SEMINARS Passia Seminar 1999 Media and Communication Skills

 

 

 

 

Eric Weiner and Lyse Doucet[1]

 

 

 

Eric Weiner

 

I want to speak a little bit in general about what it is like to be a journalist for a quality international news organization, and then go on to how you can use us, since we are using you and it works both ways. Before coming here three years ago, I spent a few years in India, and the first thing that struck me about working here is that there is so much more demand from news agen­cies for stories than was the case in India, a country of at least 980 mil­lion people. This huge amount of foreign interest – particularly from the US and Britain - means that the foreign correspondents are kept ex­tremely busy. It also means that if you have a story to tell, you are probably more likely to get it on the air than you would be if it had something to do with India.

 

If Prime Minister Netanyahu or Yasser Arafat say something that is front-page news for us; if somebody is killed or injured, that is also news; if someone is killed the same day in Miami or Washington, they do not get the same amount of coverage, simply because they were not killed here. Every foreign journalist working here is to some extent over­worked; there are way too many stories and not enough time to tell them.

 

We look at the wires a lot – AP, Reuters, the French News Agency, and UPI to some extent - sometimes too much perhaps, and they act as a sort of guide to what is happening. Yesterday, for example, there was just one story after another flashing across the screen: Prime Minister Netanyahu facing a possible no-confidence vote in the Knesset, a Palestinian man being critically injured by Israelis who shot him in Abu Dis, the unprece­dented shootout in Nablus between Palestinian police and Fatah members, and the everyday clashes in Ramallah between Palestinian protestors and Israeli soldiers over the prisoner issue. Then, of course, we had for the US audience in particular this disagreement between the Israelis and the Americans about Clinton’s trip and the possibility that his flying into Gaza could be perceived as American endorsement of an independent Palestin­ian state. The fact that I work for a US organization means that I was fo­cusing a little more on that story than Lyse was for the BBC.

 

We try to fo­cus on one story per day if we can, as past experience has taught us that trying to deal with too many issues at one time can leave the listener somewhat confused.

Another challenge is to be balanced, according to our mandate, which can be frustrating. I get a lot of e-mail every day, much of which is critique and blame for not having covered a story fairly or accusations that I am either an ‘Israeli agent’ or a ‘Palestinian agent’. If we receive an equal number of such e-mails - meaning that we have angered each side equally – it is a good indication that we are doing our job well.

 

With regard to how you can tell your story through us, I think people who wonder how we decide what is and what is not a story are often under the impression that we have committees, extensive discussions and computer-analyzed reports. It is really not like that, but more along the lines of a con­versation between the correspondent and his editor back in Washington on main topics or subjects for feature stories.

 

It probably helps to think like a journalist when you present us with an idea for a story, though you should bear in mind that a certain issue of interest to you does not necessarily qualify it as a story. Controversial issues tend to get on the air more than those that are not controversial, and I always respect people in public relations or public affairs who say, “To be honest this is controversial but here is our side of the story.” A story does not have to be controversial, however, it can simply be innovative, something new and different, but you must tell us why it is new or different.

 

Always try to be frank; we tend to discount groups with ‘hidden’ agendas, which are actually quite obvious, and would much rather that they be up front about their agenda, saying, for example, “We represent Palestinian refugees, I am going to be honest about that, but I think this is a good story.” Journalists tend to respect that kind of honesty.

 

It is also important that you present the story to us on a human level and not rely on facts and figures. Especially in the broadcast media, we look for the personal story: somebody speaking into the microphone, not an official, not an analyst, but a real person. Note, however, that if you come to us and say, “I know of a person who is really suffering or benefiting or whatever,” we expect the person to be as you present them and are not going to be very happy if we discover that they are not.

 

To wrap up, there is a huge interest in the story here, with at least 300 for­eign correspondents based in Jerusalem alone. We have to justify our ex­istence, which makes it easier for you to get through to us. The down side of that is that we are saturated with information and it is your job to distin­guish yourself with honesty and be selective in the ideas that you pre­sent.

 

 

Lyse Doucet

 

I started working in West Africa and then worked mainly in the Islamic World: in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and in Iran. Immediately before coming here, I was in Jordan, and it was from there that I came to the center of the uni­verse, Jerusalem.

