Losing the TV war
The skirmishes are still raging on the ground. But over media airways, the Palestinian Israeli contest has long been decided. Were it a boxing match the referees would have long called the mismatch off, scoring a technical KO.
Israel has been routed, and even the Israeli government is finally coming to realize that its defeat in the media battle may well be decisive to the ultimate outcome of its war.
There are many reasons for this daily thrashing on the world's screens. A major one emerges from the contrast between the striking invisibility of terror and the salience of daily images of Israeli military action.
This mismatch emerges from the fusion of the particular nature of this tragic violent conflict, and the fundamental conventions of TV coverage. Geopolitics and zeitgeist, even the purported anti-Israeli/Jewish prejudice of foreign journalists are secondary. So is the pathetic incompetence of the Israeli government in presenting its cause and selecting passable, let alone credible, spokespersons.
The media know that clashes are attention grabbers: Squaring-off turns audiences on. Contests draw attention, as family feuds, shouting contests at the office, or brawls on city streets daily demonstrate. Mass media build on our fascination with contest: the prime-time courtroom drama and Hardball, the Super Bowl and presidential debates.
Television also knows that violence is immensely, if perversely compelling. Ergo, the cocktail of contest and violence is a sure-fire television winner. The prime-time Westerns and war docu-dramas, The Exterminator and The Sopranos, are ample evidence.
One protagonist is the terrorist sporadically striking out of nowhere at vulnerable civilian populations; the other is a powerful organized army systematically confronting Palestinians as the terrorists vanishes into crowded urban habitats.
Television indeed gets repulsively exciting footage of one side of this satanic equation: impregnable tanks storming stone-throwing children, hellfiring helicopters targeting decrepit station wagons, young soldiers, armed to the teeth, confronting the elderly, the pregnant, the infant, at security checkpoints, too frequently with undue violence.
BUT ON the other side of the equation, when the terrorists play their hand, television is impotent: It can show no dramatic contest or realtime violence: Terrorists strike where they are least expected. Unlike tanks and infantry battalions, they cannot be identified, let alone filmed, until it's too late. The cameras get there only for the aftermath: ambulances, police and hospital spokesman. The available documentation of terrorist attacks, inevitably coming after the fact, cannot provide the drama of contest, the real-time eruption of violence.
The Israeli strategy of instantly removing all signs of the killings, and reestablishing a sense of control and normalcy, may be effective in counteracting the terrorists' goal of creating chaos and panic. In terms of media strategy, however, it backfires. Before long, television crews have nothing to show.
Israeli culture, through its reluctance to expose mutilated bodies, streams of blood, and horrified onlookers, also thwarts the kind of coverage which could generate empathy. Should it want - and it doesn't - Israel could attract television coverage if not by contest, then by sheer gore.
But local cultural conventions forbid visual representations of corporal atrocities, and reflect public respect to private grief.
There is an exception to this rule of terror's invisibility in the television drama of violent contest. On September 11, 2001, the entire world witnessed terrorists contesting American power, pride, and perseverance in real time, in frame by frame exposure exposure of the attack on the Twin Towers. But that was an anomaly. Whether or not Osama bin Laden intentionally timed the attack on the second tower for the benefit of the cameras, they were there for the impact. And the whole world was watching.
Must Israel lose the television-led opinion battle? Yes, if factoring in the inherent biases of TV coverage, and the foreign correspondents docile obedience to Palestinian dictates backed by threats.
But maybe not, if the spread of television-blind terrorists from Iraq, and Israel to Istanbul, London, Paris and Osh Kosh makes international television professionals realize that the violent contest, invisible in their medium, threatens the life, liberty and happiness of them and theirs, and learn how to balance this ungainly media act.
Tamar Liebes is chair of the department of communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Menahem Blondheim is the head of the Hebrew University's Smart Family Communications Institute.
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