Our group decided to examine how one news article from the Associated Press is plagiarized by other news outlets and even altered to fit the views of these outlets. The outlets we chose to compare are Fox News website, ABC News website, Y News.net and Act for America (a website).
Fox News:
Associated Press:
By: IAN DEITCH
Original Associated Press Headline: Israeli Gives Army Green Light to Stop Gaza Rockets
NOTE: The link to the article posted on the Associated Press website is for some reason no longer valid and although we searched for it in their archives as well as under the author in Google, we were unable to access it.
Fox Headline: Israel Gives Army Green Light to Stop Gaza Rockets, Orders New Jerusalem Housing
Upon examination of Fox’s “mirror” of the original article written in the Associated Press by Ian Deitch, its bias is clear in the way that it portrays Israel in a positive light. It communicates the message that Israel was being unjustly attacked by Palestinian militants thereby naturally causing them to be on the defensive.
The article starts off cryptically describing how Israel has authorized it’s army to counter strikes against enemy rocket fire from Gaza. It then goes into how the issue was being resolved, by only acknowledging the Israeli side of the issue. There is clearly a reason why Palestinians were attacking the Israelis, but the AP article doesn’t even mention this issue until towards the end of the article and the Fox article truncates it all together, excluding the details about the Israeli construction. The article builds its audience up in favor of the Israelis in the beginning by very clearly explaining how they are defending themselves in order to lessen the effect of the original reason the Palestinians attacked, which was “...an order for the accelerated construction of over 2,000 new apartments in east Jerusalem, an area claimed by the Palestinians as their capital, an nearby West Bank Settlements.” The article from Fox news is eleven lines or five paragraphs shorter than the original article by the Associated Press. In Fox’s version of the article, they make it seem that the Israelis were building settlements which angered the Palestinians into rocket fire. In The Associated Press’ version, the rocket fire wasn’t condemned because of Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians prior to building settlements.
Even though the Associated Press seems to have a more balanced stance on the issue, they still do not give any relevant information to support the Palestinians until the very end, almost forcing the reader into taking sides before the other side can even be introduced. If the entire article is taken into account, the article is rather balanced compared to the Fox version of the article, but these things are not immediately made clear in the article, rather reading deeper into the text they can be understood. So, even when the Palestinian viewpoint gets included it is obscured behind strange wording and unclear definitions. I had to go searching the web for several definitions while reading through the last bit of the article so I could fully grasp what was actually going on. After doing so I roughly found out that Palestine was recently accepted into a part of the UN that tries to promote peace. When the issue of peace talks between Israel and Palestine was addressed neither side was giving any ground to allow the peace talks to occur. The Palestinians want the construction of Israeli settlements to end until borders are clearly defined, but Israelis refuse to freeze construction due to construction already being approved and it now being a part of the private sector.
More on the Associated Press:
I was wondering why the exact same article was published in each outlet as either under Ian Deitch’s name or under the Associated Press. I could not find any specific information about Ian Deitch, but did a little research on the Associated Press. The Associated Press is an American news agency cooperatively owned by members of American newspapers and television stations throughout the United States. These companies can use stories written by journalists in their own publications. News reports, such as the Ian Deitch article, are granted permission to be distributed to other news outlets.
I have heard of the Associated Press before but do not know much about it, and I have never seen its product distributed as it was with the Palestinian article we chose.
It is interesting to note that while the AP claims to be unbiased, it is owned by a large conglomerate of media groups. The board of directors is chosen by the leaders of the many different media groups and in effect forces a bias out of the organization. With all of the major media groups being funded by private interests there is no way that the entire organization cannot be influenced by these interests, giving rise to intrinsic bias. Although the organization carries bias within itself, it does seem to make a decent attempt to at least look unbiased, since the article contained a footnote mentioning that the article was co-written by several different writers in their respective area of residence immediately related to where the events in this article occurred, thereby portraying unbiased news.
ABC News:
ABC News is a very popular and well-known news outlet to many people with many programs branching from it, such as Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America, and World News. It is obviously a very influential news outlet that is on top of the current news and happenings with a clear stand on a subject. ABC News is a website that has the latest breaking news, headlines, and offers many exclusive interviews. Not only does ABC News cover breaking news, it is also a prime time network with some of the top television shows.
One picture in this outlet was of a father viewing his son’s body in a morgue who was killed in an Israeli airstrike. The caption under the photo read :“Rawdi Abdo, the father of Al-Ansar brigade militant Yousef Abu Abdo who was killed in an Israeli airstrike early Monday, reacts as he views his son’s body at the morgue of Nasser hospital in Han Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 31, 2011. Israeli aircraft struck the southern Gaza Strip targeting rocket-launching militants, the Palestinian military officials reported that two men were found dead in the area.”
Another picture on the second page of the article was of two men running for safety as an alarm went off to sound incoming rockets. The surroundings seem to be in a fairly nice and safe area and the two men are well dressed in a suit or shirt and pants. I cannot be one hundred percent sure, but it almost looks as though there is a damaged white minivan or some sort of vehicle in the background.
