Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for about century over land. The battles - involving many other issues than just land, have been fought with tanks, rockets, aircraft, fists, stones, sticks, you name it. However, nowadays battles do not happen only on clearly delineated fronts. The battles of the 21st century are fought on editorial pages, TV screens and especially on the Internet. Satellites and cameras made transmission of text and visual context almost instantaneous so wherever we live in the world we stay "informed". But is everything as "real" as it seems?
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This globalization and unification of communication have had a big impact on war turning it into a global spectacle, especially for those not directly involved in it. Basically, if you can dominate world media and influence people’s opinions, you can defeat your enemy on this second “virtual” front by letting global levers like trade sanctions, decreased tourism etc. constrain him.
That is a good reason why media often reduce highly complex conflicts such as the Israeli/ Gaza one. Sweeping instances of media distortion – when big media report important war conflicts wrong – fascinate me. That’s why I decided to write my dissertation on this particular topic, using the Israeli/Gaza conflict as a case study.
Having witnessed the 2008/09 Israeli/Hamas war I had the chance to see how international, Arab and Israeli media reported the conflict. Being 20 km from Gaza I got pretty much real experience that I could compare with what was reported. You can imagine how shocked I was while reading and hearing different stories on the conflict from a variety of newspapers and TV channels. They were reporting the same subject but why did it sound so differently?
It is bout semantics” Robert Fisk.
At the Independent Literary Festival in Woodstock 2010 I had the pleasure to hear Robert Fisk, the best journalist reporting on the Middle – East, speaking about the misuse of words by journalists.
“It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.
More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power’.
It made me think why is it so? Is it because journalists don’t pay enough attention to the words they use? Or is it on purpose? Sitting in the old Woodstock Church in Oxfordshire and listening to the discussion I was wondering why and I couldn’t give myself a good answer. I’m still looking for the answer but after hearing Robert Fisk’s lecture it became a bit clearer to me: power of media is nowadays all about words…
