Here is summary of the Reporting the World discussion
asking ÔIsrael and the Palestinians: Are We Getting the Story?
Held on March 21, 2001 at the Freedom Forum, London.
The
discussion between more than 50 top journalists and experts went straight to
the core issues of balance and context in coverage of the intifada.
One key issue was the understanding
readers and audiences may form of the reasons for the violence, and how this
arises out of "framing decisions" about what to include in reports of
the conflict.
Are there certain explanations that
prevail by default? Or do they result from choices made by journalists? Is all
the responsibility of ill-intentioned leaders; or an expression of "ancient
hatreds" welling up from within.
Key contributor Lyse Doucet of BBC World
recalled that peace actions were generally ignored by journalists in favour of
"running off to the front-line"; but that meant Ôwe never probed why
the violence was there in the first placeŐ.
Ewen MacAskill, Diplomatic Editor of the
Guardian, said he had no appreciation of the conditions of everyday life under
occupation until he visited the West Bank and saw the poverty for himself. He
and Tim Llewellyn likened it to the privations of black South Africans during
apartheid.
Frame in these structural factors and we
see how both the hatreds and the violence are being constructed by
intelligible, if dysfunctional processes.
Equipped
with this understanding, Professor Johan Galtung suggested that people trying
to intervene in these processes at the grass roots are worthy of more coverage
than they receive; journalists otherwise risked creating only "hatred or
apathy" among the public.
Tim
Llewellyn (former
BBC Middle East Correspondent)
Most
important in my view is this question of balance, the BBCŐs and ITNŐs holy
grail. I think this can be a false banner to follow too closely, especially
when in this case balance means the totally spurious tendency to give the
impression that there is equivalence between a state with a uniquely powerful
Middle Eastern army and internal security facility with nuclear weapons, long
range missiles and airplanes. A state with the uncritical backing of the
superpower and with the highly uncritical support of Western Europe, most
carefully that given by our own government. As against on the other side in
this equivalence, in quotes 'a penurious much reduced civilian population with
no real international support which is now in its 34th year of military
occupationŐ, a particularly divisive and brutal military occupation at that.
There is it
seems to me a tone in daily domestic TV reporting that implies and encourages
viewers in the belief that the Palestinians are a headless bunch of fanatics
and no-hopers given to violence endemically and inherently, who are carrying
out with enormous ingratitude, impertinence and hostility, aggressive and
unprovoked assaults on a legal government that is trying its best for all the
people under its control, and of course to defend all god fearing people.
********
Colin
Schindler (SOAS)
One of the
problems that has occurred in the liberal left-wing press over the last 6
months has been that the raising of the right of return. The right of return
that the Palestinians have claimed since 1948 but has not been raised to
prominence. Former Palestinian intellectuals like Rashid Khaledi have suggested
that it's a fiction that 4 million Palestinians can return and yet this is
being constantly suggested in the press.
Another
point that I would make is that whereas Israel has opened its archives and
academics have been allowed access to archive material to find out what did
happen in 1948 - that the Israelis did indeed expel many people but many
Palestinians left for other reasons - that it wasn't a clear cut situation that
the Israelis expelled every Palestinian. This has been repeated time and time
again in the liberal left-wing press by people that normally have a better
sense of accuracy. Unfortunately no Arab archives have been opened to what
happened in 1948, no academic can gain access to what happened in 1948 in any
Arab country, especially the Palestinian archive.
********
Lyse
Doucet (BBC world
presenter and Middle East correspondent)
At the BBC
perhaps we do make a parody of ourselves but we do try and have balance. And
even though there's no doubt in my mind that the Palestinians are suffering far
more in this present conflict, every day they're suffering. They can't get from
A to B, their children canŐt get to schools, their impoverishment takes place
on a daily basis. Israelis in Tel Aviv are not suffering this, Israelis in
other parts of Israel are not, but that doesn't matter. The perception of
Israelis is that they're suffering - that they've been betrayed and that is
something that I think we have to reflect. We have to try and see in the minds
of two people because it is the perceptions as well as historical rights and
wrongs that is fuelling this conflict.
If I can
make one point to go to what Jake Lynch outlined in his book about how we have
to look at new frameworks and how we have to frame our reporting - what do we
include and what do we exclude - which I thought was a very good way of doing
itÉ We don't cover Israeli peace rallies, when I was in Jerusalem in October
there was a stack of papers of all the initiatives by the Israeli peace groups
but we never covered it. Everyone was running off to the front-line because
that was hard news - but we did exclude it.
