The footprint of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in online world news: The puzzle of salience

Abstract

This study measures the presence of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in online news worldwide. Employing the authors' “Global Salience Meter” – a novel multilingual news-mining technique, based on proprietary software – the relative prominence of news stories involving Israel and Palestine was traced over a six-month period in the course of 2009 in 35 leading news sites in 10 languages. The findings show that both polities are among the most prominent entities in international news coverage online, mentioned more frequently than world powers such as Russia, Germany, France, and Japan. The study also evaluates the extent of documented linkage of the conflict to the US in the different language groups. The study concludes by pointing out two directions for interpreting the surprisingly high prominence of the conflict in world news: journalism studies and its traditions of assigning news value; and cultural and religious studies which may help explain the particular resonance of this conflict, its protagonists, and its venue to the sensibilities of news organizations and perhaps news consumers the world over.

Keywords:

• globalization
• asymmetric conflict
• political violence

Acknowledgements

We would like to convey our gratitude to the Lady Davis Fellowship for supporting this research. Endless thanks to Regula Miesch for her painstaking and professional translation and her continuous help to build the multilingual database. Many thanks also to Charonne Kang, Lars Vogtmann Sørensen, Yunhua Zhai, and Masako Yamaguchi, who helped to build the multilingual database. Finally, very warm thanks to the Ronald Coase Institute and the participants of the 2009 Xiamen Workshop for their excellent feedback and useful suggestions to make ideas crystal clear.

Notes

1. The Palestinian Authority is not strictly a country, and the study also includes the UN and the EU.

2. The popularity of news sites was determined by cross referencing of several indicators and sources, including the recent statistics provided by the World Association of Newspapers ( http://www.wan-press.org/worldpresstrends/articles.php?id=18), the State of the News Media in 2008 ( http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/narrative_yearinnews_online.php?cat=2&media=2), Nielsen online ( http://www.nielsen-online.com), IVW (Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern e.V.), news rating surveys in Russia ( http://www.superjob.ru/research/articles/613/), BBC News ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5334828.stm) and direct surveys among media scholars from different countries. The list of popular news site was further supported and validated by online tools such as Alexa, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search.

3. Google News did not include special Egyptian or Iranian editions in the course of our study, but we used its Arabic edition as well as Al Jazeera as more general and popular news sources in the Arab world.

4. Based on the most complete list of country names available from ISO (International Organization for Standardization). This list was translated into the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew.

5. i is country indicator. The SI of a county reflects only news items from other countries and not news items from its own news sites.

6. Population figures are based on data from the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/wpp2008_text_tables.pdf.

7. GNP rankings are based on the World Economic Outlook Database of the International Monetary Fund: http://www.imf.org/external/data.htm.