It has been said that there are always two sides to every story,
but there are few arenas where this is as evident as in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Nearly every aspect of this conflict is seen in two ““ if
not three or four ““ ways.
The coverage of the conflict in the American media is no
exception.
As part of Palestinian Awareness Week, the Muslim Students
Association and the United Arab Society put on an event Wednesday
night aimed at showing what they perceive as the bias in favor of
Israel prevalent in the American media.
One of the problems in the media is that the Palestinians are
being portrayed as violent people, said Faysal Saab, president of
the United Arab Society.
The event was aimed at showing that this is not the case and at
providing a context for the situation in Israel-Palestine.
“We’re humanizing the cause; we’re showing the
reason (the Palestinians) act the way they do,” Saab
said.
The most blatant bias is in the reporting of deaths, Saab
said.
“If Palestinians are killed, you do not see that covered,
whereas if a missile falls into an Israeli settlement, that is
covered,” he said.
The numbers alone show the disparity, said Alison Weir of If
Americans Knew, an organization that works at analyzing news and
providing accurate information.
Weir presented these numbers, focusing on coverage of ABC, NBC,
CBS and The New York Times.
Israeli deaths receive as much as five or six times as much
coverage as Palestinian deaths do, Weir said.
And what she emphasized most were the deaths of children.
In a graph that drew a rumble from the audience, Weir showed the
results of her study on the coverage of Palestinian deaths.
For example, Weir said that on ABC, only five out of more than
120 Palestinian children killed in a year were reported.
Of the 28 Israeli children who were killed, 20 of these were
reported by ABC, she said, contrasting it to the Palestinian
statistics.
“People are being vastly mislead largely through enormous
omission,” Weir said.
The reasons for this are yet to be studied, Weir said, but she
pointed to a tradition of bias against Palestinians in the media
and a lack of diversity in the field as some of the major
causes.
The concerns with media coverage of the Israel-Palestine
conflict go past numbers and sometimes comes down to a mincing of
words ““ specifically “terrorist” versus
“freedom fighter.”
“If you’re Palestinian, the media portrays you as a
terrorist,” Saab said.
But rather than terrorists, Saab said these suicide bombers
should be called freedom fighters.
While Saab said he sees bias in favor of the Israelis, others
say the exact opposite.
“Unfortunately, I would say that the media is biased
against Israel,” said Leeron Morad, spokesman for Bruins for
Israel.
In contrast to Saab, Morad said he hears the words
“freedom fighter” or “resistance fighter”
to describe what he calls terrorists.
“The media does not call terrorists
“˜terrorists,’ but instead it uses words such as
“˜freedom fighter’ or “˜resistance fighter’
to describe those who murder civilians,” he said.
Both students cite the same sources ““ such news networks
as CNN and FOX ““ to support the opposite viewpoint.