One last
comment. I became very conscious that I was buying in to how other people were
defining this conflict this rallying cry, this official state declaration 'the
violence must stop'. Day in day out in Jerusalem I'd say 'there's only two more
days to the ultimatum that the Israelis had given to the Palestinians for the
violence to stop. The Israelis had called on Yasser Arafat to stop the violence
etc etc. And I would ask the question "why is this violence continuing?'
'Why can't you stop the violence?' And then I ask 'why am I focusing on this?'
Is this my western bias?' This violence is terrible, why can't everyone just
sit down and talk. And I'd go up to Palestinians and say why are you continuing
with this violence? And they'd say you don't understand it, for us it is the
only way we can do this, we don't see it in this way.
We're also
talking about the structural violence that JL talked about in his book. You
know what is behind the Palestinian stone thrower, 13 people living in a house
in the Gaza Strip, that doesn't get into our coverage. So we never probed why
the violence was there in the first place, what other tactics do the
Palestinians have. Maybe we were
looking at it in the wrong way I'm not quite ready to say how we should have.
It did frame our coverage day in day out - I'll call it flak jacket journalism
for want of a better word.
But one day
standing at the LionŐs Gate in a corner of the walled old city when there was a
huge number of radio, TV and print journalists all covering this little match
this ritual between Israelis and Palestinians, I'm thinking what is going to
lead bulletins around the world? Is this the most important thing? And I think
we did have a skewed understanding or we gave to the world a skewed
understanding. So I think it is important to ask what do we leave in and what
do we leave out.
Jake
Lynch (Reporting The World)
I think we
also lack an understanding in this country of what it means to Israelis to be
surrounded by countries or peoples who are at best reluctant to accept Israel's
right to exist. She referred to rhetoric that is covered in UK based media from
the likes of Sheikh Yassin for example issuing threats to not cease their
activities until Israel is wiped from the map. I've been listening to some of
the Likud rhetoric since the election and there is a resonance that we don't
properly understand in any case when Mr Sharon says that Israel is the only
place in the World where Jews have the right to defend themselves. Maybe that
is another category, something to do with cultural violence. That rhetoric may
be a form of cultural violence.
What's
interesting is that there's not that great a prevalence of these factors in the
frame. How often do we frame in the experiences of Palestinians in everyday
life which may go to construct and reproduce the violence? If we can understand the violence as
being constructed by intelligible - if dysfunctional – processes; does it
open up the possibility of intervening in them as a means of removing the
violence? That's one factor that goes right back to the framing decisions we
make as reporters.
Lyse
alluded to being in the office and having to file everyday, how do you make
time for such factors? Do we have to include ritualised calls from the White
House Press Conference? You sit in the newsroom, 3 0'clock in the afternoon
comes round and you have to refresh the Middle East package with a new line
from the White House Press Conference because President Clinton has called for
an end to the violence. Is that worthy of 20 or 30 seconds? Or would we be
better off trying to find a different voice?
Ewen
MacAskill (Diplomatic Editor, Guardian):
I was on
the West Bank for a fortnight in January. At the time when I was talking to the
officials I didn't know what they meant by the blockade and the passes and all
the petty obstacles put in the way of the Palestinians. When I went out to
Israel I spent one day on the West Bank, it was the first time I'd ever been
there and suddenly it all hit home although I'd read about it and seen it on
TV, I hadn't realised what it felt like to be under siege. You walk through the
checkpoint that would normally be full of cars and lorries and itŐs completely
empty, all economic activity has ceased...
The
Guardian's come under a lot of pressure, as other news organisations have and
there's been a lot of debate within the paper about balance and whether we're
being fair to the Israelis. This idea of moral equivalence. I don't feel guilty
of bias by reporting from the West bank, Gaza. I also went to the refugee camps
in the Lebanon. Moral equivalence: if we were reporting South Africa, during
apartheid we wouldn't give 50% coverage to the white regime in South Africa and
50% to what was happening in the townships and I don't see why we should do so
in Israel-Palestine. A lot of stories are not clear cut, they're complex. I
defy any journalist working on the West bank not to say there's something
seriously wrong here.
*************
Mark
Brayne (BBC World Service):
I think one
of the problems we have as journalists working for a western Anglo-Saxon,
transatlantic news paradigm as it were, is the question of what is news and how
do we boil something down to something that is told - in radio terms - to
something that is told in a 30 second news story. And in terms of what makes
the headline. There are 2 reasons we leave things out, one is because of the
mindset through which we approach the story, what is accepted, what is the
story? What is the clich of the moment? What is everybody else reporting and
to what extent can I step to one side and tell a different story?
