Bruce A. Williams is a Professor of Media Studies & Sociology at the University of Virginia. In the past, he has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interests focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States. He has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Cultures of Consumption Research Program of the University of London. He has published three books and more than forty scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Professor Williams recently came back from a trip to Israel where he attended an international media studies conference on media coverage of crises and conflicts. In this interview with Washington Prism, Professor Williams offers his assessment of the quality of the coverage provided by U.S. media on the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a coverage that he says he has been following “obsessively.”

Washington Prism (WP): There has been some criticism of the U.S. media coverage of the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. What is your assessment? Do you find there to be biases in the way American media have been covering the conflict?

Bruce Williams (BW): As an academic, I don’t think the word bias is a useful one. I believe that anytime you tell a story, whether you are a journalist or anybody else trying to describe world events, you always have a perspective. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a neutral, objective perspective.

Rather, I can point out some of the things that I noticed in the coverage, especially in comparison to what I was watching and reading while in Israel. Please note that I don’t know Hebrew and, as such, I was following things on the English-language versions of the Israeli media, such as the Jerusalem Post, or on Sky News and Fox on the satellite.

I think that there are stark differences in the coverage in the United States and in Israel, at least as far as I’ve been able to see. But I wouldn’t capture them by saying than one is more biased than the other. I think they are just different.

The coverage that I saw in Israel very much emphasized the Israeli perspective, for example, in the very prominent, very individualized coverage dedicated to the soldiers who got killed. In the coverage that I’ve been following in the American media instead, I think the stories reflect the numbers. U.S. coverage talks a lot more about Palestinian deaths and Palestinian casualties, and this is a reflection of the difference between almost over 900 dead on the Palestinian side -- by most accounts -- as opposed to 13 dead -- all of whom but three were soldiers -- on the Israeli side. In the American coverage there seems to be more attention for Palestinian deaths because they so far outnumber Israeli deaths.

 

The one aspect where I have been a little more dissatisfied with the coverage in the United States has to do with the context of the incursion. I think it has been difficult to give voice in the journalistic coverage to the effects of long periods of living under a small but daily risk of rocket attacks. We are talking about communities in Israel that have been living for years thinking about when the next mortar is going to fall. This gets sometime lost in the coverage of the very intense violence that is happening in the present.

WP: Do you have an example of this?

BW: I’ll give you one that I was struck by when I was in Israel. The same day the U.N. school was hit by the IDF and 30 people seeking shelter there lost their lives, a rocket from Gaza destroyed a kindergarten in southern Israel. True, there were no casualties on the Israeli side, because the school was closed. But I happen to know that the Israeli Minister of Education was there that day debating whether she should open the schools or not. To me, the idea, on both sides, that schools can be destroyed is an important issue. I would have liked to at least see a brief mention of that in the American coverage. Maybe I missed it, but I did not. I recognize it is difficult for journalists, because the fact of the matter is that 30 Palestinians who thought they were safe and sheltered under U.N. protection were killed, while nobody was killed in the Israeli kindergarten. But it seems to me that one can at least point to that connection.

WP: What do you think of the prohibition to access Gaza imposed by the Israel Government on foreign journalists?

BW: To back up one step, I think the Israeli Government had a very well defined media strategy when it came to this conflict. It was not going to repeat what it saw as the mistakes made in the invasion of Lebanon. There was an attempt to keep reporters out, to tightly cover all of the information and images that were coming out of Gaza. Both in the U.S., and, for what I was able to see, in Israel, there were rather frustrated reporters having to stick by the military and having to take pictures from quite the distance.

Initially, over a short period of time, this led to the ability of the Israeli Government to shape the kind of coverage that they were getting. Overtime, however, such tight control has eroded. As a result, now we are getting some rather horrific images coming out of Gaza, images that are being shown on Al-Jazeera and in general produced by the Palestinians themselves.

My impression is that the media strategy that the Israeli Government developed was rather sophisticated and, for a short period of time, effective. However, I believe that the reality of media coverage of conflicts today is that any strategy that aims to control information has a pretty short lifespan.

My own sense is that the Israeli Government media strategy was designed for a very brief war, or incursion, one in which you get in, you do what you planned on doing as quickly as possible, then you get out and declare victory. But the longer this military campaign goes on, the more it tilts the coverage, and increasingly places the whole idea behind it in a pretty unfavorable light.

In this case, like in many military adventures, things can get out of control very quickly. What you are seeing now, I believe, is what is sometimes referred to as “mission creep.” You go in, you have pretty well defined goals to achieve, and, if you are initially successful, then you create many new goals. For someone who studies media, if we put aside the military and political issues that are raised, it is very clear that the longer this goes on, the more the coverage is going to support the Palestinian perspective.

WP: How do Israeli journalists feel about their own government media strategy? Are they frustrated or do they think they have sufficient access to information?

