Roy Greenslade reviewed the film in Media Guardian:
‘There is more than one way to be a war reporter, and [Lynch and McGoldrick] have produced a video to prove that it can be done
peacefully. They show how the concentration by the media on violence tends to prolong disputes rather than solve them’.
‘Excellent’ - Tim Llewellyn, former BBC Middle East correspondent
‘A really excellent and extraordinary achievement’ - Professor Greg Philo, Glasgow University Media Group
A 50-minute film by RtW directors Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, built around seven news-length packages on developments in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
- an illustrated creative strategy for a television news programme intent on properly informing its audience about this important story.
It comes complete with comprehensive Teaching Notes, tracing different learning paths for groups of university students
- undergraduate and postgraduate - as well as A level students and ngo/campaign groups, to work their way through the film and the issues it raises.
News from the Holy Land opens with two contrasting treatments - one War Journalism, one Peace Journalism
- of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, in August, 2003.
From an article in Media Development:
‘The citizen is completely helpless. He does not hear any other voice; and if everybody says the same, it must be true’. The lament is from Uri Avnery, veteran leader of Israel’s peace movement, in our Peace Journalism video, News from the Holy Land, on coverage of the conflict with the Palestinians.
A Jerusalem bureau is a top posting for any ambitious reporter in international news, and it attracts some of the brightest and best in the profession. The Middle East is seldom out of the headlines; and yet there is now startling evidence of how ill-informed the viewing public has remained on some of the basic facts.
Everybody does say the same; or at least, the voices raised in print or on the airwaves are from a very narrow band of perspectives, and the questions they are asked don’t much vary. It leaves huge gaps where chunks of the explanation should be, for what is going
on.
The most glaring of these omissions is any explanation of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories
- its illegality in the eyes of the world; why it’s there; when it started; the form it takes and its effects on daily life for Palestinians.
In the film, we suggest this originates in the best of intentions. Journalists concerned to avoid allegations of bias ‘tend to stick to safe stories like big bangs and the agenda set by political leaders’.
But television, in Britain as in many other countries, operates under public service obligations. One of them, enshrined in the BBC Producer Guidelines, stipulates that ‘all views should be reflected to mirror the depth and spread of opinion’. News from the Holy Land shows how this could be done. It would entail hearing from Israeli peace activists, like Avnery himself, who are much more in line with global public opinion, than the present Israeli government.
The Guidelines also say that audiences should receive ‘an intelligent account that enables them to form their own
views’- We provide seven examples of news-length stories which could make good on this promise, starting with two different treatments of a violent incident, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
The first carries a familiar message - it’s all the fault of fanatics; prospects for peace lie in ruins. The second is an example of Peace Journalism, showing how the conditions of everyday life for Palestinians - held up at checkpoints, shot and harassed with impunity - feed into a cycle of violence that is steadily corrupting and killing both societies.
It shows Palestinian casualties - who still outnumber those killed on the Israeli side, in the violence of recent years, by three to one
- and it shows activists from Checkpoint Watch trying to reduce tension on the frontline’.
(published in January 2005 by WACC, the World Association for Christian Communication)