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February 20, 2004
Israeli PR is a disaster
Truth suffers from "infotainment," says Wolfsfeld.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Media, particularly television, has reduced the human capability
for in-depth consideration of issues, reducing complex ideas and
incidents to "infotainment," each brief segment of news
telling an encapsulated story with all the elements of the illustrated
fables we used to read as children, ideally with clearly defined
heroes and villains, according to Prof. Gadi Wolfsfeld.
Essentially, the medium defines the message, said Wolfsfeld, a Hebrew
University communications and political science professor who spoke
Sunday night at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver
at the biannual Robert Rogow Memorial Lecture. Wolfsfeld's lecture
was Refocusing the Lens: Israel and the International Media.
There are inherent difficulties in telling Israel's story in the
media, Wolfsfeld argued, because the nature of modern media gives
advantages to the Palestinian cause.
"Television news, especially, has got to be simplistic,"
said Wolfsfeld. This puts Israel at a disadvantage in the world
media, he argued, because of an entrenched narrative that depicts
Israel as an aggressor and the Palestinians as innocent victims,
images that are magnified by the fact that the region is jammed
with journalists.
"News happens where there are journalists," he said. In
East Timor, where the Indonesian government killed an estimated
150,000 to 200,000 people in the 1990s, there were few journalists
and almost no media coverage of the massacres. "The opposite
is Israel, a country where there are too many journalists,"
said Wolfsfeld, an expert on the role of media in the Arab-Israeli
conflict and a commentator for Israeli and American television and
print media.
Millions are dying of AIDS in Africa, but that doesn't merit the
coverage that the Israeli-Arab conflict receives, for a variety
of reasons, said the professor. The nature of AIDS is that people
die over time, in ways that do not translate to television as effectively
as sudden death.
"It's a process, and the media can't deal with processes, they
deal with events," he said.
Meanwhile, the importance of media has eclipsed earlier forms of
private bilateral or multilateral international relations to the
point where nations make their cases less to each other through
diplomatic channels than indirectly, through the media.
This puts totalitarian regimes like the Palestinian Authority at
a distinct advantage compared with democracies like Israel, said
Wolfsfeld. Not only is the Palestinian message simple and understandable,
it is controlled from the top down. Israel, by contrast not only
permits free expression by its citizens, but has a population of
talkers, each with their own interpretation of the day's news.
"Every Israeli is waiting his turn to be prime minister,"
he said. "Everybody is a maven in Israel.
"In Israel, there's no way to control the flow of information,"
he added. "That's very difficult in a nation where no one can
shut up. There are no secrets.... This is a journalist's paradise,
but a spokesman's nightmare."
Wolfsfeld painted a picture of a country with disastrous public
relations failures, saying there is no structure, strategy or method
of evaluation for defending Israeli positions in world media and
opinion.
"Basically, it's amateur city," said Wolfsfeld, a Philadelphia
native who made aliyah 30 years ago. He hopes to help remedy this
situation by creating a non-government think tank that will present
a cogent case for Israel.
Responding to a question from the audience asking why media do not
report good news from Israel, such as scientific breakthroughs,
Wolfsfeld said "good news is not news."
North American television viewers routinely say they want less violent
imagery and more in-depth discussion of news events, he said.
"They want it, but they won't watch it," said Wolfsfeld,
adding that media is a business and viewership translates into dollars.
Though his message was grim, Wolfsfeld's delivery was filled with
wit and wry humor, drawing many laughs from the packed Norman Rothstein
Theatre audience.
The event was the second Dr. Robert Rogow Memorial Lecture. Rogow
was a scholar of labor relations who taught at Simon Fraser University
for three decades. The admiration with which he was held by colleagues
and students was described by Prof. Mark Wexler, who moderated the
evening. Rogow passed away in 1998. The lecture series was founded
by his wife, Dr. Sally Rogow, and their family, to bring distinguished
lecturers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to Vancouver.
Wolfsfeld paid homage to Rogow and to the Vancouver Jewish community,
noting that the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University chapter
here is one of the most active in the world.
"At Hebrew University, the name Vancouver is well known to
all of us," he said. "We really appreciate the support
we get from this community."
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
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