Strange strangers: The Jerusalem correspondents in the network of nations

State of the art(s): Foreign correspondence, coverage of Israel–Palestine, journalism and the nation

Of the myriad types of journalists, foreign correspondents have long drawn the attention of researchers, mostly because the information the media provides about the foreign world has been considered crucial, affecting international perceptions and influencing foreign policy, especially in the United States. This rationale has been expounded upon many times, beginning with Schramm’s (1959) classic work. Analyses have often been accompanied by deploration, as noted by Biltereyst and Desmet (2010): ‘This lament over the shrinking output of foreign and international news has been repeated over the last decade or so, not least by leading journalists, concerned intellectuals, politicians and academics’ (p. 197). However, in keeping with Hamilton and Jenner (2004), Biltereyst and Desmet prefer to analyze the evolution as a mutation, rather than as a decline. The thrust of this argument is that the flow of foreign news has been growing and changing, fed by a much more diverse population of local staff and travelers and by a much easier circulation of information through technology – although undoubtedly, the classic ‘elite’ of foreign correspondents, the reporters from major media outlets who staff well-equipped bureaus in world capitals, has been dwindling.

Among foreign news stories, the Israeli–Palestinian (or Israeli-Arab) conflict has been a major topic of interest for both journalists and researchers. One indicator of the level of interest in the subject is the number of correspondents stationed in the Middle East (see below). It has also been suggested that for decades, this topic has received special attention in foreign news (e.g. Hess, 1996: 30). The reasons for this interest have been interpreted within the Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) classic analysis of foreign news, as reelaborated by Westerstahl and Johansson (1994). The news from Israel–Palestine offers easily accessible drama in an area of strategic importance for the Western world, which dominates the production of news; most crucially for us, the region can be seen as culturally close to the Western world. In some cases, the national and the foreign become so closely intertwined that the proximity may be requalified as hybridity.

Critical analysis of the coverage of Israel–Palestine has focused on partisanship. Here, a transatlantic divide has been suggested. As summarized in a study of three US dailies’ coverage of a month of the second intifada, ‘Critics and scholars from outside the US have frequently underscored a tendency in the American press to empathize with Israel more than newspapers elsewhere in the world’ (Zelizer et al., 2002: 287), while Europeans have been considered more inclined to favor Palestinians and have read the history of Israel (especially since 1967) within a (de)colonization framework (Goldfarb, 2001). However, much of this research takes place at the national level and including a limited number of media outlets, which makes both generalization and comparison difficult. The quoted study of Zelizer et al. does suggest that in the American newspapers, ‘language was aligned with an Israeli perspective’ (p. 290), with a ‘geographic bias’: the largest share of stories came from Israel proper, and columnists were ‘more likely to be critical of the Palestinians’ (p. 293). The New York Times (contrary to much public criticism it receives) showed a more pro-Israel slant, depicting the Israelis mostly as victims and the Palestinians as aggressors, unlike the other newspapers studied, which were more balanced in this respect and recognized culpability on both sides.

Here, the national dimension of journalism is seen as a frame used by journalists in order to apprehend both reality (and his or her work) and themselves as social beings – in this case, social beings at work among an international group of journalists facing a small but powerful nation-state and a frail, divided, stateless nation; this dimension never functions in a simple, univocal manner. As Schlesinger (1991: 154) has long reminded us, the nation is a place where a system of relations and representations, including tensions and contradictions, unfolds; its apparent homogeneity must be problematized. An echo of this can be found on the subject of foreign correspondence in Hamilton and Jenner (2004: 30).

Media scholars have studied the impact of the changing composition of nations on the media, especially the increased presence of minorities seeking explicit recognition in social life, including in the media – a complex phenomenon requiring a changing vocabulary, with researchers referring at times to ‘ethnic minorities’, ‘diaspora’, or ‘hybridity’ (as noted by Cottle, 2000). Some researchers have incorporated in their analysis anger or dissatisfaction with the way the mainstream media (‘they’) report on certain minorities (‘us’), systematically linking violence and social problems (Devroe, 2004). Coined in the 1990s, the phrases ‘diasporic nationalism’ (Appadurai) and ‘long-distance nationalism’ (Benedict Anderson) have been used about the new links with the nation-state made possible by communications and applied to involvements in faraway conflicts (Conversi, 2012). ‘Long-distance nationalism’ has recently been used to describe the attachment of Jewish diasporas to Israel (Aiken-Klar, 2009). However, the impact of this on the interaction between journalists and their audiences, and on foreign correspondence in particular, has not been considered.