 

I always say to people that it is a privilege to be able to be here because the Arab-Israeli conflict is a conflict that matters worldwide. It is a very com­pelling human story because as much as we talk about the peace pro­cess, further troop redeployments, and percentages, at the bottom of it is a story that all of you live day in day out. As journalists, it is our task to translate de­velopments here in terms of a television piece of anywhere between one minute thirty seconds to three minutes, or a documentary, or radio piece, or, in the case of newspaper journalists, into articles. We have an incredi­ble amount of material, but that can actually be a burden.

 

I think we have to say that this conflict has a special character; there are not only hundreds of foreign correspondents based here to cover it, but media is actually becoming part of the story. Why? Because Israel is led by a prime minister whose whole philosophy of politics and conflict comes down to his well-developed view on how to present this to the world. His great phrase is that, “It’s not that a picture is worth a thousand words, but that a word is worth a thousand pictures,” in other words, it is not that Is­rael’s policy is wrong, we just have to explain it better. Fortunately, what this means to people in television is that Mr. Netanyahu is extremely ac­cessible, and hence the criticisms of some like Sa’eb Ereikat who accuses Mr. Netanyahu of being a media lord. The Palestinians, I have to say, have slowly struggled to catch up and we are usually successful in gaining ac­cess to Palestinian policymakers, Palestinians from all walks of life, and presenting their point of view. That does not mean, however, that we do not sometimes face problems: the Palestinian Authority is still, after all, a fledg­ling and nascent authority with underdeveloped structures.

 

Even Jordan, an established state, is still struggling to keep up with Israel. I was there during the peace negotiations between Israel and Jordan and I remember the frustration of the journalists because they could never find out what was happening except by following the Israeli media. When King Hussein finally agreed to see foreign journalists based there, someone said “We need a foreign ministry spokesman,” while someone else remarked, “Israel has a spokesman for social affairs, for politics, for agriculture, for this and for that, a myriad of spokesmen; why don’t we have the same?” One of the princesses said, “Oh, but then we would become like Israel” and King Hussein muttered and said, “Yes, that would be normalization.” If you want to beat the Israelis then you have to try to beat them at their own game by providing as many good quality spokesmen.

 

Television pieces are usually short and can be very unfair, even if we bring in a Palestinian and an Israeli viewpoint. Sometimes, a Palestinian will say, “That’s not good, the Palestinian doesn’t speak very good English, and the Israeli speaks great English. Why did you use this Palestinian?” It is true: if you have only 20 seconds the image matters a great deal, and if your mes­sage is conveyed by someone who does not speak good English, then of course the Israelis may sound more convincing. This is Netanyahu’s great strength; he always sounds convincing.

 

I remember last year we were doing a story, a summary of the year in Is­rael and the Palestinian areas, and we decided to do it through the closure, in other words, by getting an Israeli employer who was affected by the clo­sure, one who had a rather decent relationship with his employees, and a Palestinian worker. We interviewed the Palestinian as he went across the Erez checkpoint at five in the morning and the Israeli as he was waiting for his worker. Both were interviewed in their own languages, Arabic and He­brew, and as we were driving along I said to the Palestinian cameraman, who speaks both languages fluently, “How do you think it is going to come across? Did they sound good?” His answer was: “Well, the problem is that the Palestinian had no teeth, so when people watch the piece they’re going to see an Arab talking with no teeth and an Israeli talking with a lovely full set of teeth.” The point is that on television, image is everything.

 

Everyone who works in promotion and public relations tries to promote a cer­tain issue or institute, and the success depends on presenting it well. We are not here to take up the Israeli or the Palestinian cause, we are just here to report; we are not here to make history happen, but to provide a rough draft of history by being the first ones out with the story. This, of course, causes problems, because one side or the other inevitably com­plains that we have taken the other’s side. If, day in day out, Israelis see pic­tures of Pal­es­tinians, wearing the keffiyeh, throwing stones, against a mighty Israeli army with their teargas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets, it is only a matter of time before a rightwing group will tell us, “Oh, you are pro-Pal­estinians, Nazis, anti-Semites, because you are always presenting a pic­ture of the Palestinians as weak and helpless.” My re­sponse is to say, “Look, I didn’t make those clashes happen, but I have to cover them, and if every day, day in day out there is such an image of David and Goliath, then that is the way it is.”

