Israel-Hezbollah Conflict

Most newspaper stories during the 2o06 Israel-Hezbollah war used Israeli sources more often for quotes and attributions, a new study has found. The overall coverage of the fighting sides (Israel and Hezbollah) was highly critical of both, although Israel received more sympathetic coverage than Hezbollah. An overwhelming majority of articles (55 per cent) explicitly blamed Hezbollah for starting or...

The victims of last year's war between Hezbollah and Israel –on both sides– were treated as statistics not people. Although human victims of the war were mentioned in one out of every five articles, they were mostly covered as mere facts and figures. Almost 91 per cent of the articles covered killed and wounded civilians in a very or somewhat impersonal manner, a new study has found. Civilian...

In retrospect, it should have been a given that Hizbullah would be capable of claiming “media superiority” and strength following the last war between Israel and Lebanon. However, various media sources were forced to jump at every opportunity to get information regarding Hizbullah leaders and the group’s political stand, after extended periods of silence on the part of Hassan Nasrallah and...

BEIRUT: It's been said that the vibrancy of a city's media culture is a good indication of that city's quality of life. A metropolis with a lot of magazines is a metropolis with a lot going on. If one were to survey the newsstands in Beirut earlier this summer, one would have been impressed with the number of new and established titles on display - a spate of fashion rags, business journals and...

There is an Arabic TV channel dying to keep alive the debate on “mughamaraat” (adventures). Since the crippled cease-fire in Lebanon, there is a concerted attempt (otherwise, why are the viewers strangled with monotony?) to discredit the resistance fighters. So the “experts” are logging in many many-hours to prove to the Muslim public (which is no more for sale) that it was the unwarranted risk...

Eight prominent journalists convened in a town hall meeting at the Jerusalem YMCA Monday night in the first public forum seriously tackling some of the most difficult questions that have arisen over the media's coverage of the second Lebanon War. Bluntly responding to the interrogations of Media Line Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Harris, the journalists, including Steven Erlanger of The New York...

The Arab world tuned into the events in Lebanon in July, and Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV station was one of the main beneficiaries, according to ratings released by Ipsos-Stat. As detailed in the Mena Report, a publication of the Al Bawaba Media and Technology group, the biggest surprise in the ratings, measured between July 15 and 28, during the war in Lebanon, was the emergence of Al-Manar as the No...

A month before the war in Lebanon broke out, the Al Jazeera channel began filming documentary programs, which have not yet been broadcast, about life in Israel and, among other things, the Hebrew press. In an interview that a reporter for the channel conducted with me, she read out questions that had been dictated by the office in Amman and the editorial desk in Qatar. I told her the Israeli press...

Managing Director of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) Ahmad Khademolmelleh here Wednesday said that besides fighting in the military front, Lebanon was involved in a media war directed by the US. He made the remark at the inaugural ceremony of a photo exhibition, called 'Lebanon, Epic of Victory' at the School of Media Studies, which was attended by Lebanese Ambassador to Tehran Adnan...

If these were normal times, the American view of the conflict in Lebanon might look something like the street scenes that have electrified the suburbs of Detroit for the past four weeks. In Dearborn, home to the Ford Motor Co. and the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, up to 1,000 people have turned out day after day to express their outrage at the Israeli military campaign...