Sunset in the northern Gaza strip. Zenab Oudah/Press Association. All rights reserved. Towards the end of 1991, in the wake of the Madrid Conference on the Middle East, I was chairing a packed Palestinian-Jewish dialogue meeting in London when speaker after speaker denounced the bias of the press. So I called for a straw vote. Sure enough, almost everyone was apparently of the same mind. Then I asked who the bias favoured. Roughly half the audience thought it was definitely slanted towards Israel while the other half was equally convinced it favoured the Palestinian and Arab side.
So what may we conclude from this? Does it mean that bias is merely in the eye of the beholder and that the much-maligned mainstream media are innocent of the charge? Might it even be that the charge itself merely exposes and reflects the accuser’s own bias? Would the accusations evaporate if the media made a greater effort to be balanced and report objectively? Do we really know, in fact, what we mean by balance and objectivity? And is it what we truly want? What if it takes us outside of our respective comfort zones, as it’s bound to do?
These are critical questions in any conflict situation and they don’t just impact the media. I was faced with these conundrums when embarking on a doctoral thesis in the early 1970s on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I set out to write a brief, objective, history of the conflict as the introductory chapter and was counselled by my academic advisors to stick scrupulously to the facts, to be even-handed and not to be swayed by the passions of either side. But I soon found I could not make even the most basic facts sit still long enough to get them down on paper.
