Miami Herald ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos surveyed his paper’s last three months of coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was surprised by the volume of coverage:
There were 77 articles in which Israel and/or the Palestinians were mentioned in the first two paragraphs. That is considerable attention to a small region of seven million people, plus an additional four million Palestinians. By comparison, there were 319 articles on Cuba and 203 on Iraq.
But Schumacher-Matos continues:
Further breaking down the 77 stories, I found that only three mentioned Palestinians alone. This is a very imprecise measure of what the stories were about, but it does reflect a general trend I found. Not only did Israel get more attention, but more importantly, stories about the conflict between the two were overwhelmingly told from inside Israel, even if critical of Israeli actions.
This is partly understandable: Almost all of the foreign correspondents in the area, including The Miami Herald’s shared McClatchy correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, are based in Jerusalem. Compared with Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has far superior safety, communications, support services, cultural affinity and functioning government. Plus, it occupies the West Bank.
What does that mean?
The constant reporting from the Israeli vantage is unfortunate. As much as the stories may include Palestinian views, the trend denies readers the opportunity to see more articles through Palestinian eyes, and thus better understand Palestinian thinking, for better or worse. The effect is a subtle bias that isn’t intentionally or even necessarily for or against one side, but does over time give readers a greater shared understanding of Israelis than Palestinians. With understanding, there is greater chance for sympathy.
The ombudsman would have reached a different conclusion had his survey included the Herald’s use of wire copy, much of which is written by Palestinian journalists inside Gaza and the West Bank.