That's one
very substantial constraint. It's very scary standing out on a limb telling a
story that nobody else is telling or that somehow flies in the face of the
accepted journalistic wisdom. That's one thing that constrains us tremendously
and as a result we distort the story because we focus on one tiny part of the
story. Which isn't to say that the story we tell at that moment is wrong but it
is only a tiny part of the story.
The other
problem is the one that Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence,
describes as Ôlimbic newsŐ. I don't know whether anyone's ever read his
articles about why it is that we are fascinated, almost morbidly, by bad news.
He has a physiological, evolutionary theory in that it has to do with survival
instincts. The problem is that not only do we distil that news down by only
focusing on a very small part of the story but then the part of the story that
we focus on is the violence. The more blood that is shed, the more people that
are killed the better, suddenly people are interested in the story.
Hack
instincts that we've all grown up with - chasing fire engines on local
newspapers - they kick in frighteningly quickly and you start you're story off
with 'so many people have been killed and so an so many people have been
injured in ***' fill in as required. Clashes on the West Bank whatever. I think
that there is such a long way to go to change the way individual journalists
frame - as Jake would say - the story. And also the acceptance of, across the
media - not just in individual news organisations - what is news. We are
obsessed with a news agenda which, by its very approach to a story,
automatically distorts it beyond recognition. We're seeing it now with
Macedonia and itŐs certainly been true over a long period of time with the
Middle East.
********************
Annabel
McGoldrick (Reporting The World):
I know from
talking to a lot of the journalists here that you often find that you're under
attack. If your story is liked by one particular group then the others will
hate it. It also fits for me with that understanding of a conflict as a tug of
war. So that whatever ground is gained by one side is lost by another. It is a
way of seeing the conflict which is summed up by Ehud Barak in a TV interview
he gave to Newsnight back in January:
"This
is a confrontation between the wills of two nations and movements, a struggle
over the same piece of ground. And this is the history of the last ten years,
maybe the last 22 years, or 52 years. It's a very long confrontation of these
two movements".
It's an
interesting clip in particular the zero sum analysis. I think implicit in what
a lot of people have said is that that is a framing which is also constructed
by some of our habits as reporters. We have the habit of doing a tick-tock
going to the official source on one side and the official source on the other
as often as not. In some of the reporting especially at the beginning of this
particular phase of the conflict, the phrase 'a blow by blow account' was never
more aptly applied. It's almost as if exchanges of violence gave us this zero
sum formulation. The question is, is that the only way to see this conflict, or
indeed any conflict?
************
How about a
Middle East Community with Israel and 6/7 Arab states as fully fledged members
and maybe also one Persian state? Once you think in those terms and you see a
Middle East community in charge of water problems and maybe arms control and
above all of administering an agreement. And of course increasing trade
enormously and increasing the flow of people and communication in general. It
is not at all a zero sum. It's very much an increasing sum game.
Now I don't
know how many people have suggested that. All I would say is that I haven't
read it in the papers. It is absent. I know a lot of rank and file people who
are thinking in these terms. So why is that not in the forefront? Let me
mention another one, and people may be surprised, I'd like to pick up 3 peace
policies by Sharon. Joint economic venturesÉJoint patrollingÉPeace Education?
Also
missing from the debate, are the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian co-operation
when Palestine becomes a state. You see you cannot take a step into the dark,
without knowing what you are going into, that has been a festering problem in
Northern Ireland and I think the British press is much to blame for that in being
so unable to project on the screen a variety of images which could possibly be
realised in the future.
I think I'm
missing point 1) a diagnosis, point 2) a prognosis and point 3) a therapy. Now
these are medical terms and if you're missing all three you're missing quite a
lot. What do I mean by diagnosis? Well I mean an attention to the conflict
formation. Look, if you try to say to people that Northern Ireland is a
question of ancient hatreds between two tribes called Protestants and Catholics
I think you are missing quite a lot. I cannot do anything on Northern Ireland
without having at least 6 parties to the conflict formation.
