Philo provides some insights on how news coverage of Israeli-Palestinian events are carefully framed and interpreted to shape the views of the British public. Of course, the methods are the same as used in the US and Canada.
The journalists are under tremendous pressure to not criticise Israel. As soon as they start to criticise Israel from the Palestinian point of view they get into all sorts of problems. If they do that it’s very difficult. So what they tend to do is to stay on the strongest ground, or what they see as the strongest ground, which is civilian casualties. They would show lots of Palestinian civilian casualties and that would be their version of the Palestinian side and against that they would give the Israeli point of view of why it was all happening. And of course that means that people in a sense become inured to the casualties and say, ‘Oh yes it’s sad isn’t it, but if only the Palestinians would stop starting the trouble’.
