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Abstract
This article measures the relative attention given to Israel and Palestine in 37 leading news sites in 10 languages over two years. Findings clearly show that the Palestinian entities and Israel are the world’s most prominent polities after the United States in top news stories of international online coverage. Most news attention is given by Middle Eastern news sites, and only then by European and American news sites. During periods that attention to Israel decreases, attention to China increases. After presenting these rather surprising findings, the study considers a number of directions for interpreting them.
Notes
1. The Palestinian Authority is not strictly a country, and the study also includes the United Nations and the European Union.
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). For Palestine we used “Gaza” and “West Bank” as possible synonyms. This list was translated into the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
5. This reliance on the veteran conflict may account for Friedman’s initial discussion of the dramatic upheaval in Egypt as a mere backdrop for developments in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict: “B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt.” New York Times, February 1, 2011.