Israel at 60 in the UK media: an analysis
Executive Summary
Scope
Israel’s 60th anniversary was an event which received wide coverage in the UK media.
- Seventy articles appeared in the print media, BBC Radio 4 aired 12 segments in the programmes we monitored, while the BBC News website featured over 40 articles related to this event. The Guardian carried the most coverage, followed by The Independent.
Themes
A number of themes emerged from the coverage:
- A key theme to emerge from the UK media coverage was that Israel does not seek peace. Eighty-three per cent of all press coverage which took a position on the issue contained the message that Israel does not seek peace.
- Seventeen per cent of all press coverage which took a position on Israel’s stance on peace contained the message
that Israel seeks peace.
- Only 16% of articles conveyed that Israel is a homeland for the Jews.
- Just Journalism found that across all the coverage as a whole, the strongest theme to emerge was that Israel was created at the expense of the Palestinians. While Israel’s anniversary celebrations received extensive coverage, this was generally offset by reporting on what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” or catastrophe. A snapshot of the overall newspaper coverage indicates that 44 % of articles contained the message that Israel was created at the expense of the Palestinians, and this rises to 54% when looking at the broadsheets. This message is particularly prominent in The Guardian and The Independent. Sixty-seven per cent of articles in The Guardian contained this message.
- There was a noticeable lack of coverage of domestic issues in Israel, of concessions Israel has made for peace and of the existential threat to Israel posed by Iran.
Nevertheless, there were divergences in messages across media outlets:
- Eighty per cent of the coverage in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, contained the message that Israel faces existential threats.
- On BBC Radio 4, the strongest message was that Israel is a homeland for the Jews – a message appearing in 42% of items.
- By contrast, the strongest message on the BBC News website was that Israel was created at the expense of the Palestinians – a message appearing in 45% of web articles.
Positioning
Just Journalism also analysed the positioning of the coverage and found that The Guardian and The Independent contained the highest volume of negative coverage, while The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph carried the highest volume of positive coverage.
- Sixty-six per cent of The Guardian coverage was negative while only 7% was positive, with the rest neutral.
- Fifty-five per cent of The Independent’s coverage was negative while 9% was positive, with the rest neutral.
- In The Times there were twice as many negative as positive pieces about Israel.
- None of the Sunday broadsheets carried negative articles.
- BBC Radio’s coverage was balanced overall, with 66% of its coverage neutral, 17% negative and 17% positive.
- By contrast, only 5% of the items on the BBC News website were positive while 43% were negative. I.e. negative articles outnumbered positive articles by almost nine to one.
- Interestingly, a separate study of the authored pieces on the BBC News website, – i.e., pieces where the journalist is named – revealed that 60% of the coverage was negative and 40% neutral.
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