8 - 14 November 2001
Issue No.559
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 8 - 14 November 2001 Issue No.559 |
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Under influence
Sir- Allow me to share with your esteemed readers information about a new book which appeared in Israel recently: Newspapers Under the Influence by Daniel Dor (Bavel Publishers). In this book, as Aviv Lavie wrote in Ha'aretz "Dor offers a precise analysis of the reporting by the three major Israeli dailies during the initial period of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which began at the end of September 2000. The timing of the book's publication is also felicitous: On the one hand, the events are still fresh enough for the discussion to be relevant and perhaps even useful; on the other hand, enough time has passed to place the harsh conclusions in the proper perspective.Those conclusions, according to Lavie are summed up in a nutshell on page 19 of the book: "We can say that anyone who relied on the coverage of the events in the Israeli newspapers -- particularly those who relied on [the tabloids] Yedioth Ahronoth and Ma'ariv, but also, in ways that are truly significant, those who read Ha'aretz -- simply don't know anything about what happened here during that [first] month, about the infinitely complicated causal chain that led from Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on Thursday, September 28, 2000 to the entry of the Israeli public, from the end of the first week of the intifada until the beginning of November, into a period of despairing, tense, anxious, fatalistic waiting for an all-out war."
The author of Newspapers Under the Influence is aware that his approach is perceived in Israel as a call to identify automatically with the Arab, thus infuriating many. Nevertheless he tries to analyse this paradox which prompts the average Israeli to "vigorously deny the contention that Israel, and the Israeli press, produce propaganda," yet at the same time, gets absolutely incensed at demands for "journalistic objectivity."
"We can and should demand of an Israeli paper, as we do of any paper in a democracy, to avoid, as far as possible, allowing the feeling of collective identity to sabotage substantive reporting of the facts as they develop in the field," says Dor.
Wafaa Abdel-Azim
Physician
Madinat Nasr
Cairo
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