Tamar Liebes

Our war/their war: Comparing the intifadeh and the gulf war on U.S. and Israeli television

War coverage puts journalism to the severe test of choosing between patriotic fervor and morale building, on one side, and a more distant and analytical stance, on the other. Journalist choice in wartime can be observed by comparing coverage of “our” war—when the journalists own country is at war—and “their” war—when the journalist reports on a conflict among nations not his or her own. Comparing Israeli coverage of the Palestinian intifadeh and American coverage of the Gulf (“our” wars) with American coverage of the intifadeh (“their” war) reveals widely different framing mechanisms. In “our” war coverage, television journalists tend to excise the opposite side, sanitize the suffering inflicted on it, attribute equal strength to both sides, personalize “our” side, demonize “their” side, and decontextualize its aggressive actions.

Global Culture in Practice: A look at children and adolescents in Denmark, France and Israel

This article discusses a preliminary exploration of how globalization becomes embedded into the lives of children and adolescents in three very different countries: Denmark, France and Israel. Analysis of qualitative data collected from the three countries as part of a major cross-cultural study suggests five interrelated practices of globalization: (1) the role of television as both a default medium and as a source of favourite contents; (2) the preferences for transnational fiction; (3) the medias catering to the utopias of a shared world; (4) the hybrid characters of childrens cultures; and (5) intergenerational struggles related to globalization. The findings suggest that for children and adolescents globalization involves the linking of their own locales to the wider world while, at the same time, localization incorporates trends of globalization. The article points to two parallel processes: one of young childrenss adoption of a global perspective on social life, and the second of the hybrid coexistence of multi-cultures in their lives.

Inside a News Item: A Dispute Over Framing

Trust in serious journalism is based on our belief in the professionalism of journalistic practice. We expect televisions evening news to select the most significant events of the day and tell them in a fair and accurate manner. Whereas academic research agrees that news value or newsworthiness should be the guiding principle for selectivity, the principle is rarely spelled out in detail. Occasional attempts to infer these values empirically from what gets published or from whats left on the floor conceal the process of negotiation and disagreement that goes on in the newsroom and between professional journalists and the interests of the channels private or public owners. The case study presented here uses inside information that emerged during the course of a public debate following the broadcasting of a news item on Israels Public Television featuring football fans at a victory celebration welcoming Prime Minister Netanyahu with racist shouts. The analysis demonstrates that the same event may evoke several competing frames and thus may be included or dropped, or appear at various spots in the lineup for different reasons. The paper raises the question of whether the authority of the news might not be enhanced on occasion by sharing competing frames with viewers.

Live Television's Disaster Marathon of September 11 and its Subversive Potential

Televisions coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attacks visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attacks effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which televisions coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.

Routinizing Terror: Media Coverage and Public Practices in Israel, 2000-2005:

This article argues that counterintuitively, the unrelenting multivictim terrorist attacks on Israel between 1996 and 2004 did not bring about a linear escalation in the intensity of media coverage nor in the demoralization of the public, as seen in the changes in daily routine and in the radicalization of political attitudes. By the use of a combined index based on the length of television’s disaster marathons, their viewing rates, and the extent of changes in the daily lives and the political attitudes of Israelis (drawing on secondary analysis of various sources), the authors distinguish between two periods in terms of the impact of terror. In the first period, from1996 to the end of 2002, they observed a relatively strong effect in all the indicators mentioned above. From the beginning of 2003, in spite of the continuing high frequency of the attacks, the authors see a process of routinization apparent in all our indicators, on the part of the media and of the public.

It Takes Two to Blow the Whistle: Do Journalists Control the Outbreak of Scandal?