As far as the rest of the ABC website is concerned, there were advertisements for other ABC news and articles with links to other popular and recent new stories and videos. Other then that, there were no outside advertisements. However, the second time I visited the site, there was an advertisement for a coffee place and very small links to other international news. There were quite a few different places with links to Facebook or Twitter, so you could retweet the article or share it on Facebook. Other side ads were of other news anchors and what they suggested for reading on the website, as well as “must read” articles and other breaking news.
Although this was the exact same article and author that was found in every other outlet we came across in our research, there were some minor differences in the articles, but those differences spoke volumes because they communicated the bias of Israeli support or Palestinian support. For example, it provided an Israeli-based summary of the topic with sources directly from the Israeli government and military. The article also showed a brief history of the other recent events regarding the Israeli government.
There were three additional reporters named: Aya Batrawry (Cairo), Ibrahim Barzak (Gaza City), and Ilana Curiel (location undisclosed), as contributing reporters.
The one comment written by someone who read the article on this website stated that this is yet another article saying there have been attacks and that such articles are common and, therefore, not a breaking news headline. The person commenting was clearly against the bias of the article because they claimed that very few Israelis have been killed by the attacks in the past ten years, and that we need to be worrying about Israeli offensives.
Ynet News:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4142646,00.htmlYnetnews
Ynet News source is part of the Yedioth Media Group, which publishes Israel’s most read newspaper. Yedioth Group owns stock in not only TV Channels, but a Cable TV company, local newspapers and magazines, and even companies outside the media market. The site seemed very well organized but inexpensive looking compared with the very decorative, High Definition United States news’ web pages. The article truly only filled half the visible page, the other half was filled with advertisements for Rosetta Stone, Intelligence Studies, Qwest Wireless Internet, Google Chrome, Cramster, and American Public University. This is quite a range of advertisers so this site could be aiming for a wide range of demographics. Because many of the advertisements are dealing with education and Internet it sways me to think the demographics would be younger viewers, ages 17-35.
Ynetnews.com was established in 2005, with of course, the same goal as countless others, to provide the surrounding community and worldwide readers with ground breaking news. Despite their goal, Ynet News has not offered an unbiased story for its readers. Throughout the article Israel was the one on top, doing nothing but good. It constantly brings up how Israel was just acting in defense towards Palestine. The article urges the Israelis that we “must protect our security.” The view of Israel being the victim was reinforced with two pictures: one of Ashdod under fire and the other displaying the damage in Gan Yavne. These two photos were placed beside this article to visually increase sympathy for Israel and blood-thirst for Palestine.
The website gave credit to the Associated Press for the article but did not list Ian Deitch as author. Instead, it listed Ilana Curiel for contributing to the report. Whoever the author was chose quotes that would only push readers to lean in the favor of Israel. Since this article is being published on one of Israel’s top read websites flak comes into play because the government will want only the things it thinks is “right” to be seen by the public. The Yedioth Media Group has been known to slant readers view on certain people, by editing or even leaving out articles and videos that would give readers a positive opinion towards one party. This is flak at its best. In fact, an entire paragraph was omitted from the original article in this outlet:
“In another development, Israel announced late Tuesday that it has ordered accelerated construction for Israelis in east Jerusalem, the section claimed by the Palestinians as their capital, and nearby West Bank settlements.” This is quite crucial, as it is the very reason for the rocket fire in the first place.
The most interesting part about this article was the comments it generated. The most current comments were very ruthless saying to “show no mercy” and make Palestine a “pile of rubble.” As you scroll down the comments, they start to balance out with comments that blame Israel for the entire situation in the first place. The article may not have portrayed or supported the side of the Palestinians but the comments sure spoke great opinion. Even with the view of both the comments and article, it is still up to us to decide which we believe is the “truth.” We must do research of our own and gather information in order to form a “true” opinion. The wealthy and political people of this world may be able to surround us with bias news that is circulated over large areas, but if the people work together or even on an individual level, we have the human right to decide what we believe for ourselves and to discover where the truth actually lies.
Act For America:
http://www.actforamericaeducation.com/blog/2383-israel-army-has-green-to-stop-gaza-rockets-
Act for America is the outlet I chose for analysis. It was founded by Brigitte Gabriel who is a Lebanese immigrant who “came to the United States after losing her country of birth to militant Muslim fundamentalists during the Lebanese Civil War.” This statement alone gives away the position of this website immediately as one which is clearly biased towards the viewpoints of Israel and the United States. This was very surprising to me because the founder of Act for America is Arab and from a country which is close to Palestine. One would think she would be taking the side of her fellow Arabs if not Muslims.