 

 

Discussion

 

Eric Weiner: Our jobs involve much more than covering violence; we try to do other stories, on Palestinian cinema, culture, or social issues. Perhaps we are not quite as powerful as some people may think, but we do have the power to present a different kind of image, or at least of making people sit up and say, “Hey, I never knew that the Palestinians had mobile cine­mas, or great universities, or do this and that, etc.” Even though journalists like to think that the world revolves around them, the real truth is that they do not have as much power as they would like to have. A good example of that was Bosnia, where the majority of journalists were very critical of the poli­cies of the Serbs and the Western governments, but did the policies change? No. Television pictures and radio coverage may have caused more government officials to send food to the starving in Ethiopia and Su­dan, but they did not stop the starvation nor its reoccurrence. It is only natural that some of you come to us and say, “Why don’t you tell your pol­icy-makers what is happening and try to change the Palestinian reality? You invade our privacy, and every time a member of our family dies from Israeli bullets or teargas you interview us, and what does it change? Noth­ing.” That is because our power is rather limited.

 

Nobody would turn down a good story, but what exactly is a good story? I believe that at the end of the day, all of us – whether we are American, Palestinian, or Israeli – like to laugh, to cry and to hear a good tale. In the city of Bethlehem, for example, there are all kinds of great stories waiting to be told, certainly as we approach the year 2000. If we knew more about what was happening in Nablus, we would possibly go there more often, too. When the troop redeployment was on in Jenin, for example, it was an opportunity to go there - though in the middle of the night – even to cover just one story. Often what we lack is people who can tell the story well, people who have been intimately involved in the conflict.

 

With regard to the peace talks, every time a new round begins, we kind of sigh and say, “How are we going to cover it this time? What new story can we tell?” and if a journalist is tired and lacking in interest, it shows in the piece, so we have to find new angles. For example, the fact that you have 100,000 pounds from the British Council and are going to buy 50,000 pieces of paper and would like us to do a story about how this is going to help school children is not particularly interesting, but if you explain why it is going to make a huge difference, saying, for example, “Did you know that since the closure was imposed we haven’t been able to get paper through to Bethlehem and therefore this project will enable the schools to operate?” and we can see that it taps into another story, then we are far more likely to be interested. In short, we should all think about our job more broadly.

 

Question: How much do you interact with Palestinian journalists, both on a professional and personal level? In working with the foreign media, I have always noticed that they tend to stay with their own people in West Jeru­salem and do not know very much about the Palestinian culture and peo­ple. You must live amongst the Palestinians in order to find interesting sto­ries. Another problem is that you are obviously under a lot of pressure, which prevents you from listening if I come to you with an interesting story.

 

A third point is that I often get calls from abroad saying congratulations, because they think the Palestinian problem is almost solved, thanks to what they hear or see in the foreign media. You give them the impression that the withdrawal of Israeli troops from a certain area will mean the end to our problems, and everyone will be happy and live in peace, but it is not like this. We still have problems connected to settlement, Jerusalem, bor­ders, and statehood.

 

Eric Weiner: Your criticism is justified. One of the reasons behind this prob­lem is the fact that the nature of journalism, especially broadcast jour­nalism, is to simplify. Lyse and I have more time than commercial broad­casters in the US, who have to tell the story in a minute and a half; I usually have three to five or six minutes, but that still means that we have to sim­plify, and invariably when we simplify, we leave things out, which may be the things that you want us to include.

 

Another aspect is that we have to report on change, as the status quo is usually not news. If the peace process has been frozen for two years, there is a lot of time to deal with the stalemate, whereas if Israeli troops pull out of some small percentage near Jenin, that is news, and so we report that.

 

I do not want to say that we should be positive when there is nothing to be positive about, but after so much negativity, I think the listener in America often feels that the Middle East is a hopeless case and simply does not want to hear about it anymore, which means that whenever there is a small glimmer of hope, we are duty bound to report that. Having said that, I admit that it is possible that we do not always put things in perspective enough.

