Thursday, October 08, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
As a Palestinian-American historian, professor, and opinion writer, I know from my work and my personal experience that Palestinian viewpoints rarely appear in mainstream U.S. media outlets; I especially remember my frustration at the lack of Palestinian voices in U.S. publications during the Oslo years. But to what extent is this the case? How many opinion pieces in major media outlets have actively discussed Palestinians? How many of those pieces have been written by Palestinians? How has this trend changed over time?
I decided to crunch some numbers to find out more.So, how are American news readers encouraged to think about Palestinians? Using several news databases (Proquest, Gale, and Nexis Uni), I searched for the keyword “Palestinian,” limiting my results to editorials (written by the editorial board), columns (written by staff columnists), and guest opinion pieces.This trend was especially striking in the daily press. In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
This historian and professor is either a very good propagandist or a very bad statistician. I tend to think the former.
The statistic of very few Palestinian authors is meaningless in a vacuum. To be meaningful, we would need to know how many editorials were written by Israelis. That is the only way to compare apples to apples.
If the number of Israelis writing these articles is, say 4% - which is probably a decent guess - then the disparity is not nearly as bad as Nassar is implying.
Beyond that, the newspapers would specifically recruit Israelis who are critical of Israel - but they will practically never publish Palestinians critical of their own leadership.
Her methodology is meant to stack the deck to minimize the percentage. She is including all newspaper editorials - which are 100% non-Palestinian (and non-Israeli.) She is including newspaper columnists - which are 100% non-Palestinian (and non-Israeli.) The hundred or so Thomas Friedman columns that mention Palestinians are all counted. All of these bring the percentage of Palestinian voices (and British, and Israeli, and French) voices down.
Her methodology implies that if less than 2% of editorial pieces are written by Palestinians, then 98% of them are anti-Palestinian. This is emphatically not true. When I used to follow the statistics, the number of anti-Israel op-eds in the New York Times outweighed the number of pro-Israel op-eds by at least 4-1. Which is why this entire article is deceptive from the start - it implies the exact opposite of the truth.
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