The article argues that the exposure of scandal, often seen as constituting the highest journalistic achievement, is not necessarily controlled by the journalist. Looking at scandal as the outcome of the varying relationship between reporters and sources, the authors offer a typology of subgenres. Whistle blowing is a story in which the source betrays his or her institutional loyalty (often for a higher cause), entrapment is a story in which the reporter betrays an often naïve source (possibly for the sake of a good story), and mainstreaming and spotlighting are the highlighting of violations of social norms by picking up stories from marginal media channels or by choosing to investigate routine, endemic antinormative practices. A new type of scandal emerges in the capacity of interviewees on live talk shows to surprise their hosts by violating the norms of the studio interview or of accepted social behavior.

Black and White and Shades of Gray Palestinians in the Israeli Media During the 2nd Intifada

An examination of the Israeli media coverage of Palestinians during the 2nd Intifada demonstrates a new openness, not compatible with the “crisis routine” of rallying around the flag. Fifteen years earlier, in the 1st Intifada, Palestinians were altogether excluded from the screen. This time round, in spite of the higher level of violence, the Israeli public was exposed to their human side—as political leaders, victims, witnesses, and even terrorists. The authors’ analysis of news photos and television representations (2000—2005) reveals that during the 2nd Intifada coverage was expanded to include a broad range of Palestinian figures. Alongside traditional framing, Palestinians are also seen as ordinary people living under occupation, often as direct victims of the Israeli military. Analysis of the relationship among these images (including their textual framing), with their implied readers and with “real” readers with ideological preconceptions, leads to arguing that the emotional appeal of the varied representation calls into question the understanding of the conflict as a fixated black-and-white dichotomy. The authors suggest reasons for this new media openness. In conclusion, the authors point to the ways in which their model can facilitate an understanding of images of the “other” side in armed conflicts.

Managing a moral dilemma: israeli soldiers in the intifada

The Palestinian uprising (intifada) in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has created a moral dilemma for at least some Israeli soldiers who are assigned to participate, however reluctantly, in the military effort to suppress it. The dilemma consists in strong commitment to the army, on the one hand, and objections to its tactics of repression on the other. In an attempt to observe the processes of coping with the resulting dissonancewidely assumed to result in the surrender to some sort of routinization-conversations were initiated with soldiers from an upper-middle class background. Their discourse reveals that coping takes the form of searching for (1) cognitive reorganization through frames that reduce inconsistency and justify obedience; and (2) improvising behavior and negotiating with external reality so as to make the dilemma more livable. But while the findings, on the whole, are in line with the axiom that dissonance is reduced even when inconsistency is maintained, it is proposed here that in certain cases where two ego-involving commitments conflict, an individual may willfully attempt to preserve the pain of dissonance rather than to alleviate it.

Performance Journalism: The Case of Media's Coverage of War and Terror

We argue that the move from print to broadcast has brought about new modes of reporting. Rather than observe events from the wings, contemporary journalists often perform as active agents on stage, sometimes even playing the role of protagonists in the story. Such new journalistic practices are particularly significant at times of conflict; a moment in which the relationship among media, public, and government is challenged. We demonstrate these modes by two interrelated subgenres of performance journalism: embedded-ness and chasing after terrorists. In contradiction to the common perception according to which ‘embedding’ is patriotic and ‘talking-to-the enemy’ is subservice, we claim that both are indifferent to the traditional dichotomy of patriotism versus professionalism.

The Structure of Family and Romantic Ties in the Soap Opera An Ethnographic Approach

The authors offer a new approach for the study of soap opera, aimed at discovering the social boundaries within which a particular culture negotiates its primordial relationships. The interaction between culture, power, genre, and gender is revealed by tracing the complex kinship structures of family and romance among soap opera characters and by observing how this structure is activated by the narrative. The advantages of this ethnographic method are examined within the framework of three parallel research traditions of audiences and texts: (a) quantitative analysis of social stratification (and the corresponding gratifications) and the wielding of power (content analysis), (b) analysis of meaning and process in the decoding by viewers (reception) and in narratives (literary analysis), and (c) ties and contexts in the ethnography of viewers and of characters.