To couch it
in terms of Israelis or Palestinians is infantile. As a very minimum one has to
be aware of the fact that there are very clear divisions in the two groups. I
could put it in terms of Extremists vs Moderates; Labour vs Likud;
Secular/Reformed/Modern Jews vs
Orthodox, There are more refined ways of doing it Ashkenazy vs Sephardim. My
friend here to the right mentioned the Palestinian camps, itŐs a terrible way
to treat people. I ask myself, if I were the son of somebody growing up there
what sort of attitude would I develop?
Now I go to
prognosis. I think one thing that journalists might be more interested in asking
more often not only of politicians but of rank and file people - How is this
going to end? In my experience you find an overwhelming majority say 'it's
going to end with some kind of compromiseŐ. I haven't heard anybody say itŐs
going to end with Israel being thrown into the sea. Now this is important: it's
the in between steps, its where the missing therapy comes in.
Would it be
possible for journalists to focus more on solutions? I'm not saying that they
shouldn't focus on the violence, of course that is very important, but imagine
with your inner eye that you see two extremes, the two possibilities. A
violence oriented news casting and a solutionary attitude.
What kind
of things do you stimulate in the reader if you report mainly violence? I think
you stimulate two emotions. The first is hatred if the side that you sympathise
with is on the victimŐs side, just absolute hatred, to cry for revenge,
counter-attack but I don't think that's the majority view. I think there's
another emotion that's equally dangerous - apathy. See that is what the world
is like, man is man's worst enemy this is going to continue all the time there
is nothing we can do about it. Hatred and apathy are not a good basis for
building peace. Journalists carry an enormous responsibility here.
Imagine you
had gone the solutionary route. Whenever you find whatever small little group
that has a glitter of an idea get it down, print it out and get a headline out
of it. So what kind of emotions would you get? Nobody has described it better
then Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that when somebody has a new idea the first
reaction is silence. The second reaction is laughter - 'its the most ridiculous
thing I ever heard. The third is persecution - he must be crazy. The fourth
reaction is some leading politician stands up and says - I have always been of
that opinion.
*************************
Daphna
Vardi (Israel Radio):
My
understanding from talking to pretty much everybody who was involved in the
construction of the Oslo Agreement was that the economy is what actually
underwrites the agreement: create on the ground the conditions that people on
the ground will have something serious to lose and that is what we spread
Now as to
the issues that were attributed to Sharon - these were all issues that were
part of the Oslo Agreement. One of the things that I found disappointing about
the coverage of Oslo was the exclusion of those points. A good time to cover
these points would have been a year before the Intifada started when these
patrols worked fine and were accepted. Another occasion when it could have been
covered by the press was when Sharon visited Al Aqsa which got lots of press
coverage here. But what didn't get covered was that on the same day an Israeli
soldier who was on one of these patrols was shot dead. As far as I can see as a
journalist it would have made a very good human story.
***************************
Bob
Jobbins (BBC World Service):
While it's
easy to sit in a room and deplore the focus of the media on violence the core
and the essence of what's happening at the moment is really about violence. And
if we don't report that then we are failing in our duties as journalists and
while it is deplorable that it may become over-mechanistic, journalists take
extraordinary risks to try to cover what is happening on the ground.
The
essence, to me, of the story is what is happening to individual people in the
Middle East. Many other dimensions get reported in other parts of the media
maybe not as often as people would like but I do think there's a danger of
seeing a coincidence of interest between people engaged in conflict resolution
and the media. Conflict resolution is something on which I report not something
in which I engage. A side effect of my reporting may be that it makes conflict
resolution harder or easier but that's a judgement that is made after our
reporting.
In this
sort of discussion itŐs easy to lose sight of the audience to whom we're
speaking. In this case itŐs the World Service and that's the people in the camps,
the people who live in the Gaza Strip and in Israel and to people all around
the worlds and our job is to engage their interest and that seems a reasonable
thing for the media to try to do. It has imperfections but they can be
revisited in hindsight by academics and politicians and that seems to me to be
a fair enough bargain.
I know that
one thing the BBC is renowned for more than any other organisation is the
insistence that the events we report on should be properly contextualized and I
think itŐs fair to say that a lot of what we're talking about is how we select
the things that go in the frame in order to contextualise episodes of violence.
So I'm not sure whether there's a debate as to whether we should cover violence
or not.
One of the
things JG touched on was the fact that not everybody from one side of a
conflict can be seen as one bloc of opinion. This is particularly pertinent
with regard to Northern Ireland and in the Concept Document we call this disaggregation,
not scooping everybody up in one aggregate.
