Bad News from Israel (Greg Philo and Mike Berry)

Bad News from Israel
by Greg Philo and Mike Berry / Glasgow University Media Group

Based 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.

About the Author
Greg Philo is Professor at Glasgow University, and has been the head of the Glasgow Media Group for over 25 years. His current research interests include ESRC and other externally-funded research projects on political advertising, images of health and illness, migration and 'race', as well as risk and food scares. He is the author of numerous publications.

Reviews
"In this admirable study, the authors, who are pioneers in their field, demonstrate the distortion of the UK television coverage of occupied Palestine. Using a series of focus groups drawn from across British society, they reveal how viewers have fallen victim to a dominant bias in favour of Israel. They conclude that Israeli officials are given twice as much airtime as Palestinians get; that news and current affairs on BBC1 are in thrall to (or intimidated by) "Israeli perspectives"; and that the views of Israel-supporting American politicians appear twice as often on the BBC as politicians from any other country, including Britain. TV news says almost nothing about the origins of the conflict, so most viewers have no idea that the Israelis forced Palestinians from their homes in 1948 - or, indeed, who is occupying the Occupied Territories... Threaded through the "coverage" is the phoney notion of "balance" between occupier and occupied; Tim Llewellyn, a former Middle East correspondent for the BBC, calls this "the tyranny of spurious equivalence". Every journalist should read this book; every student of journalism ought to be assigned it.A companion to Bad News From Israel is a superb book called Peace Under Fire."
- John Pilger, journalist and filmmaker, director of Palestine is Still the Issue

"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