In addition, my analysis draws on anthropological work, attempting to undo social categories rather than relying on them. Regarding foreign correspondence, it is inspired by Pedelty (1995) and Hannerz (2004) and piggybacks on Bishara’s (2013) recent research on Palestinians working for the American media from Palestine.

Methodology

This study is based on 48 semistructured interviews that took place between 2006 and 2010, 35 led by myself and 13 by students of a Tel Aviv University seminar. In all, 17 French, 6 Americans, 3 Britons, 3 Czechs, 2 Spaniards, 2 Argentinians, 2 Scandinavians, 2 Japanese, and 1 Russian were interviewed as well as 7 producers or fixers (3 Jewish Israelis and 4 Palestinian Israelis). A minority of the correspondents were interviewed after their tour in Israel–Palestine had been completed. I reinterviewed eight of those correspondents, befriended some, and spoke freely on a variety of subjects, including coverage of the conflict. I analyzed 10 debates with journalists (for which I was often the moderator) in Paris and Tel Aviv (list in annex of Bourdon, 2009). Finally, I consulted books of former correspondents in which they reflected on their work (Allouche, 2010; Friedman, 1989 [1998]; Lema, 2003; Luydendjik, 2010).

The interviews and debates took place over an extended period, beginning in early 2003 for the debates, 2006 for the interviews, and continuing into 2010 (after the Gaza War of 2009–2010, and the Gaza flotilla affair). This period has three characteristics, all mentioned by the interviewees: the return of the conflict after the failure of the Oslo agreements, the rise of violent political Islamism, and the rapid growth of the Internet.

An important characteristic of the way journalistic discourse reacts to criticism was identified as a result of my fieldwork: its variability depending on the context of the criticism. Journalists speak differently on the subject of their professional practice when appearing in a public debate and facing a hostile audience than they do in a more personal, relaxed conversation or a single one-on-one interview with a researcher. Responses to criticism in each of these situations range from a more formal, professional, defensive discourse (the archetypal utterance would be: ‘I don’t see the point of this criticism, we are just doing our jobs’), to a more reflexive, weary, and critical (of oneself and/or of colleagues) discourse in more intimate, off-the-record circumstances. My intention here is not to use these differences to point out journalistic contradictions or hypocrisies; this variability is instead analyzed as revealing the tensions experienced by journalists in this particular context (for a similar perspective, see Lemieux and Schmalzbauer, 2000). Just like social actors, journalists must respect certain rules when representing their profession in public, while they can agree to speak more openly in more private situations, either in the name of realism (we know this is not the way things really work) or in the name of confidentiality (there are some things we cannot say in public as it would imperil our work or our profession). ¹

The correspondents of the foreign press in Israel: A portrait

Many studies of foreign correspondents start with numbers (Archetti, 2013), which are hard to establish. In Israel, a convenient source is the Foreign Press Association phonebook, copies of which can be found in their Tel Aviv office. Since 1975, there have been, on average, more than 200 members listed in any given year, and an average of more than 300 registered throughout the 1990s. In 2003, there were 316 names listed and 361 in 2011. However, these listings are not very precise: not all journalists are members; fixers and producers, or ‘assistant journalists’, are often members as well; and the names of some former members, including some who have left the country, may still remain listed. In addition, figures can surge during major events, such as elections or flare-ups in the conflict. For example, many witnesses claim there were more than 1000 journalists present during Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005.

It is also difficult to decide who is a journalist. This is a hierarchized professional universe, but with blurred borders, and increasingly so as one goes down the hierarchy. This blurriness has been exacerbated by the growth of the internet. The Israeli government distributes press cards, but this is certainly not the best criterion as distribution is often political. Access to the actual production of news, and the right to sign, varies from one country and medium to another; some are fixers in one medium and actual journalists in another. From the top down, the hierarchy starts with the ‘tenured’ correspondents sent by rich, mostly Western, media outlets: big agencies, television stations, and newspapers of record (with the New York Times correspondent considered the most important by Israeli officials, the primus inter pares). Next in rank are the correspondents of less prestigious media outlets, sometimes recruited locally; they may get a monthly salary but with less protective contracts. Further down are stringers or free-lancers. Many of these locally recruited journalists are binational citizens, especially on the Israeli side. The vast majority of correspondents live on the Israeli side of the border in West Jerusalem. If they speak a local language, it is generally Hebrew; Arabic is much less common. This is the picture I get from the interviews, confirmed by a rare quantitative survey of foreign correspondents (Lavie, 2000). So far, my comments concern print and broadcast reporters. However, photographers and camera people are also considered journalists, although their status is, for the most part, inferior to that of reporters; most of them are either Israeli or Palestinian, depending on which side of the conflict they work on. Finally, there are the fixers (the Anglo-Saxon jargon has become universal), who are always recruited locally. The most established fixers may be recruited as assistants in some bureaus, in which case the term ‘producer’ may be used. Some producers will call themselves journalists, but this upgrading is far from universally accepted. Whatever the title and exact function, their ‘skills of proximity’ (Bishara, 2013: 139) (i.e. their knowledge of their local society) are crucial for providing daily coverage – especially for the West Bank and Gaza.

