More Bad News From Israel

Examination of media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East.

Building on rigorous research by the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, More Bad News From Israel examines media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East and the impact it has on public opinion. The book brings together senior journalists and ordinary viewers to examine how audiences understand the news and how their views are shaped by media reporting. In the largest study ever undertaken in this area, the authors focus on television news. They illustrate major differences in the way Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and the presentation of the motives and rationales of both sides. They combine this with extensive audience research involving hundreds of participants from the USA, Britain and Germany. It shows extraordinary differences in levels of knowledge and understanding, especially amongst young people from these countries. Covering recent developments, including the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, this authoritative and up-to-date study will be an invaluable tool for journalists, activists and students and researchers of media studies.

'This superb study ... is extensive in scope, and scrupulously fair. It will be a landmark.' Edward S. Herman, co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent'Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often dangerously superficial. Bad News from Israel is a strong contribution to scholarship and public debate.' John D.H. DowningDirector, Global Media Research Center, Southern Illinois University'[The book] covers a lot of ground in a clear and readable manner and is particularly good at airing different views about the Arab-Israeli conflict.' Professor Avi Shlaim, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford'A remarkable book.' Professor Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel, Université de Lille III and Paris VIII'Just about everything that we know about Israel/Palestine comes to us from our television screens. Bad News from Israel reveals remarkable levels of ignorance about what and why things are as they are. What's more, the analysis offered here strongly suggests that the media are intimately linked to the perpetuation of this unhappy situation.' Professor Frank WebsterCity University, LondonBased on rigorous research by the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, this authoritative book examines media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East and the impact it has on public opinion.For the first time, the books brings together senior journalists and ordinary viewers to examine how audiences understand the news and how public belief and opinion have been shaped by media reporting.In the largest study ever undertaken in this area, the authors focus on television news. They illustrate major differences in the way Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and the presentation of the motives and rationales of both sides. They combine this with an extensive audience study involving hundreds of participants from the USA, Britain and Germany. It shows extraordinary differences in levels of knowledge and understanding, especially amongst young people from these countries.The book explores the processes that shape the news. It looks at patterns of ownership and at how public relations, information control and the close political links between the USA and Britain affect what we see and hear in the media.The authors set the study in context by providing a history of the present crisis from the period of the British mandate in Palestine through to the Oslo and Wye Accords and the intifadas.

Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage. Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities. Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington's unwillingness to confront Israel's ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics--namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington's management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington's distinctive "blind spot" to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents. Fathom journal has examined these questions relentlessly in the first decade of its existence, earning a reputation for careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy. In this book, the Fathom essays are contextualised by three new contributions: Lesley Klaff provides a map of contemporary antisemitic forms of antizionism, Dave Rich writes on the oft-neglected lived experience of the Jewish victims of contemporary antisemitism and David Hirsh assesses the intellectual history of the left from which both Fathom and his own London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, as well as this book series, have emerged. Topics covered by the contributors include antisemitic antizionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from a cross-fertilisation between new left, Christian and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of antizionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the oft-misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

Since the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has become an important news item. Western coverage is shaped by the cultural milieu of its journalists, with news written from New York or London by non-specialists or by those staying inside wealthy guarded enclaves in an intensely segregated Caracas. Journalists mainly work with English-speaking elites and have little contact with the poor majority. Therefore, they reproduce ideas largely attuned to a Western, neoliberal understanding of Venezuela. Through extensive analysis of media coverage from Chavez’s election to the present day, as well as detailed interviews with journalists and academics covering the country, Bad News from Venezuela highlights the factors contributing to reportage in Venezuela and why those factors exist in the first place. From this examination of a single Latin American country, the book furthers the discussion of contemporary media in the West, and how, with the rise of ‘fake news’, their operations have a significant impact on the wider representation of global affairs. Bad News from Venezuela is comprehensive and enlightening for undergraduate students and research academics in media and Latin American studies.

The Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies has provided students and the general public alike with a gateway into the study of intercultural communication, public relations and marketing communications since 1984. In this 9th edition, James Watson and Anne Hill provide a detailed compendium of the different facets of personal, group, mass-media and internet communication that continues to be a vital source of information for all those interested in how communication affects our lives. They cover new applications and developments, such as the incorporation of Neuroscience techniques in advertising and marketing. Other updates include Cyber-bullying, Twitter scandals, conduct in media organizations, on-line lobbying, global protesting/petitioning, and gender issues relating to social media in general. While new entries explore the profound shifts that have taken place in the world of communication in recent years, the purpose of this new edition is not necessarily to keep abreast of every new media event but to reflect the trends that influence and prompt such events, such as the Leveson Inquiry and Report and phone hacking via mobile phones. Politics seems to be playing out more on Twitter than in The Times. This volume seeks to make its twenty-first century readers more media literate, as well as more critical consumers of modern news.