 

Lyse Doucet: I want to return to your concern about the fact that without living among the Palestinians, we are unable to comprehend their reality. Living in Jerusalem, one is between Tel Aviv and Ramallah and cannot help but try to understand the heart of both the Israeli and the Palestinian soci­ety. It is often a personal decision as to how much journalists socialize with Pal­es­tinians or Israelis and how they report. In my case I work at the big televi­sion building opposite the bus station, but it is full of Palestinians and Israelis. One does go to Ramallah, to either eat or do stories. In fact, the Israelis often accuse us of doing far more stories about what is hap­pening to Palestinians because often those are the saddest cases and the ones that speak loudest. Some journalists I know could spend more time trying to un­derstand Palestinian society, but it is not easy to understand a differ­ent cul­ture and you should not write us all off and say we are not making an effort.

 

Eric Weiner: Timing is everything in this business. Right now we are par­ticularly busy because everything is collapsing around us and President Clinton is flying into a mess, so now would not probably be the best time to suggest a story on a paper project in Bethlehem or whatever, but there was a long period during the summer when not much was happening in the peace process and a lot of us were hungry for a good story. Journalists are usually busy but you should keep in mind that there are certain times of the year when they are more receptive to ideas than at others.

 

Lyse Doucet: You should also know how to pick your target. For example, a few months ago a Palestinian in Bethlehem asked me, “If I want to get something in the Israeli papers, who should I call?” and I said, “Call Amira Hass - she lives in Ramallah, she used to live in Gaza, and she wants to do Palestinian stories.” Journalists actually have different audiences and fol­low different editorial guidance, so if you find someone who has got a lot of time for features, you are more likely to get your story placed than if you give it to someone who is involved mainly in statistics or something. Always be smart about where you pitch your story, and pitch it at the right time.

 

Tudor Lomas: Another problem is that Palestinians do not always tell the story frankly and clearly. If you talk about a particular issue and say, “Arafat believes that this is a real triumph for the Palestinians,” then that is the story the West is going to take. Perhaps a better strategy would be to say, as strongly as you can, “Hang on a minute, we deserve half this bloody land.” Do not forget that in the West, it is a new generation that does not know the history. You live it, you feel it, it is part of your life, but kids back in Britain and the US are taught very little history, so you have got to tell them very simple basic truths.

 

Eric Weiner: I agree, it is very important to put things into terms that the ‘average’ American, if such a thing exists, can understand. If you do not want to be quoted on the air, just mention Area A, B or C, because we have to explain what Area B is now, which is extremely complicated, so there goes our whole story. You have to use terms that people can under­stand.

 

Lyse Doucet: It is not as important for me to ask the questions as it is for you to ask them. If Palestinians start asking, “What about human rights in our so-called democratic society?” then I will start asking too and searching for an answer. I only got involved in a recent documentary on honor kill­ings because a very prominent lawyer in Jordan was taking it up as a cause and trying to change the legal system, and a very prominent lawyer here was trying to change the social system; it was their question, not mine.

 

Eric Weiner: With regard to the coverage of human rights issues, we have a unique situation here in that on the one hand the Palestinians have suf­fered greatly at the hands of the Israelis, to put it mildly, and on the other, they are now suffering at the hands of their own people and government. This is a story we foreign journalists do see now and then. All of us have talked to people like Bassem Eid, and though there may be no human rights in Pal­estine, there are certainly a lot of human rights groups and a lot of informa­tion. Law, for example, is pretty reliable and does not embellish the facts with opinions. I think that we are doing okay in trying to tell the story of hu­man rights.

 

I am sometimes asked about the typical day of a foreign correspondent. In my case, I have a time difference of seven hours with the US, which means the night before I might be working until 11, so I wake at around nine, make coffee and get the newspapers – Ha’aretz and The Jerusalem Post. I then check my e-mails, which can be quite time consuming as I usually find 20 or so, including a few from my boss saying look into this, look into that, those from the Israeli Government Press Office, which inundates us with e-mails, and some from the Palestinians who seem to be catching up in the e-mail race. Afterwards I look through the wires, then I read the newspa­pers and may call someone in Gaza to see what is going on. After sifting through all the information, I decide where to go from there; if I do not have to do a story I might follow up on something that happened yesterday or last night, or I might just get out of the office to actually see what is hap­pening on the street.

