https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1235-9136
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ABSTRACT
Utilizing the 2014 Israeli-Palestinian failed peace negotiations, this study examines the relationship between blame agency, the national identity of a newspaper, and the type of newspaper. To do so, we collected all news and opinion pieces from six newspapers representing broadsheet and tabloid newspapers from Israel, Palestine, and the United States one week before the official failure of the negotiations and three weeks following this date (N = 281). The results illustrated that the stronger party’s media (Israel) tend to portray Israeli actors casting blame on Palestinians, with some capacity for self-criticism, while the weaker party’ media (Palestine) report on both Palestinian actors and Israeli actors blaming Israel, revealing a unique pattern of the weaker actor in asymmetric conflict portraying the stronger party as engaging in self-blame. In addition, the study found that tabloids extensively blame the adversary while broadsheets spread blame more evenly. The mediator’s media was found to adopt blame frames from the side with which it shares cultural proximity. We conclude by discussing the implications of such findings on journalism studies in asymmetric conflict situations.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Meira Ovadia for her dedicated work as our research assistant on this project and Dr. Yossi David, Dr. Jonathan Sobel, Dr. Christian Baden, Dr. Eran Amsalem and Prof. Zohar Kampf for their guidance and helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Materials from both Haaretz and Israel HaYom were taken from the original Hebrew editions.
2 Al-Quds is not a tabloid newspaper in the sense that Israel HaYom or USA Today conform to this newspaper type. In fact, upon interviewing Palestinian journalists, it became clear to us that there is no real tabloid newspaper tradition in Palestine. However, the newspaper Al-Quds does exhibit central elements of tabloid journalism, such as attempting to represent a core, ethnic "people", while engaging in public mobilization. Conversely, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida tends to represent an elitist perspective, conforming to the broadsheet format.
3 We originally included a third independent variable “specific blame agent”, which was coded as: journalist; quoted political official; quoted civilian; anonymous source; and oppositional political actor. However, as the small yield of each of these coding options provided a small yield, which did not provide adequate results, this variable was discarded.
4 The category “Israel and Palestine” only exists for blamed agents, rather than blaming agents, as there were no cases in which Israel and Palestine jointly attributed blame; however, there were cases in which both actors were blamed. An example of the American broadsheet (New York Times) attributing blame to both Israel and Palestine is as follows: “The peace talks, which began last summer, have been on the verge of collapse since late March, when Israel missed a deadline for releasing a fourth group of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinian side responded by applying to join 15 international treaties and conventions in defiance of Israel” (Kershner Citation2014). In this blame occurrence, each side is attributed with an action that contributed to the collapse of negotiations.
5 In an interview with a Palestinian journalist, in which we asked the journalist about this phenomenon, the journalist explained that, as the weaker party in the conflict, the Palestinian media translates and publishes full opinion pieces from the Israeli press which are critical of Israeli policy to illustrate to Palestinian society that Israeli society has significant self-doubt regarding government policies.