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Dr. Luke Peterson |
November 2014 will see the publication of a new book by UCIS Visiting Professor in Contemporary International Affairs Luke Peterson. Palestine-Israel in the Print News Media: Contending Discourses appears in the Routledge Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict. We offer Global Studies colleagues and students an excerpt from its opening pages:
…To put it concisely, this study constitutes an investigation into the print news media discourse on Palestine-Israel in the United States and Great Britain. I offer a comparison of the variances of representation present in the news media institutions located in each of these two national news media communities. Through this process I seek to identify ideological focus and even political orientation present in the two news media institutions. This study undertakes this comparison with an eye toward the connections between language and thought, and the various ways in which print news media language plays a role in the development of knowledge in two contemporary societies.
Conclusions in this book speculate as to the boundaries of the available authoritative knowledge on Palestine-Israel within the United States and Great Britain, suggesting how individual and collective perceptions of the conflict may be formulated in distinct ways in each of these two locales. Given that epistemological developments and discursive constructions within any contemporary society are necessarily ephemeral, however, these conclusions can only hope to be snapshots of language, thought, politics, and place. Nevertheless, it is this author’s hope that these conclusions and the methods by which they are reached are as noteworthy as they are informative. It is my further hope that the patterns of language and knowledge here described provide insight into the construction and application of language, into patterns of coverage within the print news media, and into the development of knowledge about Palestine-Israel within two contemporary news media communities.
My background is as a student of the history as well as the contemporary social and political circumstances in Palestine-Israel. As such, I have travelled to, lived in, researched in, and explored both sides of the line in this divisive conflict. As an American citizen, I have also sought out information on the region from major news media sources in my home country. As a doctoral student in the United Kingdom (and as the son of an English mother), I have likewise engaged in this pursuit in England, where I sit now as I compose this work. And from within these multiple venues of scholarly investigation into Palestine-Israel, differences in tone, text, perspective, and presumption in the language used to describe the conflict in the pages of the authoritative newspapers distributed throughout each country became increasingly apparent. Those differences did not strike me as surprising within the media products of Palestine or of Israel; each side of a political conflict has always sustained its own narrative. But those differences that appeared between news media publications from within Great Britain and the United States seemed to me to be especially noteworthy.
Upon further investigation into these sources, I worked to apply a quantitative methodology in this investigation for the purposes of scholarly objectivity, but I could never fully retreat from my qualitative roots either (the result of this prolonged internal debate was the formulation of the hybrid investigational methodology that appears in this book’s case study chapters). Throughout all of these investigations however, what lay at the heart of the questions I was asking was the concept of discourse and its manifestation in the print news media of two distinct national news media communities. The resulting study, therefore, provides a comparative sketch of the boundaries of that discourse, and offers speculations as to its impact on the formation of knowledge on Palestine-Israel within the United States and Great Britain.
This study has a cognitive aspect as well, offering a brief and speculative assessment of the effect of language in the news media upon the development of public knowledge about Palestine-Israel. This aspect appears in this project because it is not simply the presentation of events in two national media institutions that is of concern here, but also their interpretation and absorption into the communities in which they circulate. That is, it is not only the words on the page and their arrangement in a news media publication that is of interest, but also the potential thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, and actions that those words and presentations engender…