 

Rami Khouri: Is one of these sources more useful than the others or do you find that they are all providing the same ideas? Is it best for people to send you an e-mail or send something to the AP about them and hope that you will follow it up?

 

Eric Weiner: Well, if it gets out on the wires, on AP or Reuters, we assume that they have checked it out a little bit. I personally pay more attention to a wire story than something that is just sent as an e-mail. If a story has made its way into a respected newspaper, I will pay attention. I consider Ha’aretz to be a very respectable newspaper, but I would certainly pay less attention to The Jerusalem Post because I think that it tends to be a bit biased and the quality of its journalism is not quite as good as other papers. So, it is not just the information, it is the source.

 

Lyse Doucet: It also depends on the nature of the news. If you get an e-mail overnight from one of the human rights groups saying someone is going to be brought to court or something important is going to happen that day, then you might try to be there. I used to be in close contact with the Birzeit Human Rights Project and did stories on the Gaza students, on the protests, on the prisoners, but then my contact left and now I am only get­ting e-mails and certainly do not do as much. You get used to dealing with certain people; you know you understand them, and they understand you, and they know when the story is a story.

 

Eric Weiner: Another important point is that you need to let us know about things that are going to happen, not events that have already happened, especially when you are dealing with the broadcast media, which needs pictures and sound and the drama of an event that is actually happening. If you know there is going to be a demonstration or an event or celebration somewhere and you tell us, we are far more likely to report on it than if we hear about it afterwards.

 

Question: When you have seven or eight stories all at the same time, how do you decide which ones you are going to cover?

 

Eric Weiner: Well, unfortunately violence is news, whoever is involved, and the more people are killed, the more it is news. That is one criterion we use. Political upheaval is next in the criteria of what makes for a story. Yesterday, for example, we had people injured throughout the West Bank, and that was news. We also had Netanyahu perhaps being kicked out of office; had he been kicked out of office, that would have superceded any violence in the West Bank, unless it was on an extremely large scale.

 

We always try to be fair, although there are many pro-Israeli groups who make the joke that NPR stands for National Palestinian Radio. On the other hand, you probably feel that the Western media is pro-Israeli, in spite of the fact that there are many Israelis who are equally convinced that we are pro-Pales­tinian. It is true to some extent that Israel is treated with kid gloves, for ex­ample, it is never held to the same standards as Iraq when it comes to UN resolutions. I personally think that a picture of Israeli soldiers firing on unarmed Pales­tinians is still more powerful than any number of words. This is what people will remember and all the PR publicity in the world is not going to compensate for that one picture of Israeli brutality. I try to en­sure that there is overall coverage balance; in other words, one story where I make the Palestinians angry, one story where I make the Israelis angry.

 

It is hard to tell if what we do here has any effect at all. Maybe if journalists were not here there would be no peace process at all. Okay, it has flaws, it is in serious trouble, it is stuck, but there is a peace process. How do we judge if we have an effect or not? I think the only way to do that would be to take all the foreign correspondents out of Jerusalem and see what the dif­ference is. We try to take snapshots; a Palestinian is losing his farm near Hebron because the Israelis are building a bypass road for settlements, so we take that picture and show it. It is fact; it is something that is actually hap­pening. A car bomb on the streets of Jerusalem wounds Israelis, so we take that picture and show it. It is fact; it is something that is actually hap­pening. Everybody wants each three-minute story to contain the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict! When a tragedy befalls a Palestinian one day we are going to focus on that, and if another tragedy befalls an Israeli the next day, we are going to focus on that, while trying to put things in perspective.

 

Question: Coming from an NGO, I would like to know: Have you ever contacted an NGO and thought of covering its story, or have you ever been approached by someone from an NGO, ask­ing you to visit their organiza­tion, and if you have, were you prepared to listen?

 

Lyse Doucet: I have worked in places like Pakistan and Africa where one had a closer relationship to the UN and to NGOs, because development was part of the political process, and, aside from that, we had more time to deal with such issues. We also try our best to cover such stories here. Al­ways keep in mind that journalists can get very bored of just covering the same story, day in day out.

