, this practice of distinguishing Israeli adults as military versus civilian is, again, unfounded.

On a separate note, we note the author’s own labeling at work as he calls the 9/11 hijackers "terrorists" (p. 73), references Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s "terrorist struggle" (p. 125), and describes Israel as "terror-ridden" (p. 77). One is left wondering, then, why he never labels Israeli violence against Palestinians as terrorist. Rather, we only see references to "constitutional violence" that he repeatedly argues emanated from the U.S.-led war on terror and Al-Aksa Intifada (pp. 64, 149), or similarly "from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (p. 104), never specifying what exactly constitutes this constitutional violence or the perpetrators and victims thereof. With "terrorism" being the controversial term that it is (e.g. Tuman, 2003) and the author himself attacking what he sees as a lack of objectivity by examined media outlets, then his own choice and clarification of labels seem particularly warranted.

References

Gerbner, G. (1992). Violence and terror in and by the media. In M. Raboy & B. Dagenais (Eds.), Media, crisis and democracy (pp. 94-107). London: Sage.

Nossek, H. (2004). Our news and their news: The role of national identity in the coverage of foreign news. Journalism, 5(3), 343-368.

Schudson, M. (2003). The sociology of news. New York: W.W. Norton.

Tuman, J. (2003). Communicating terror: The rhetorical dimensions of terrorism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Amani Ismail, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Journalism at California State University, Northridge.