A Journalist, A Newspaper, The Media, Society....

Articles about the Israeli Palestinian conflict are always "interesting" to follow because I cannot possibly think of any other issue that brings such an obvious bias on the part of whatever publication, journalist or speaker. The words that you choose, whether you speak of Jews, Israelis, settlers, civilians, men, women and kids, the title that you put on top of your article... Everything just indicates a stand. The French national newspaper for instance titled its article on the bombing in Jerusalem "a bus going to a Jewish settlement is targeted in a bombing attack", which is just so different from the "Deadly Blast Strikes Outside Jerusalem's Central Bus Station" from the New York Times.
I just wonder whose words are those. Obviously, they have been written by an individual, a journalist, but would it be fair that those are only the words of the journalist and not of a newspaper? Certainly not, it is the newspaper that sets up standards for its stuff, and it is the newspaper, meaning the direction of the newspaper that edits and decides whether each article is worth publication. At the end of the day an article written by one journalist is published by an entire crew. Okay so each of this bias is the work of an entire newspaper. But then if every newspaper is biased, if an implicit principle becomes that pure news are boring and that newspapers need catchy titles in order to be sold, then the phenomenon is enlarged to an entire field, and that the media as a whole can be called biased. Is that it? Are words such as settlers or civilians chosen and used specifically by this abstract industry that media represents? My opinion is that this is not the case. Media being a business, it does what every business does: it gives its customers what they want. And there is a reason why American, French and Israeli media don't deliver the same perspective. It is true that different sides also exist withing one country, like the Washington Post being so different to the New York Times. but even that answers to different groups of people, and responds to different audience.
At the end of the day it is us who make the media, it is the society that dictates the words that are being printed, and it is therefore each and everyone of us who are biased in terms of papers that we read, information sources that we use and terminology that we consider right.

Media and Sensationalism

In my Contemporary Israeli Fiction class (for which I have a midterm on Monday), we saw how Israeli writers such as Castel Bloom or Yehoshua denounce the way media coverage of events such as bombing and war. We spoke a lot in class about media sensationalism and about the appropriate coverage for such events. It is one thing to deliver sensationalism with news of presidents cheating on their wives, but it is probably another to use tragic events for a commercial purpose. Besides the issue of compassion, it demeans the definition of media and demeans the trust that its customers have in it.

The Media - Ethics or Business?

Last year, France tried to deal with the issue of media having to respond and act like a business and therefore having to be sensational all the times and not necessarily only objective, by limiting the privatization of the media and the advertisements in between programs. The goal, again, was to go back to a more ethical, more serious, maybe even more monotonous media that would just deliver news and nothing else. This has provoked a tremendous debate, because the heads of media companies argued that indeed media were a business before anything else and that it was unfair to hold them to different standards. Reading Lippman and Dewey, I simply wonder where the middle could be between media being a business or an institution of ethics, and if this middle exists at all....