 

Eric Weiner: You cannot really divorce the NGO work from the politics. A classic example is some form of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, where both sides get together to work towards protecting the environment, for exam­ple. That is a nice little story to tell. Of course, there is no guarantee that if you ring me up I am going to do a story at all, and I am certainly not going to do one if it only focuses on your particular organization, but if you say something to get me thinking, something that could tie your story to a larger one, it will make me consider looking into it.

 

Lyse Doucet: One thing you should remember is that we are eager to hu­manize our stories, so if you have some information on someone who is affected perhaps more than anyone else by a certain issue, then we are certainly going to appreciate your lead. The important thing is that before you ring us up with your story, take a few seconds to think, “What is the most interesting thing about this particular story?” It is difficult for you be­cause you have to stop being a Palestinian and think about what the rest of the world wants to know, but for a story to be interesting, it has to be hu­man.

 

Rami Khouri: Is there any way of measuring the impact of having airtime on NPR or BBC and of knowing whether it is more useful for Palestinians to get stories on NPR or to get them into Ha’aretz, or Al-Quds, or whatever?

 

Lyse Doucet: It depends on who your audience is. Almost all the inter­views that Arafat has done recently have been with the Israeli media. Every time something happens he is on Channel I, on Channel 2, in Ha’aretz, because he wants to address the Israeli public.

 

Rami Khouri: But from your experience in your own institutions, what is the impact of airtime? Do you have examples of stories you have done that have resulted in some political, economic, or personal benefit? Is it useful to use the international media?

 

Lyse Doucet: It is not something that you can measure. If someone tells you “I heard your story about the Palestinian who was having some prob­lems getting from A to B, and I was really surprised by what I heard” this does not necessarily change policy, even if attitudes change. It is a process of changing little by little, making people think in a different way about a situation. Whenever I hear people who are here on a visit say, “I never re­alized that getting to school, hospital or work could be so complicated or dangerous”, I find myself cringing and thinking, for God’s sake, didn’t you hear my report?

 

Eric Weiner: Not all Palestinian issues are big geopolitical issues and I think we probably should do more stories about what every day life is like, how you get to school, and whether you are safe in the streets or have enough money to buy food. It is simple issues like these that need to be addressed.

 

But as far as measuring the effect of these, other than the type of the story where there’s a dying baby somewhere and you cover the story and get flooded with letters and donations and the baby is flown out to London and you can say yes, journalists saved that child’s life, it is really hard to know what effect we have. I would like to think, however, that we have some.

 

Lyse Doucet: You have the advantage that this story is on the air day in day out, and because it is, people have an idea that it is important. Even if people do not really get everything we say, but think from time to time, “Oh my God, it’s happening again, isn’t this awful?” and the policy-makers say “Oh, we’d better do something,” and the constituents write to their mem­bers of parliament and say, “For God’s sake do something, give them money, or votes, or whatever it is that they need,” then that is a very good start. It is really a case of keeping it on the boiler.

 

Tudor Lomas: You need to remember that even if you are not so good at using the foreign media to get your message across, the fact that the other side is more experienced in doing so means that you have to fight back. An example from the commercial world will illustrate this: if one particular com­pany starts getting the publicity and coverage, everyone starts to feel like they are the only company offering a particular product or service. As a result, the other companies in the same field will run to follow suit and launch huge publicity and advertising campaigns. Here, for example, the Is­raelis managed to produce one impressive, lucid spokesman after an­other, while the foreign journalists were having a terrible time running around try­ing to get someone who could speak anything more than a few words of English in a reasonably clear manner from the other side.

 

Question: I want to ask you Lyse, when you do something like the feature on honor killings, which you obviously did for the benefit of a foreign audi­ence, not the Palestinians and the other Arabs, what kind of impact are you trying to achieve?

 

Lyse: Well, this feature was slightly different because I did it in col­labora­tion with a prominent Canadian filmmaker who had two basic pur­poses: one, to take up an issue that is an important issue within Arab so­cieties and an issue that, whenever it is dealt with in the press, is dealt with from a kind of ‘Isn’t that awful, just look what these Arabs are doing to one an­other!’ an­gle; and two, to say to people yes, the situation is bad, but look there is a process under way and these people are tying to change things, in other words, to try to make people look at the issue in a different way. She worked very hard at getting people to tell their stories and I think that the result is very interesting.