A journalist can advance along this hierarchy through an informal cursus honorum: starting out as an occasional local fixer, becoming a stringer, then being recruited by an international medium, and, in rare cases, moving to the medium’s headquarters outside Israel. I encountered four cases of correspondents who started locally as non-Jews working or studying in Israel and who were eventually recruited and ‘tenured’. One of them, Lorenzo Cremonesi, moved back to Italy and is now among the senior staffers of the Corriere Della Sera (the most popular Italian daily) – he occasionally flies back to the region as a special envoy.

I used the phrase ‘Jerusalem correspondents’ to refer to the population studied instead of ‘foreign correspondents’ because they are mostly Jerusalemite and much less clearly ‘foreign’. Beginning in the 1970s, Jerusalem (or rather, West Jerusalem, on the Israeli side) replaced Tel Aviv (which remained the capital city of the Israeli media) as the city of correspondents and a prestigious one among such cities; the interviewees agreed that Jerusalem ranks third in the world in this respect (after Washington and Brussels). ‘In times of budgetary restrictions, one can suppress or reduce other bureaus or reduce their staff. Not Jerusalem’, said a bureau chief of a major agency. Among the interviewees, some appointed before 2000, for example, Alexandra Schwarzbrod, from the French daily Libération, told us that when peace was ‘about to be signed’ at Camp David, there were jokes about closing the Jerusalem bureau ‘at last’.

Only a small minority of mostly ‘old timers’ (as one young correspondent jokingly referred to them), one of whom described herself as ‘Israelized’ (speaking Hebrew, married to an Israeli), prefer to live in the center, close to Tel Aviv, like Nelson Fletcher, a British journalist working for NBC, or Gisela Dachs, from the German quality magazine Die Zeit. I know of only two correspondents, both French, who were based in the territories at the time of my research: both worked out of Ramallah, the ‘capital city’ of the Palestinian Authority, but have since left.

In a relatively small city, with many points of professional convergence (shared offices for television stations, press conferences, and coverage of violent events), correspondents socialize with each other and collaborate across media; these associations arise in large part from shared culture and language. A Danish correspondent commented, ‘I socialize with Scandinavians, naturally, but also with Israelis, as I studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and speak Hebrew’. In 2001–2003, Luis Lema, correspondent for the Swiss daily le Temps, teamed up with Alexandra Schwarzbrod: while they shared a language, they represented different markets (thus there was no competition), making this the ideal collaboration. Conformism, especially on a sensitive topic, also encourages proximity: some events require coverage, even if one knows in advance what will be said. In addition, the hierarchy puts pressure on junior staff: ‘If you know that everybody gets there, and especially if the big ones do, you go, or your boss will blame you: The New York Times was there and you were not’ (stringer for American media, off).

Finally, and this may directly affect the perception of belonging, distance, and proximity, crucial to this research, the length of stay matters. It is a truism of foreign correspondence, as many interviewees reminded us, that ‘one should not stay too long in the same place’. The over-involved, over-knowledgeable correspondent may become unable to translate the situation for unknowledgeable faraway audiences. Jerusalem contradicts this truism. In addition to the settled ‘old timers’, the average correspondent is often not in a hurry to leave this ‘fascinating and comfortable’ place, which is ‘coveted by others’ (Italian correspondent). With the passage of time, some correspondents become local experts on the region and may write books (NBC’s Fletcher, Enderlin’s France2, not to mention the books quoted in the ‘Methodology’ section), television documentaries, or even, in two cases, novels.

