As with any media, the war in the Western press coverage is fought with weapons of buzzwords and pictures, and the most effective strategies involve timing and subtlety. While the argument over the extent of Western media bias towards Israel will remain unresolved, there is no denying that the Palestinians do not have an effective counterbalance to the weight of pro-Israel organizations in the West. Pressure from readers, the base of a journalist s viability, forces him or her to conform to more acceptable norms of reporting. For example, in the current Intifada some Western media has taken to portray factual events from the Palestinian side with quotes like, Palestinians say a closed checkpoint in Gaza forced a town to go without medical supplies for four days instead of stating the obvious facts as Israeli military closures have kept medical supplies from reaching Gazan towns. Lingo is a dangerous weapon because the casual reader doesn t realize right away that he or she has just been hit.
Examples abound from the current crisis in the occupied Palestinian territories.
A recent online article by CNN captioned a picture of IDF soldiers in Hebron with Israeli border guards patrol the divided city of Hebron. Hebron is located entirely within the West Bank, and I dare say any border guard who is twenty kilometers across the boundary is not really guarding the border. Furthermore calling Hebron a divided city is a horrific misnomer. These 40,000 human beings are victims only of an unjust occupation. In the news a lot in the past several weeks are the clashes between Palestinians and Israelis between the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala and the so-called Jerusalem suburb of Gilo.