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Abstract
This article examines the strategies and practices by which the Israeli news media negotiated and (re)appropriated a Lebanese documentary that was produced in cooperation with a French company and was purchased and broadcast by an Israeli commercial channel. Using this transnational textual event, the article explores the dynamics, opportunities and pitfalls associated with transcultural exchanges that take place in a conflictual, translocal context, and the ways in which such exchanges are shaped by an interplay of material-institutional and discursive-symbolic dimensions. The article also provides a multi-layered framework for analyzing the broadcasting and journalistic practices surrounding such textual events, and establishes the relationship between appropriation and witnessing strategies. I show how the Israeli media—driven by commercial interests and applying complex forms of witnessing and appropriation—worked to sustain national myths and suppress the potentially disruptive aspects of the documentary, while at the same time exposing the weaknesses of these myths, as well as the limits of the State's power. Emerging from this case study is a complex picture of the multifaceted roles played by national news media in a transnational economy, and of the ways in which commercial media interests serve as both hegemonic and disruptive forces within the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Marwan Kraidy, Barbie Zelizer, Oren Livio and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Notes
1. The documentary had at least four different names they were used by the different parties involved in its production and distribution. They demonstrate the ways in which the movie was “sold” to different audiences, as well as the negotiations over its meaning. On LBC, the documentary was broadcast under the name “The Big Swap Deal;” on the Israeli Channel 10 it was interchangeably called “The Kidnapped” and “The Price of Freedom;” and the French company Article Z publicized the documentary under the most neutral name: “Israel/Hezbollah: The Exchange” (in avenues like its movie catalogue and television festivals). Given the multiple names, I chose to refer to the movie throughout the paper as “The LBC documentary.” In addition to the video images of Arad, the documentary included newly surfaced footage of the capture of three Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah in October 2000, and a combination of voice-over narration and interviews with Israelis and Lebanese—including prisoners, former prisoners, and their families—about the history of kidnappings of Israelis and Lebanese and about the events and negotiations that led up to the prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hizbullah in January 2004.
2. Marwan M. Kraidy and Patrick D. Murphy, “Media Ethnography: Local, Global, or Tanslocal?” in Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan M. Kraidy (New York: Routledge, 2003), 299–307; “Shifting Geertz: Toward a Theory of Translocalism in Global Communication Studies,” Communication Theory 18, no. 3 (2008): 335–55.
3. See, in particular, the conceptualization of “critical transculturalism” in Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 148–61; and of “transculturation” as a category of cultural appropriation in Richard A. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation,” Communication Theory 16, no. 4 (2006): 474–503.
4. Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2000), 86.
5. Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2000), 86.
6. The news videos were obtained from three online video archives: The University of Wisconsin NewsLab http://www.israelnews.wisc.edu/ (accessed 26 January 2007); The MSN video archive http://msnvideo.msn.co.il/video/ (accessed 26 January 2007); and the Nana news video archive http://news.nana.co.il/ (accessed 26 January 2007).
7. Internet items were gathered through a combination of an internal search in the central Israeli news websites, and searching for “LBC” and “Arad” on the Israeli Google site, http://www.google.co.il/ (accessed 26 January 2007).
8. Elihu Katz, “And Deliver Us from Segmentation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (1996): 22–33.
9. See Noam Yuran, Channel 2: The New Statehood (Tel-Aviv, Israel: Resling, 2001) [in Hebrew].
10. Rotem Kalina, “A Matter of Time,” NRG-Ma'ariv, 29 August 2006, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/4/ART1/471/688.html (accessed 26 January 2007) [in Hebrew].
11. Yael Gaoni, “Channel 10 Pays $200,000 for Ron Arad Documentary,” Globes, 5 September 2006, LexisNexis (accessed 16 February 2007); Yoav Stern and Assaf Carmel, “The Movie Featuring Ron Arad will Air Today in Lebanon and on Channel 10,” Ha'aretz, 5 September 2006, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo=758799 (accessed 22 February 2007) [in Hebrew].
12. Quoted in Rotem Kalina, “I Chose Channel 10 Because I Got the Impression that It Advances the Dialogue Between Nations More than Channel 2,” NRG-Ma'ariv, 5 September 2006, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/4/ART1/474/792.html (accessed 26 January 2007) [in Hebrew]. Channel 10 is often perceived as more left-leaning than Channel 2, or at least as more critical of the government. This was particularly true during the 2006 Lebanon war, when Channel 10 presented a much more critical perspective on the war than Channel 2. See Keshev—The Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, War Till the Last Minute: The Israeli Media in The Second Lebanon War, July 2007, http://www.keshev.org.il/FileUpload/KESHEV-ENGLISH-ABSTRACT-LEBANON-WAR-JULY-2007.pdf (accessed 15 February 2008).
13. Roni Koren-Dinar, “10 News Broadcast the Film with Ron Arad—and for the First Time Surpassed Channel's 2 News in Ratings,” The Marker, 5 September 2006, http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?log=tag&ElementId=rkd20060906_0434 (accessed 23 February 2207) [in Hebrew].
