Gaza Carnage: 'Why Does American TV News Look Like a Netanyahu Ad?' — A Question from Europe

An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one.

Many people agree with and sympathise with your determination to stop these attacks
on your people,’ Bob Schieffer told Netanyahu. Meanwhile, on Fox: ‘What part of this
can’t you get through your thick head?’ Video stills via CBSNews.com, FoxNews.com

American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time

By Chris McGreal
Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

• What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
• What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
• What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.

Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.

As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”.

As way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel.

There has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming “less pro-Israel”.

But the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling.

We have a media scandal that we need to expose,’ says Rula Jebreal. Still via CNN

Former MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. “We are disgustingly biased on this issue,” she said.

She has a point.

An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian “laymen”, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture.

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