Ignorance of American College Students on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Caused by Deliberate American Media's Bias and Prejudice.

Read here full article by Tom Fenton of CBS News

In a new study of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a group of American college students was asked,

"Who is occupying the occupied territories, and what nationality are the settlers?”

Fairly simple questions, but only 29 percent knew the correct answers. The Israelis are both the occupiers and the settlers.

• Some thought the Palestinians occupy the occupied territories, but the Israelis are the settlers.
• Others thought the Israelis occupy the occupied territories, but the Palestinians are the settlers.
• A smaller number thought the Palestinians were both the settlers and the occupiers.
• The rest simply could not answer.

The study points out that the Americans questioned were journalism and media students and some had even done projects on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

 So their answers clearly overstated the public’s level of knowledge about the Middle East.

As a journalist who has spent almost four decades reporting on world affairs and especially the Middle East, I was not surprised. I learned long ago that you cannot underestimate the level of understanding of the general public.

The study(*) by the Glasgow University Media Group examines coverage of the Middle East conflict and its impact on public opinion. It includes audience samples of over 800 people, most of them British, and large samples of television news reports from September 2000 to April 2002. It claims to be the largest study ever undertaken in this area.

The focus is not on the public confusion and ignorance about the Middle East, but on where the fault lies.

The researchers believe the media, and primarily television news, are at fault.

They point to the way Israeli and Palestinian combatants are labelled in television reports.

• Palestinians are "activists," "militants," "extremists," "assailants," "gunmen," "bombers," "terrorists," "killers," "assassins," "fundamentalist groups," "attackers," "self-styled Palestinian martyrs" and "fanatics."
• Iraelis are "soldiers" or "troops," and even when an Israeli group tried to bomb a Palestinian school, they were not "terrorists" but "vigilantes."

The report also found that there is significantly more coverage of Israelis casualties than Palestinian, even though Palestinians consistently have two or three times as many casualties.
Also, in the spiral of Palestinian-Israeli violence, Palestinians are frequently described as "starting" the trouble, while the Israelis "retaliate."

The researchers say television has largely denied its audience an explanation of the background and origins of the conflict.

"It is clear," they say, "that the fact of military occupation and its consequences are crucial to an understanding of the rationale of Palestinian action."

Many in the audience sample did not understand that there is a military occupation and that it is widely seen as illegal.

A BBC journalist even told the researchers his boss had instructed him not to do "explainers." So his reports were "all bang bang stuff." And the BBC is widely thought to be better on foreign news coverage than American TV.

The authors conclude that the lack of understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leads to a lack of interest.

One British viewer complained, "Every time it comes on, it never actually explains it so I don’t see the point in watching it. I just turn it off and go and make a cup of tea or something."

In both Britain and America, television news is still the main source of information on world affairs for most of the public. So it is not surprising that most of the public hasn’t got a clue about what is behind the depressing news from the Middle East. It’s mostly "bang bang" and very little context.

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