On this website, the article from the Associated Press is incomplete. Parts of it are omitted and some statements are even added. For example In this article, regarding the Israeli philosophy on security, it adds the statement: “Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel’s position has not changed.” It adds four short paragraphs that was not included in the ABC news version of the article:
the website has many links such as: American Congress for Truth Media Monitoring Guide: Click here to download guide
How to be an effective Citizen Media Monitor:
This link is about combating media which is politically correct towards mainstream Islam. It basically states that while there are peaceful Muslims, the religion itself is not peaceful. To this statement, I say that most religions are not completely peaceful if taken literally. The media link also says that Americans should not buy the rhetoric that Islam is a peaceful religion which was high jacked by a few extremists because this makes it a dangerous message. It states that organizations such as CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) contribute to this rhetoric. I have been personal friends for over 18 years with two of the founders of CAIR: Nihad Awad (a kind and gentle Palestinian man married to a wonderful and highly intelligent woman, Emily, who converted to Islam) and Ibrahim Hooper (a white American Muslim convert married to Rhonda, an African American Muslim convert), all from Minnesota. They would never think of carrying out a violent act and are very quick to admonish any such acts.
The long time efforts of CAIR have assisted Muslims when being harassed in the workplace or elsewhere as well as assisting victims of hate crimes against Muslims. They were a key player against Florida pastor Terry Jones when he was threatening to burn Qur’ans as a sign against Islam.
According to the Act for America website, CAIR is contributing to the power of Jihadist movements by sugar coating the details and refusing to call a terrorist act a terrorist act. This media link is designed to point out examples of the mainstream media being specific and cautious regarding details of any act carried out by Muslims in order not to label them terrorism. Act for America is against this because they feel that it empowers Muslim extremists. It calls for mainstream Muslims to reel in the teachings of Islamic doctrine in order to prevent further extremism from sprouting up.
Connections between the different outlets:
Between these articles, the Israeli side is much more heavily defended. As a group the
Israeli death toll has been recorded in almost all of these articles, although the Palestinian death toll has been largely left out. Between the AP and all the different news outlet portrayasl of the article it has clearly been systematically shaded to favor the side of the Israelis. The article also tends to only get the opinions of the Israeli officials, rather than the opinion of both sides. It is unclear whether or not the Palestinian leaders were asked for their side of the story, other than the Egyptian ambassador,Yasser Othman, who claims that “ In the past few hours Egypt saved Gaza from severe destruction and succeeded in securing Israeli restraint to give Egyptians time to reach a cease-fire agreement with Palestinian factions.” The article makes no mention of Palestinian officials refusing to comment, so it is very probable that such officials were not even contacted.
In this article, a typical journalistic approach called the “Inverted pyramid” is utilized.This means that the article is written so that what is considered to be the most important information is placed at the beginning of the article and that the less important details are included towards the end so that media outlets can omit this information if they wish. This is what happened in the Fox, Ynet News, and Act for America outlets’ reporting. If we examine this approach regarding this article, it is clear that the Associated Press deems the Palestinian viewpoint as much less important because it only turns up at the very end of the article. Why rocket attacks against Israel occurred in the first place is not even touched upon in this article until the very end, when many different media groups had edited, or truncated the information contained. It shows that in many western societies, Palestinian agency is very underrepresented in the media.
The ruling class owns all of the news outlets associated with AP, even though AP claims to be an unbiased news outlet which is cooperatively owned and operated. How can it not be biased? Their board of directors are all presidents and CEO’s of large, for-profit outlets such as the Washington Post, Gannet Co., Inc., and New York Times Regional Media Group. These news outlets are clearly biased and therefore the board of directors of Associated Press who own such outlets are going to contribute a bias as well. AP states that they are not privately or government owned, but their board of directors sure are. It is really quite baffling how they can make these claims and expect to be taken seriously since not of the members of the board of directors is a CEO of an alternative news source.
Is there a reliable way to go about being informed by the news? Perhaps the alternative forms of these news stories and the real people behind them is the most reliable hope we have as citizens to get a glimpse of what really happens in the world. It is too bad that Chomsky and Hermann have not decided to re-write their book now that the everyone has internet access. Most of the news outlets are still biased online and offline, but there are more Facebook real accounts of what is happening. The Arab Spring has shown us this. Perhaps the best place to find the news is from sources who have, monetarily, nothing to gain or lose by conveying it.
Contributors:
Bethany Waldron
Danielle Streed
Amanda Hoefling
Mitchell Elsmore
I can't imagine a better issue, nor a harder one. In fact, I'd say there is NO 'unbiased' account of the Intifada and the occupation, or Palestinian terrorism, or the diaspora--see, you can't even find a word to name it. We agreed that all representations of current events are constructions, and thus 'partial,' but this one is so shot through with politics that it's virtually impossible to sort out.
ReplyDeleteYou did impressive sorting, and the descriptive parts were acute and careful.
Blogs trouble me as a theorist. They certainly offer a way to represent events OUTSIDE the usual economic systems that Chomsky and Herman take to task. They probably represent the best current-technology example of what they call 'alternative presses.' But as Bethany and I talked about, they are absolutely impossible to fact-check, even extending to the possibility that this radical anti-Muslim blogger is a construction herself (don't think so). Good work all around.