Although I have depicted a rather motley group, it is important to remember that all journalists interviewed here (and their assistants and fixers) are what Pedelty (1995) calls ‘centrist’ journalists. They work for major national media outlets in their respective countries. They do not make any direct connection between their work as journalists and their political leanings, as would journalists from the extreme-right or the extreme-left. This is true of locally recruited journalists interviewed here as well, although, as I will show, they may have to negotiate between their local identity and their identity as a journalist.

I will now move to my findings, discussing first the political-professional aspects, followed by the ethnic and religious identities of journalists, and, finally, their interaction with audiences.

The global–local politics of the conflict and the profession of journalism

Let us start then with the idea that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – a loaded, highly politicized conflict – affects the work of journalists. Most of the journalists interviewed (with the exception of the Japanese correspondents) come from nations where the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a topic of ‘domestic policy’. To illustrate this, France2’s Charles Enderlin quoted a former French president coming back from Israel in the 1970s, answering a journalist’s question with this comment: ‘Israel, it is not abroad’. To Luydendjik (2010), more recently, a Dutch diplomat commented, ‘Arabs and Palestinians are foreign policy. Israel is domestic news’ (p. 117). However, this perceived proximity is not only about Israel. As a Danish correspondent said, ‘In Europe today, Islam and the Arabs, is it really foreign news?’

Major parties and politicians are expected to take a side on the conflict, and public opinion is divided, with a ‘remarkable percentage of people able to voice an opinion for a topic of foreign policy’ (American bureau chief), a comment confirmed by the study of opinion polls in both Europe and the United States (Bourdon, 2012; Pew Research Center, 2007). Consequently, the conflict is part of the domestic political repertoire, which justifies the subject’s presence in the media and which in turn perpetuates the continued political attention accorded the subject.

The interviewees sensed a deterioration of Israel’s image abroad; however, they identify different starting points for this deterioration, depending on their generation, level of knowledge, and nation of origin. For older Europeans, the turning point was unanimously 1967: ‘Israel became an occupier then, even if it took some time to realize it’ (Belgian correspondent, in Israel since the 1950s). Americans will tend to locate the degradation later in history. One correspondent suggested that ‘the end of the dream’ (which coincidentally is also the name of a 1987 NBC documentary referring to the ‘Zionist dream’) may have started with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The first intifada, which started in late 1987, and the second intifada, beginning in October 2000, were also cited as turning points by other correspondents.

Although my research was not, in the start, focused on the differences between Americans and the rest, this emerges as a major axis. Both the few Americans interviewed refer to the others (to Europeans especially), and Europeans to Americans, as covering the conflict differently. The deterioration of the image of Israel may be seen as something positive, especially by some Europeans, as corresponding to a moment of redress: ‘it took so long for the Palestinians to emerge alongside Israel’ (correspondent for Le Monde). Conversely, for many Americans, this is seen as the rise of growing, often unfair criticism of Israel. These divergences were expressed mostly during off-the-record parts of the interviews, at times as ironic statements bordering on contempt and sometimes as mere irritation. For example, a French journalist proclaimed, ‘Most Americans, even the New York Times, which is a bit critical of Israel, are very careful when they do this. For example, they use the Israeli vocabulary, they say “security barrier”, and will never use the term wall’. Jay Bushinsky, one US ‘old timer’ (he started his career with the Eichmann trial), was ‘appalled by the pro-Palestinian bias’ of his European colleagues and claims that after the first Lebanon war, objectivity ‘died in Jerusalem’, blaming some young US reporters and the New York Times (as many pro-Israelis tend to do, see next section). As other American correspondents, he derided the British press, especially newspapers of the liberal left, as pro-Palestinian, but did it openly while his fellow journalists spoke off the record.

Of course, there are exceptions to these general trends on both sides. However, these exceptions perceive themselves and are perceived as just that. A long-time correspondent in the Middle East for the Washington Post, Jonathan Randal is now retired in Paris, where he pours praise on the French media for their coverage of the conflict, as opposed to the American media. Another example was given by a British correspondent, who singled out the late American anchor Peter Jennings for his liberal, ‘non-American’, view of the conflict. Conversely, a rare European correspondent (Czech) who claims to ‘understand Israel’s situation better’ condemns the ‘pro-Palestinian orientation’ of his own country and his country’s media.

