American media distorts the way Palestinians are viewed

James Zogby looks at the way US new organisations contribute to differing perceptions of Palestinians and Israelis.

The media plays a role in how Americans view events and people in Gaza. Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Media coverage of the ugly war on Gaza has only served to remind us of the fundamental problem that has plagued the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the beginning: Israelis are seen as real individual people, while Palestinians are an abstraction – objects of contempt, scorn, or pity – but not people to whom Americans can relate.

Because Israel knows how important it is to maintain this unbalanced equation, in any battle they rely on their ability to dominate and shape media messages and images. And because the Israelis have cultivated all-too-compliant partners in the press and in politics, their narrative of events often trumps reality.

This past week’s coverage of the war in Gaza by the Washington Post can serve as a case in point. Each day, we have been presented with moving stories of Israelis who have lost their lives or those who are living in fear. Last Sunday, as the Israeli ground offensive was beginning, the Post featured a front-page headline, in large type, reading “Two Israelis Killed in Gaza Clash”. In smaller type there was a subheading, “Death toll tops 330 as Hamas militants step up attacks”.

The impact of this presentation is quite clear. The loss of the two Israelis trumps the deaths of 330 Palestinians. While the Israelis are “killed”, the 330 dead are presented as a body-count – we are not even told that they are Palestinians. To add to the confusion, the 330 died “as Hamas militants stepped up attacks” – making Hamas appear as the sole responsible agent.

Then on Wednesday, as the casualty toll grew, on two facing pages the Post featured stories that added insult to this injury. Page 9 featured two moving human-interest stories. The first was about a grieving mother whose son, an Israeli soldier, had perished in battle. Below this appeared profiles of two young Israeli-Americans, both soldiers who died fighting in Gaza. The accounts were personal and touching.

On the facing page, the Post provided a diagram of the war’s total casualties, using little stick figures – one for each person who died. Adults were presented in black, while children and babies were in red. Not only did the 406 Palestinians figures dwarf the two Israeli figures, but especially poignant were the number of tiny little red figures – 129 in all. There were no pictures, no names, no stories and no interviews with sobbing Palestinian mothers.

Above this obscene chart was an account of the difficulties Gazans were having finding places to bury their dead. Again, no touching stories to put flesh on the bones of the stick figures. The story had a picture of a man, who was said to be “overcome by emotion” but who looked like he was shouting in anger.

This is the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been presented – the Israelis are real people whom you can see and know, versus an amorphous Palestinian mass.

In defending themselves, American reporters will argue that while the Israelis provide them access to the stories and will bring them to the grieving families, they don’t have the same access to the Palestinian side of the story. But that simply won’t wash. There are a number of courageous souls covering the situation within Gaza. The remarkable website Al Monitor features reporting from Asmaa Al Ghoul. Every day, at great personal risk, Asmaa walks the streets of Gaza telling, in heartbreaking detail, the personal stories of families who’ve lost loved ones or survivors whose homes were destroyed. Her writing deserves a wider audience. And even US outlets NBC and CNN’s international team have also been on the ground in Gaza showing the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Washington Post and too many other news outlets have also failed to bring home for their readers the impact of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. US readers have not been told that Israel has bombed much of Gaza’s power plant facilities leaving most of the Strip with only about three hours of electricity each day. And because the delivery of Gaza’s limited drinkable water supply requires electricity, 600,000 Palestinians are now without water. International aid agencies have reported on the deplorable living conditions in crowded shelters, of traumatised children in need of counselling and severe shortages of basic medicines.

These stories have not been given the attention they deserve.

Sadly, this reminds me of how little progress we’ve made in the past 30 years. I once wrote a report on media coverage of Israel’s bombing of the Fakhani neighbourhood in Beirut in 1981. There had been a border clash between Israeli forces and the PLO in which two Israelis were killed. The next day, Israel bombed an apartment complex in Beirut killing 383 Palestinians. TV coverage showed dramatic scenes from Israel with ambulances roaring, and people crying or running in fear. There was no coverage from Beirut. The next night, the news on all three major networks featured repeat footage of the scenes from Israel.

One network covered the story from Beirut with a reporter standing at the end of a bombed-out street. When I later met the reporter and asked him why he didn’t cover the story differently, he told me how they had arrived on the scene the night of the bombing, but, he said, “There was fire and smoke and people running about. It was chaos. So we waited until the next day so we could get a better shot of the destruction.” The lesson: in Israel, the story was the people; in Lebanon, it was the buildings.

It’s one thing for governments to lack a moral compass; it’s quite another for the media to operate in the same way. It is not that people are immune to Palestinian suffering. They just don’t know about it or they can’t relate to it as being about people who have been living a decades-long nightmare with no end in sight.

James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute

On Twitter: @aaiusa