Spin doctors in the Middle East
By David Perlmutter Posted Jul 1 2002
Phil Reeves, a correspondent for Britain’s Independent, recently detailed an encounter with an Israeli briefing officer, the newest kind of soldier in the history of war. “Joel,” Reeves wrote, “…has a warm handshake, a chummy smile [and] introduces himself as a ‘military source,’ but it swiftly emerges that he is a headline machine, churning out allegations and slurs.”
In the more forgiving language of public relations, Joel (and his Palestinian cousins) are “spin professionals,” whose duty it is to target journalists with sound and image bytes to push the agenda and viewpoints of their patrons.
All sides in the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict understand that in modern war, spin, which may influence world and domestic public opinion and governmental policies, matters as much as bombs and guns. “One of the major instruments in any war is propaganda,” said Hashim Miki, head of Gaza’s Palestine television. The most complete victory goes to the most cynically image-management-savvy combatant.
Old-fashioned censorship is, of course, a common way to direct or blank out the journalist’s gaze. Most Arab countries simply ban foreign journalists or severely restrict what those they let in can see and say.
Now, Israel blocked press access to Palestinian cities and towns during its invasions. “The situation [changed] with the recent fighting,” observes Peter Hermann of the Baltimore Sun. “You used to feel pretty safe in the Palestinian areas [but] now everything is difficult.” One Italian journalist, Raffaele Ciriello of the Milan’s Corriere della Sera was killed by Israeli soldiers.
Many others suspect that the press bans, only lifted fully after the operation was mostly over, gave a carte blanche to ordinary IDF soldiers to roughhouse and even shoot at journalists. The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported recently that many foreign journalists say “they have never encountered such rough treatment as they are receiving from the Israeli army.” Le Monde’s Florence Amalou reported that IDF soldiers “treat many journalists as enemies, accusing them of being pro-Palestinian.”
Israelis respond that their tiny country now hosts more foreign journalists per capita than any other nation on earth — one thousand in all, according to Ha’aretz. Many in Israel do consider the foreign press, especially the Europeans, to be pro-Palestinian. They also blame European papers for stirring anti-Jewish attacks in France and elsewhere. Some in the Israeli right have called for an “Arab” solution to the PR mess: ban all foreigners — the press especially — from the country and the Palestinian territories.
American papers and television news organizations don’t fit into such a “propaganda front” model — `hence anger aroused in partisans when they don’t print or show “our truth.”
Furthermore, difficulties in covering issues and events in the Middle East arise from cultural divides.
Many American reporters I spoke to have complained that both sides are overly emotional when talking to the press. The Palestinians are cited as the sharpest and loudest ranters.
But there are differing cross-cultural standards of “coming on too strong.” An Israeli once told me: “American journalists judge people’s voice and body [language] by the standards of [the Midwest].”
More importantly, as Magda Abu-Fadil, the director of the Institute for Professional Journalists at the Lebanese American University, comments, “If you’re under siege, being bombarded every day [and undergoing great suffering], would you be a rational human being?”
Who are the best spinners? Some journalists say that the Palestinian “spin” machine has declined precipitously in the past year.
Much of the infrastructure of Palestinian media and press relations has been destroyed by the Israelis. Their official web page has even crashed, although the circumstances leading to this are unclear.
Some reporters claim the Palestinian spinmeisters have become more astute since 9/11. They have focused more on the domain of television images. “Everything the PA does as propaganda now is oriented toward TV,” said one print reporter. When the destruction resulting from 9/11 prompted widespread celebration by ordinary Palestinians, the PA determined that such scenes were not to be witnessed by the West. In Nablus, journalists who tried to report on a pro-bin Laden rally were chased off by gunmen.
But there is also the perception among many that Palestinians are winning the spin war by default. “There’s a widespread assumption among the Palestinians that the story sells itself,” comments Cameron Barr of the Christian Science Monitor.
In the past few months, Israel’s spin apparatus has become much more physically imposing and efficient but, many claim, less effective. Foreign reporters can get a beeper messaging stream that tells them about all breaking news — according to the government. A huge media center issues briefings and offers press conferences each day. The army also provides a great deal of footage of the fighting and post-battle restricted tours of the combat areas.
Are the pictures created by spin campaigns affecting journalistic practice?
Most journalists I spoke to and those who have commented in print deny that spin has affected their reporting or undermined its fairness or accuracy. One said, “Sure, there are restrictions and that affects what we do, but I think the basic story is still getting out there.” Partisan criticism is taken in stride, too. “Both sides say we are biased,” a news photographer points out.
On the other hand, American journalists trying to sort out spin are often criticized for not being biased enough. Such accusations come from combatants and colleagues, especially the European correspondents whose tradition is more of passionate advocacy than straight reporting.
Problematic too is the issue of historical and situational context. One talking point among Palestinians (and repeated by Arab leaders and Arab-American spokespersons) is that “the Palestinians are the only occupied people in the world.” A Tibetan, Christian Sudanese or Kurd, or perhaps an American Navaho or Belfast Catholic, might disagree. But this writer has witnessed five instances when American reporters — including Dan Rather — raised no objection when this assertion was stated.
Second is the missing context of military precedent and procedure. When American troops retook Manila in 1945, for example, 100,000 civilians died and the city became moonscape. Current Israeli, American and NATO tactical doctrine for combat in urban terrain is identical. Such contextual details may be missing partly because of the paucity of journalists with actual military experience.
Yet, spin can be deflected by routine mechanisms of journalism, argue reporters.
The barroom consensus is one such device. Foreign correspondents gather in water holes (but also in private homes) to dissect their jobs. What emerges is often a pooling of individually gleaned knowledge into a “bigger picture.” The Sun’s Peter Hermann, for instance, comments that he and several of his colleagues shared information and concluded that so far there was no evidence of any “massacre” (a deliberate rounding up and execution of civilians) in Jenin.
Indeed, by May 1st, Palestinian officials reduced the estimated death toll in Jenin to 56; during the fighting they had claimed that 500 civilians were “massacred.” Such overblown claims increase the cynicism of journalists appraising what spinners in the Middle East tell (or yell at) them.
Another solution to lessen spin influence is to avoid, as the Monitor’s Barr puts it, “tennis ball journalism.” When he writes political stories — what’s going on inside the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority — he avoids using the enemies’ experts and their fixed message of the day, trying rather to find a variety of internal voices. This is a clever and thoughtful device; the job of a journalist, after all, is not to pretend that there are only two sides to every story, nor to be the moderator of a shouting match.
George Lockwood, retired managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal, argues that spin can be avoided if reporters are “highly skeptical, scrupulous in their research, well backgrounded in the history of the region and rigorous in their search for sources who do not color or slant the information (facts) they provide. A job for Superman? You bet!”
In all, the pictures on the front pages of major American and European newspapers suggest an ironically decisive Palestinian victory in the battle of the image: their homes are pictured as destroyed and their people shown to be suffering. Pro-Palestinian commentary by European journalists and editors simply captions with emphasis what people can see with their own eyes.
But to what and whose end does the spin war serve? Former Clinton Administration Middle East envoy Dennis Ross recently speculated that Palestinian violence since the Oslo Accords was not purposeless, but rather conducted because “Arafat needed to re-establish the Palestinians as a victim, and unfortunately they are a victim, and we see it now in a terrible way.” In turn, right-wing elements in Israel, foremost among them Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, deeply believe in the “Israel as Czechoslovakia 1938” analogy and want to show through violence that Israel will punish to the point of destruction any who commit violence against it.
In such a world, “spin” is secondary to the more visceral message of brutality — and for that the press is an excellent conduit.