Impact of International Media Coverage on Palestine-Israel Conflict

Abstract

The media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict has drawn immense scholarly interest. A number of studies have analyzed the relationship between media and the conflict. The previous studies largely focused on traditional media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict or social media coverage of the conflict. In the emerging relationship of media and conflict, it has been observed that traditional media are using social media to cover the conflicts. The literature on the emerging relationship is very limited. The presence of media, conflict parties, policy makers, and public at a time on social media platforms make them complex communication platforms. Unlike one-way communication of the traditional media, the viewers/readers at social media can become part of the news stories by adding on information and commenting. There also exists a literature gap in analyzing the media coverage of the conflict through value frames which are binary-laden and judgmental in nature. The emotive and gory images published on social media platforms can influence public opinion and also ignite the violence as they have instantaneous and unlimited global outreach. The values are important to understand the information. The traditional news organizations have built their communities on these platforms to promote their brand and dominate the discourse. In the

absence of violence they make sense of the conflict for the outside world through value- framed content. The presence of slant in the value-framed content reflects the positive and

negative bias of the news channels towards the conflict parties. Therefore, this study also focused on finding the objectivity in the value-laden content of the news channels. The analysis helped to understand thecoverage biases of the news channels.

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This three-stage study initially compares value frames in social media coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict by Al Jazeera English, BBC and CNN. The data set consists of Facebook and Twitter posts of three news channels. The data was collected in 2017 during a period of calm but marked by some major events such as President Trump’s visit to the Western Wall, Hamas’s acceptance of pre-1967 bordersand widespread hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The data have been analyzed through four value frames: (1) right to self-determination, (2) human rights,(3) peace, and (4) security where the unit of analysis was one Tweet or Facebook post by the news channels. In the second stage, four value frames in Twitter and Facebook posts of ministries of foreign affairs of Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel. In the third and the final stage, the level of objectivity has been analyzed in the news stories with four dominant value frames. These news stories related to the conflict were selected through Twitter and Facebook posts of the three news channels during the above-mentioned timeperiod. Hayakawa-Lowry news bias model has been applied to the dataset to find out the level of objectivity. The analysis of news channels’ data in the light of value frames and objectivity helped to understand the emerging relationship between media and conflicts. Capitalizing over their reputition as professional organizations, the traditional news organizations are effectively using the social media platforms to dominate the discourse and promote their

brand through conflict coverage. The traditional news organizations are using value framed- contentbecause it helps viewers/readers/netizens to immediately make sense of the conflict

and draw conclusions. The objectivity test provided some interesting results to see level of bias in the value framed content about Palestine-Israel conflict,The study also finds out that the conflict parties through value framed data on social media platforms to get support for

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their stance. The value frames used by news channels and conflict parties are almost identical in nature. Findingsindicate that the news channels explicitly and implicitly used value frames in their content. There were fewer posts which did not evoke any value frame. The data analyses showed Al Jazeera content largely evoked the human rights value frame. The security value frame was dominant in the majority of BBC Tweets and Facebook posts. CNN framed most of the content with right to self-determination and peace values.The data analysis of tweets and Facebook posts of the conflict parties revealed that the human rights value frame was dominant in the content posted by the ministry of foreign affairs of the Palestinian Authority. The content posted by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs on both

social media platforms largely evoked the security value frame. However, the right to self- determination and peace value frames were dominant in Israel’s social media contentas

compared to Palestine. The human rights value frame dominated the social media content of both PA ministry of foreign affairs and Al Jazeera English.Likewise, the security and right to self-determination value frames were present in the majority of CNN, BBC and Israeli posts. The news bias analysis showed that CNN has the highest objectivity level among three channels in news stories evoking two dominant value frames right to self-determination and human rights. BBC news stories with peace and security as dominant value frames have the highest objectivity level.Al Jazeera has the least level of objectivity in stories with all four dominant value frames. BBC has the highest level of objectivity in overall conflict reporting while CNN has the second highest objectivity level. Al Jazeera has the least objectivity in its news as compared to BBC and CNN.