Topic: CNSNews.com
An Aug. 1 CNSNews.com article by Julie Stahl highlights a "recent study" of Israeli media finding that "Israel’s own media coverage of the U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the years has been biased toward the liberal school of thought." But the article never honestly admits the apparent bias of the study's author, Avraham Gur, instead presenting only his academic credentials.
Gur appears to be a conservative; he has written two articles for the Israeli journal Nativ, published by the right-leaning Ariel Center for Public Policy Research. Stahl's labeling bias is another clue: While Ehud Barak is described as "leftwing," neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor his Likud party are labeled as right-wing.
Stahl also states that "the so-called 'peace camp' or peace process is generally identified with the leftwing or liberals in Israel," but that "[s]ome Israelis oppose the idea of Israel giving up land to the Palestinians and creating a Palestinian state, a tangible, in exchange for peace, an intangible." Stahl thus implies that the "some" who oppose the peace process are right-wing -- in fact, it's true -- but she did not put an ideological label on them as the did the peace process supporters.
And there's also this curious paragraph about Gur's findings:
On Israel’s public television station, out of 2,717 participants in broadcasts, 1,348 to 3,228 minutes of broadcast time were from the leftwing; 871 to 1,667 minutes of broadcast time from the rightwing; and 498 to 696 minutes of broadcast time were considered non-political.
Why is there a range? Was it not clear whether a participant forwarded a specific political view? If the person's ideology was not clear, shouldn't that have been excluded from the numbers?
Further, Gur is apparently the only person Stahl interviewed for this story. Given that CNS' almost exclusively American audience knows little about the machinations of Israeli politics and even less about Israeli media, more information and analysis from others are needed to put Gur's study (to which CNS provides no link) in a realistic perspective as an apparently partisan document.