BW: I think they are also very frustrated. I think that journalists, whether they are Israeli, American or anyone else, want to be there, want to see it for themselves. What is interesting is that, at a time like this when Israeli public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favor of this conflict, Israeli journalists would be unlikely to write very critical things, even if they were given access. However, I think they feel incredibly frustrated that they are not given access.

WP: You mentioned that one important reason why the coverage has been changing and tilting towards a more pro-Palestinian perspective is the fact that images from Gaza have increasingly been broadcasted out by Al-Jazeera and by the Palestinians themselves. Do you think that U.S. media organizations are doing all they can to get access?

BW: What truly strikes me is that the situation in Gaza looks a lot like the situation journalists face in Baghdad. There, as long as you stay inside the Green Zone, you are relatively safe. At the same time, the more you stay inside the Green Zone, the more what you see, what you say, and what you can write is shaped by what the American and Iraqi governments want you to see, say and write.

 

However, if you leave the Green Zone, the work becomes very dangerous. There already are many dead journalists to prove this.

I would imagine that Gaza is also a pretty dangerous place to be. It is hard to say what more journalists could actually do a situation that appears so dangerous and volatile.

I read the New York Times the closest, the Washington Post coming second. My opinion is that the Times’ coverage has been of a very high-quality, even-handed but realistic. I also think that, like in much of the rest of the coverage, overtime it has become more and more critical of Israel.

WP: The assumed notion that the U.S. media coverage is tilted towards a pro-Israeli perspective seems to have roots in opinion pieces and editorial pages rather than news coverage. Do you agree?

BW: I kind of disagree. However I can see why it could look that way from a Palestinian perspective.

Moving away from the day to day newsgathering that gets done, I think it is important to point out that, unlike many previous actions taken by the Israeli Government, including the invasion of Lebanon, Israel enjoyed this time an unusual amount of international support, right from the get-go.

I believe that is because of Hamas. It is certainly not surprising that the United States would aggressively defend Israel’s right to act and denounce Hamas. The European Union was also very supportive of Israel’s right to intervene. This is a result of the fact that Hamas controls Gaza and the recognition that it was Hamas that ended the cease-fire with Israel.

All this said, I was struck by how even-handed The New York Times was in its own editorial pages. From the very beginning The New York Times recognized Israel’s legitimate right to act but also urged them to get out quickly and to deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

The paper was very much in line with this idea that Israel had a very short window of time to act. They needed to do what they needed to do very quickly and then they had to put broader attention to a real peace settlement.

But, as I said, I do understand where some of the concerns could come from. To go back to something I said before, to the long-term threat of the rockets that get launched from Gaza: in the end I think that they pose very little real risk to the Israeli citizens. I don’t know how many Israelis have been killed by these rockets, but I’m sure it’s a pretty small number. I don’t want to minimize this. I certainly wouldn’t want to live thinking whether there was someone that would try to mortar Charlottesville, Virginia, every day. It is an intolerable situation. But this amounts to a sort of existential crisis, a crisis of how people feel as they try to live an ordinary life.

Living in the Gaza Strip for the same kind of ordinary Palestinian citizens, instead, is a nightmare. It’s not an existential question; it’s a question of starvation, of not having a job, and not having any sense of what a future could look like. From the perspective of ordinary Palestinians, the situation just seems to keep getting worse and worse. We are further away from having a Palestinian Government that can speak for all Palestinians in some kind of a peace settlement. We are further away from this than we were five years ago, further away that we were even three weeks ago. That is a horrible situation.

WP: Do you think that this even-handedness is true only for the New York Times? Or does it apply in general to the U.S. media?

BW: To be honest I have not seen the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I think the Washington Post has been pretty even-handed. With the exception of maybe Fox News, I think there is recognition that Israel has a right to defend itself, but, at the same time, that it has an obligation to do this very quickly and that it must deal soon with some kind of serious attempt to negotiate a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

In any case, I think that, by far, the best and most interesting coverage I heard is on National Public Radio. For example, NPR recently interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, who is someone that I have actually met and I have huge respect for. He is not politically affiliated either with Hamas or Fatah. In this respect, he speaks for a Palestinian view that I agree with. One of the things he said in his interview with NPR is that Israel and the United States have tried to turn Hamas into the bad guys and Abbas into the good guy. At the same time, it’s not like they have done anything that would lead Abbas to succeed.

In another story that I heard on NPR just this morning, Palestinians in the occupied territories were being interviewed and said what Barghouti has been saying, that there are many more military checkpoints now that they were a year ago. And the truth is that, no matter what Ehud Olmert has said, he has not closed down not even the settlements his own government declared illegal. From this perspective, there is a feeling of real hopelessness now.

Valentina Pasquali writes for Washington Prism