 

Attitudes are changing. When I came here four years ago, went to one of the women’s groups, and said I would like to do a story on honor killings, they told me it was impossible. Could I interview the women? Impossible. Could I interview them in silhouette? Impossible. The director even told me, “We gain nothing by you interviewing these women.” Four years later when I went to her, she said “Yes, you can talk to them,” and I attribute her change of heart to the fact that at the time of my second visit, the issue was being dealt with by the women’s parliament and was literally begging to be ex­plored. People here were asking the question, so it was much easier for us to ask it too, to find answers, and even to encourage the rest of the world, for example, Canadian NGOs, to get involved. I want to tell people some­thing different, something they do not know, I want them at the end to say, “I never thought of that.” It is like when I saw a certain documentary at the Jerusalem Film Festival by an Arab-Israeli. The docu­mentary was on honor killings, and at the end of the story we suddenly realized that it was not the brother who killed but the sister, and I thought, “Oh my God, it is not just the man who is the victim, it is the whole society that is a victim of this kind of a system” and it changed my whole view of it. We are often frus­trated by the fact that we are often restricted to doing one minute thirty pieces but at the end of the day, there’s a chance that they will get people to ask differ­ent questions and this is I think the value of journal­ism.

 

Question: How would you explain your bias toward Israel?

 

Lyse Doucet: Give us examples.

 

Participant: Two weeks ago, I was watching CNN and it was covering the attack on an Israeli soldier by a group of Palestinians. When a Palestinian was stabbed by an Israeli, all we heard was that a Palestinian had been stabbed and was thought to be the killer’s seventh victim, but in the report involving the Israeli soldier, we got to hear so many details, such as the fact that this was not an isolated incident as the Palestinians are constantly attacking settlers all the time, and so on.

 

Eric Weiner: I think what played a large role in the ‘biased’ coverage here is simply the fact that the attack on the Israeli soldier was televised, while, unfortunately for Mr. Natsheh and his family in Abu Tor, the murder was not captured on videotape. I am confident that the story of the Israeli soldier, had the cameras not been there, would have disap­peared pretty quickly, but the cameras captured it and they were able to show this picture of a brutal mob and a helpless Israeli soldier. The Israelis are debating amongst themselves concerning what the soldier should have done, but the incident was captured on videotape, which is why it was cov­ered more.

 

Secondly, the Israelis made a big deal of the incident, with Netanyahu go­ing so far as to suspend the peace process, so now we are reporting on a breakdown in the peace process and we have no choice but to say that the peace process broke down because the Israelis say that this kind of vio­lence is unacceptable. It is for these two reasons that Mr. Natsheh slipped down the totem pole of events, even though we tried to convey the mes­sage that although the peace process had been suspended because of the attack in Ramallah, there had also been an attack in Jerusalem. Again, we come back to the problem that we only have limited time.

 

Lyse Doucet: You have to be fair and refrain from passing judgment based on one report, and you have to give us the benefit of the doubt. Say the day after the Natsheh stabbing Faisal Husseini had said, “They shut off the security camera, look what they did, they tried to hide our reality” then we would have treated the story as a running story and dealt with it in more depth. On the day that the stabbing happened, however, our main respon­sibility was to say what had happened, to whom, and where, and then say a little about the implications and why the incident matters because in­creasingly our editors are asking, “Why does this matter? Why should some­one living in the UK or Britain care?” We have to simplify, we have to say there is a human issue and you should care. Anything else has to wait.

 

It is a very imperfect world, and we cannot defend every aspect of every media because we work under the pressure of time and the pressure of working with what is available, and we do, perhaps, occasionally get the balance wrong. However, I honestly believe that the vast majority of foreign journalists working here do not deliberately set out to ‘have a go’ at one side or the other.

 

Eric Weiner: Yes, we try to be fair. Regarding the best kind of story to offer us: give us a happy story, and I think every journalist will be inclined, with so much negativity here, to jump at the chance of doing this one rare story with a silver lining.