In pursuit
of that we're now going to hear from a speaker from Tel Aviv. Yitzhak
Frankenthal who set up the Bereaved Families Forum. Losing a family can help
contribute to the cycle of violence by creating a desire for revenge, YF set up
a group that sets out to intervene in that cycle; he did so after losing his
own son on active service with the IDF.
Yitzhak, we
were hearing earlier about the conflict being presented as a giant tug of war,
that everything that happens one side is the fault of the other side and that
one side cannot gain without the other side losing. To me as a journalist if we
were to report rather more on initiatives like this we would convey that some
people at least see the problem as a shared problem. What you seem to be saying
is not the fault of the other side but the fault of a system that both sets of
people share?
Yitzhak
Frankenthal (by telephone)
It's not a
question of who is guilty, both sides are making mistakes. What we need to do
is realise that we both need to compromise - both the Israelis and the
Palestinians. As a group of bereaved parents that is what we are trying to do.
Some of us are religious people, I'm a religious person and itŐs much easier to
talk about peace from the point of view of Judaism. We need to get the
Palestinian people to live as we are. So the question is not who is guilty,
each side needs to understand the mistakes that they made and to try and make
peace.
********
Brian
Whitaker (Middle East Editor, The Guardian):
I was in
Lebanon last week on the Southern border and I found a number of things that
are not really quite as you'd expect. The first was that there have been
belligerent noises about a fresh outbreak of war on the Lebanese border. A lot
of this comes from the siege mentality on the Israeli side that we were hearing
about earlier and the demonising of Hezbollah who now seem to rank only
slightly behind Bin Laden in the list of the world's worst terrorist
organisations.
The real
situation as I see it with Hezbollah is that since the Israeli withdrawal took
place the actual conflict has been confined to the Sh'bah Farms area and there
has been a tacit understanding with the Israelis. And I was quite surprised to
learn that Hezbollah have been passing messages to the Israeli soldiers through
the UNIFOR unit down there. Hezbollah is certainly an organisation that regards
Israel as an illegitimate entity, as they call it. At the same time they think
it might collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions or
whatever which means that they don't need to do anything about urgently so they
seem to be focused on matters within Lebanon.
Another
thing that happened there is related to the waters of the Haspani River which
runs through the border slightly into the Golan Heights area down towards
Galilee. While I was there, there were reports in the Israeli press basically
that Lebanon was diverting the river and was building a pumping station and
this was a threat to Israel's security. Two quite senior security figures said
that it could be grounds for war. The reality on the ground is that before the
Israeli withdrawal two pumps were installed to provide water for the Israeli
settlements.
Since the
withdrawal the pumps have remained there and haven't been touched. The plan was
to supply a tiny village called Wazani with water through a 4" pipe,
hardly a diversion of the river. One of the views of the UN on how to build
peace is to develop the area and repopulate it, as HaŐaretz observed itŐs going
to mean more water consumption and Israel may not be able to get as much water
out of Lebanon as it has been doing in the past. So there is an interesting and
subtle dilemma whether you forgo water or peace on the Israeli side.
If I can
just mention another problem on the border which is village called Rajia that
consists of about 1000-1300 people. The inhabitants are Syrian Alouites who
have Israeli ID and it lies 2/3 in Lebanon 1/3 in the occupied Golan Heights,
so that is quite a complex situation. When the Israelis withdrew there was the
option of taking the border right through the village and nobody wanted to do
that. So they just let it lie and they now have a high security fence going
along that suddenly stops when it gets to the village and there's a rough wire
fence round the village.
Another
major twist is that the village because of its location has become a major
smuggling centre and the cannabis grown in the Bekaa Valley passes through the
village on its way to Israel. There's more to this than the issue of a fence
but the Israelis put it up to stop movement through the village. They did it on
the Northern Lebanese side and the Lebanese then complained that this was an
incursion onto their territory. The US told the Israelis to stop and the
foundations of the fence were filled in but you can see what has been reported
as an incursion into Lebanese territory - there's actually a lot more to it
when you get down to the details.
Jake
Lynch:
You have
effectively reported to us that you have framed in elements that elude that
familiar zero sum framing. So by reporting here tonight you're already
constructing a different shape to those conflictual issues. We'll just briefly
take a small detour now because we've got somebody else joining us from
Jerusalem, Gila Svirsky from a group called Coalition of Women for a Just Peace
which has grown partly from the Four Mothers Movement, itself instrumental in
raising the need to negotiate a withdrawal from Lebanon by Israel.