14. Israel Audience Research Board, “Television program ratings: 9/3/2006-9/9/2006,” http://www.midrug-tv.org.il/scripts/rating10.asp (accessed 22 February 2007).
15. Marwan M. Kraidy, “Broadcasting Regulation and Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 42, no. 3 (1998): 387–400; Hybridity, 116–47.
16. Douglas A. Boyd, “Lebanese Broadcasting: Unofficial Electronic Media during a Prolonged Civil War,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 35, no. 3 (1991): 269–87; Kraidy, “Broadcasting Regulation and Civil Society in Postwar Lebanon.”
17. On the Saudi involvement in LBC, see Marwan M. Kraidy, Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81–90.
18. The documentary was broadcast on LBC in primetime and generated some discussion in the Lebanese and Arab press, but in general, the documentary was not given nearly as much attention and prominence as it received in Israel.
19. CNN, “Your World Today,” CNN, 30 August 2006, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/30/ ywt.01.html (accessed 25 February 2007).
20. CNN, “Your World Today,” CNN, 30 August 2006, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/30/ ywt.01.html (accessed 25 February 2007). While Ibrahim Al-Amin also brought the Arad footage to LBC (according to Pierre el-Daher), it is not known whether Hizbullah is the source of this recording, because the video dates from the period when Arad was still in the hands of Amal, a Lebanese Shiite organization led by Nabih Berri. The documentary states that the Arad video was obtained in “unique and very sensitive circumstances.” All parties connected to the production insisted that they had no knowledge as to the source of the video.
21. Marwan M. Kraidy, “On Media and States: Roles, Norms, and Power in Global Communication Studies” (paper presented at the Annenberg Colloquium Series, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 27 February 2007).
22. Marwan M. Kraidy, “On Media and States: Roles, Norms, and Power in Global Communication Studies” (paper presented at the Annenberg Colloquium Series, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 27 February 2007).
23. Tamar Ashuri, “Television Tension: National Versus Cosmopolitan Memory in Co-Produced Television Documentary,” Media, Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2007): 34.
24. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005).
25. Kraidy, Hybridity, 101–3; See also Silvio Waisbord, “McTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats,” Television and New Media 5, no. 4 (2004): 359–83.
26. Tamar Ashuri, “The Nation Remembers: National Identity and Shared Memory in Television Documentaries,” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 3 (2005): 423–42; “Television Tension,” 31–5.
27. Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104.
28. Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 111.
29. Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), 31 August 2006, television promotion, emphasis mine.
30. Ruthy Russo, “Don't Be Optimistic,” Ma'ariv, 30 August 2006, A4 [in Hebrew].
31. Stern and Carmel, “The Movie Featuring Ron Arad will Air Today in Lebanon and on Channel 10.”
32. Hoskins et al., Global Television and Film, 104.
33. See Elizabeth Bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News,” in Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, ed. James W. Carey (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988), 67–86; James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Jack Lule, Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001).
34. For studies that examine the mythic dimensions of the media coverage of hostages’ stories see Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, “Fighting for the Story's Life: Non-Closure in Journalistic Narrative,” Journalism 9, no. 1 (2008): 31–51; Graham Knight and Tony Dean, “Myth and the Structure of News,” Journal of Communication 32 (1982): 144–61; John Shelton Lawrence and Bernard Timberg, “News and Mythic Selectivity: Mayaguez,. Entebbe, Mogadishu,” Journal of American Culture 2 (1979): 321–30; Catherine V. Scott, “Bound for Glory: The Hostage Crisis as Captivity Narrative in Iran,” International Studies Quarterly 4, no. 1 (2000): 177–88; Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
35. See Tamar Katriel, “The Rhetoric of Rescue: ‘Salvage Immigration’ Narratives in Israeli Culture,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra'anan Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Danny Kaplan, “Commemorating a Suspended Death: Missing Soldiers and National Solidarity in Israel,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 3 (2008): 413–27; Selwyn Ilan Troen, “Organizing the Rescue of Jews in the Modern Period,” in Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, ed. Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 3–19.
36. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, “Fighting for the Story's Life.”
37. Carey, Communication as Culture.
38. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000); Paul Frosh, “Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 265–84; Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, ed., Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 707–23; Courting the Abyss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Carrie A. Rentschler, “Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering,” Media, Culture & Society 26, no. 2 (2004): 296–304; Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); “Photography, Journalism and Trauma,” in Journalism after September 11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48–68. The tight relationships among witnessing, visuality/video clips, and global culture can also be seen in the centrality of the notion of witnessing in global video activism, most notably the activities of the human rights organization WITNESS (www.witness.org), whose motto is “See it. Film it. Change it.”
39. Ellis, Seeing Things.
40. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 10.
