I am ANTI your draconian restrictions on the exercise of free speech in the blogosphere, you jackbooted cyber-thug!
Okay, seriously, I view a nation's media as a reflection of popular mood in a lot of cases, despite the entreaties of some (such as the Shorenstein Center's Marvin Kalb) that the press be "detached, unemotional, cool skeptical, determined.” As such I'm not surprised that Israeli media language paints an "us vs them" word picture when discussing IDF operations.
Acknowledging that cross-cultural analogies suffer from inherent flaws I find a 2005 Parameters article by William Darley instructive on this point. He writes that in the US at least, “public support for wars is not so much an act of intellectual deliberation as it is a collective emotional reaction to events due to what Clausewitz described…as a ‘latent hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind, natural force.' ” It's easy to see the media reflecting that emotional reaction in its reporting, at least until a government looses the support of the public due to what is seen as incompetence or indecisiveness. At that point, as the public mood cools, the change may be reflected in the language of media reports.
This idea is further reflected in an essay by Daniel Hallin and Todd Gitlin entitled “The Gulf War as Popular Culture and Television Drama”. They wrote that 80% of the US' biggest newspapers increased circulation in GW1 and that both cable and network television news outlets saw ratings spike during the Persian Gulf crisis; and demonstrated a link between popular approval of President GWH Bush (exemplified by the President’s 89% approval rating at the start of the air war), and pro-war media coverage. Part of me believes that this reflects the fact that the press is also a business, thus newspaper circulation and television ratings largely factor into how a story is presented to the public, and what stories are selected to air at all. If running pro-war stories sells paper or air time, the story will be run.
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