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Abstract
Recent research on the news coverage of war and conflict has argued that journalists maintain more professional independence and are more critical of the government and military than in the past. At the same time, critiques that during wartime journalists rally around the flag and serve as mouthpieces for nationalist propaganda persist. Given these opposing views, we examine the ways in which three Israeli online newspapers covered the 2014 Gaza War and compare this coverage to posts on the Israel Defense Forces’ official social media pages. Through close discursive analysis of legitimation and referential strategies, the use of reported speech, transitivity, voice, and modality, we demonstrate both the great ideological similarities between news discourse and military public relations, and the ways in which journalists transform the authoritative, formal voice characteristic of official texts into the more personalized, emotional voice of media discourse. We discuss our findings as reflective of the complementary influence of journalists’ ideological presuppositions, professional rituals, and commercial constraints.
Notes
1 In the two popular outlets, some criticism that the military was not operating aggressively enough was also found. Such criticism essentially reaffirms the positive moral evaluation of the IDF (Neiger, Zandberg, and Meyers Citation2010).
2 We did not find cases in which media discourse clearly influenced the language used by the IDF, although information originating in the media was occasionally addressed by official IDF channels.