41. “A Testimony from Captivity,” Ma'ariv, 29 August 2006, 1. Witnessing from captivity is viewed as a particularly powerful form of witnessing. “Prison is the house of witness,” states Peters, “those who have languished in captivity stand as witnesses against inhumanity and gain political and moral stature” (Courting the Abyss, 257). In Latin America, for example, the tradition of Testimonio has been closely associated in recent decades with stories of people who suffered in captivity, such as the Desaparecidos of Argentina (e.g., Nora Strejilevich, A Single Numberless Death [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002]), or the Farc hostages in Colombia (e.g., Clara Rojas, Cautiva: Testimonio de un Secuestro [Bogota', Colombia: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2009]).
42. Channel 10 Nightly News, Channel 10, Israel, 5 September 2006, television newscast, emphasis mine.
43. Peters, “Witnessing,” 719–21.
44. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation,” 477–97.
45. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation,” 491.
46. Dvorit Shargal, “A Minute to Midnight,” The Marker Blogs—Velvet Underground, 6 September 2006, http://themarkerblogs.com/velvet/?p=59 (accessed 23 February 2007) [in Hebrew].
47. According to the “psychological warfare” interpretation, the movie was a means to exert pressure on Israel in order to advance a prisoner exchange deal. It should be noted, however, that the production of the movie had started long before the July 2006 abductions.
48. Posted 5 September 2006. Original post can be found at: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3299742,00.html (accessed 22 February 2007).
49. See Ayelet Kohn and Motti Neiger, “To Talk and to Talkback: The Rhetoric of the Talk-Back in Israeli Online Newspapers,” in Journalism Dot Com: On Line Newspapers in Israel, ed. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler (Jerusalem: The Israeli Democratic Institute and Ben-Gurion University, 2007), 321–50.
50. In 2006, Hot, the cable company, offered LBC-Sat as part of its basic cable package. Yes, the satellite company, offered LBC-Sat as part of an Arab-speaking package, which cost about $2 per month. Significantly, Channel 10 was also available only on cable or satellite (it was not broadcast terrestrially), so Israelis who were not cable or satellite subscribers could not watch the documentary on Channel 10.
51. Channel 2 Nightly News, Channel 2, Israel, 31 August 2006, television newscast, emphases mine.
52. Quoted in Assaf Carmel and Yoav Stern, “Channel 10 to Air Unseen Video of Missing IAF Airman Ron Arad,” Ha'aretz, 4 September 2006, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/758642.html (accessed 22 Febuary 2007) [in Hebrew].
53. Or Barnea, “LBC Channel will be Shut Off during the Broadcast of the Movie on Ron Arad,” Ynet, 5 September 2006, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3300165,00.html (accessed 23 February 2207) [in Hebrew].
54. The bodies of the two soldiers were eventually returned to Israel in July 2008 as part of an exchange deal with Hizbullah.
55. “Is this Ron?” Yedioth Ahronoth, 29 August 2006, 1; “Truth or Fake?” Ma'ariv, 29 August 2006, 2; and “Israel Examining Veracity of New Footage Showing Missing IAF Airman Ron Arad,” Ha'aretz, 29 August 2006, A1.
56. Yossi Melman, “Israel Examining Veracity of New Footage Showing Missing IAF Airman Ron Arad,” Ha'aretz, 29 August 2006, A1 [in Hebrew].
57. Peters, “Witnessing,” 710–17.
58. Channel 10 Nightly News, Channel 10, Israel, 5 September 2006, television newscast, emphases mine.
59. Mordechai Haimovitch, “Splinters of Israeliness,” Ma'ariv, 7 September 2006, A2 [in Hebrew].
60. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 194.
61. Ellis, Seeing Things; Peters, “Witnessing;” Zelizer, Remembering to Forget.
62. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).
63. In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I am related to this former captive and lobbied for his release during the time of his captivity.
64. Channel 10 Nightly News, Channel 10, Israel, 6 September 2006, television newscast.
65. Ellis, Seeing Things, 13.
66. Ellis, Seeing Things, 12.
67. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 79.
68. See, for example, Daniel Dor, Intifada Hits the Headlines: How the Israeli Press Misreported the Outbreak of the Second Palestinian Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Anat First, “Who is the Enemy? The Portrayal of Arabs in Israeli Television News,” Gazette 60, no. 3 (1998): 239–51; Tamar Liebes, Reporting the Arab-Israeli Conflict: How Hegemony Works (London: Routledge, 1997); Gadi Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
69. Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
70. See Zelizer, “Photography, Journalism and Trauma.”
71. See, for example, Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Yael Zerubavel, “Patriotic Sacrifice and the Burden of Memory in Israeli Secular National Hebrew Culture,” in Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Ussama Samir Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 73–102.
72. For the three meanings of “witness,” which correspond to the three points in the basic communication triangle, see Peters, “Witnessing,” 709.
73. As such, the framework developed in this study is consistent with and extends Paul Frosh's conceptualization of bearing witness as “an act performed not by a witness but by a witnessing text” (“Telling Presences,” 274), and his view of organizations—rather than only individuals—as legitimate witnessing agents (For the three meanings of “witness,” which correspond to the three points in the basic communication triangle, see Peters, “Witnessing, 276–7).
74. Peters, “Witnessing,” 710.
75. Kraidy, Hybridity, 149.