Gila, explain
to me what is the principle behind the specific non-violent direct actions that
you and your colleagues have been carrying out recently. What is the political
effect you're trying to achieve at the moment?
Gila
Svirsky:
We're
trying to end the occupation and introduce women into the negotiations. We're
trying to raise the issue of the human rights abuses that are taking place and
get people to understand that they are intolerable. On the Palestinian side for
the suffering and on the Israeli side because itŐs wrong for a civilised
country to engage in them.
JL: We've
told a number of colleagues about you and that you were going to be joining us
and one objection that has been raised already tonight is why would journalists
report what you are doing. Because after all you represent a tiny sliver of
Israeli public opinion.
GS: We're a
small part but our actions have been a dramatic voice of protest. We have seen
voices of protest on the right wing gain a great deal of publicity but I have
yet to see the protest movement on the left getting any coverage.
JL: There
was a particular incident I discussed with you on New YearŐs Eve when I
received pictures of a rally at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem - not your rally,
a very different one - by what was categorised as Jewish extremists. Yet we
didn't receive any material on your organisation. What's your reading of the
kind of framing decisions we journalists are taking here?
GS: ItŐs
because we're the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace and not just Coalition
for a Just Peace. The demonstration you refer to took place on the 29 December
it was in the midst of the Intifada. There were certainly very grim moments
there. We had a rally through the streets of Jerusalem of 2000 Israeli and
Palestinian women for peace. Not only did we hold a vigil holding signs that
said 'end the occupation', we then marched through the streets holding signs
that said 'we refuse to be enemies".
We marched
up to the wall of the old city, draped three enormous banners the entire height
of the wall that said on them in Arabic, Hebrew and English 'end the
occupation'. Now itŐs pretty interesting to me that in the midst of the
violence 2000 Israeli and Palestinian women marching through the city would not
get any coverage whatsoever.
********************
JL: Why is
it most unlikely as Lyse Doucet was saying that a protest by a peace group will
get any coverage? Why are we more likely to hear about other more extreme
groups that are more bellicose? Why are they Ôframed inŐ and groups like the
ones you mention, framed out, in this way?
Adel
Darwish (Mideast News agency):
I think
they would make a good story on a day when there's no violence and no
event. I think there's confusion
between the role of a reporter and the role of a historian or author. I'm both,
but as a reporter I'm here and we're being asked to take sides just because the
Palestinian has to be the underdog in this particular conflict. We're asked to
be historians, we're being asked to do prognosis and to seek solutions. Its not
my job I'm a reporter and I have to go and report on what is happening.
When Oslo
happened we reported Oslo, when there was a handshake on the lawn of the
Whitehouse we reported because it was story. That's my job as reporter. As a
book author I had time to write about the water wars that happened in the
Middle East a few years ago, I wrote about the Gulf War but as a reporter I
have a job to do. I was concerned about JG saying we should go out and be part
of conflict resolution. If that's your job then go out and do it and then we
will report it when you are successful.
The other
thing I want mention is the economics. My colleague from the BBC has problems
that are slightly different to mine. I'm bound by space and what my editor says
in London, the economics of newspapers are now that you have some kid who left
school yesterday and he became the foreign editor its very hard to sell him a
story he hasn't seen on the wire because the pack are going to go for this
story even though mine might be more interesting.
You're
suggesting that what reporters do is report the facts and what we're saying
here tonight is that it may pay us to look at the process of selection we carry
out when deciding what are the facts. The statements that blame Yasser Arafat
for inciting Palestinian violence that then get reported, come from the Israeli
government, but what came first, the chicken or the egg? Is it a fact because
someone said it or has someone said it in order for it to become a reportable
fact?
ÉLet me put
something to you very briefly. In the example we've taken here (in the concept
document) we imagine 800 words for a paper on a specific incident. Do you use
100 words using two platitudinous quotes from Washington? Or do you use them to
say you know while this is happening there's some very different work going on,
to add to the context. Also it would appear that itŐs not always the case that
we report the facts. There is also a view that we are framing the conflict,
constructing a view and it is valuable to go back to how we framed those facts
and wonder how they performed that job.
***********************
JG: If I
can make a minor correction. Nobody has suggested that journalists work for
solutions. What I am suggesting is that journalists should be better a
reporting proposals for solutions. In 1991 Perez de Cuellar proposed a solution
to the Yugoslavian conflict it was not reported by BBC or the major media it
was in a correspondence in a short paper rustled up very quickly. And that's what
I'm sayingÉ