These political differences also create tension between the reporters on the ground and the editors in the office. More susceptible to pressure from media executives, public opinion, and the market, editors will tend to stick to the national saleable consensus on controversial subjects. Closer to the ground, reporters will tend to write in a more emphatic, emotional manner, especially when writing about victims they see from up close. They will complain about the ignorance of editors driven by their own agenda. This has been noted in other situations of war reporting (Pedelty, 1995: 90; Dor, 2005).

However, one has to define who the victims are, and here, differences appear again. For most European reporters, overwhelmingly the main victims of the conflict are the Palestinians, but editors may choose to correct or nuance this emphasis. A Spanish reporter’s story was spoken of by one of his colleagues: ‘His report on Jenin for the daily El Mundo, where he refuted the thesis of a massacre by the Israeli army, was corrected in a pro-Palestinian direction by his editor. He was furious’. A French and a Czech journalists reported similar experiences of editors correcting correspondents. In the United States, similar corrections may appear but in the opposite direction. Off the record, three reporters mentioned that their editors at home did not like emphasis on Palestinian suffering (or Israeli responsibility). In a public debate, Lara Marlow, Irish correspondent for an American magazine (Time), remembers how an article of hers covering ‘the suffering of Lebanese citizens bombed by Israel’ was ‘corrected’ by her US editor who ‘gave lots of space to his Israeli friends who said how they were shocked, how it was a mistake which should not have happened’ (Les médias et le traitement du conflit, 2003: 93).

These differences do not quite fit into existing general academic research on journalistic values. Most international comparisons suggest a division between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ journalism, which values neutrality, the separation of commentary and fact, and uses the word ‘objectivity’, and European (continental, and especially French) journalism, which exemplifies a more literary model, leaving more room for the reporter to maneuver, and which admits a certain level of subjectivity (Benson, 2005; Pedetly, 1995: 12). In my case study, national differences among journalists are linked to the history of the relation of each nation to the conflict. Thus, British journalists appear to be closer to their European brethren than to American journalists – more pro-Palestinian, or less pro-Israeli, if you will. And some French Editors, supposedly respectful of their correspondents’ authorship, nonetheless corrected them in a manner more typical of American editing. In short, journalists cannot totally evade the global, or at least Western, politicization of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Hybrid journalists

The conflict is not only a matter of traditional political divisions but also of ethnic identities. While the relationship between the profession, the nation, and conflict situations has been debated in Academic research, the relationship between journalism and other (ethnic and religious) identities has received little attention. Wilson (2000) has diagnosed a ‘paradox’ (p. 97) of African-American journalists, who despite their slowly increasing presence in newsrooms, are placed ‘in the almost total racial and cultural isolation of the newsroom’, where values, policies, and procedure ‘have long ingrained (sic) to exclude the African American perspective’.

The case of minority journalists (Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians) discussed here is somewhat different. As journalists, they will rarely, if at all, claim a ‘Jewish’, or even more rarely, ‘Palestinian’ perspective on the conflict. This is due in part to the fact that their own ethnic and religious identities make them vulnerable to suspicion or criticism from inside their own ‘profession’. This uneasy debate started with Jewish identity long ago and later moved to Arab identity, especially for Palestinian cameramen. Identity is discussed mostly with respect to others rather than in reference to oneself. I only found two correspondents who told me that being Jewish prevented them from covering the conflict (one of them in Paris, due to circumstances not related to this survey).

Seven correspondents (themselves neither Jewish nor Arab or Muslim) agreed it was better for a journalist to be ‘neither Jewish nor Arab’. Connie Mus, a Dutch ‘long timer’, deceased in 2010, and former head of the foreign press association, was quoted several times as having supported this position. Off the record, two journalists (one French and one Italian, both considered relatively pro-Palestinian) leveled accusations at Jewish colleagues for ‘going bonkers’ during the second intifada – that is to say, becoming overly supportive of Israel. Still off the record, a Jewish correspondent was quite critical (off the record) of a past Jewish colleague who was really ‘over-critical of Israel, ‘on the verge of self-hatred’.

From an editorial standpoint, this particular question of identity and neutrality is sometimes an issue when appointing a correspondent. There have been all sorts of unwritten and half-said conventions and hesitations regarding this point. The most famous and public debate took place at the New York Times (Lewis, 2012), when in the late 1970s, Editors-in-Chief broke the unwritten rule of not sending Jews to the Middle East. Jewish correspondents (or correspondents with Jewish-sounding names) were accused of being either pro-Israel Zionists or self-hating Jews (or both!) (Lewis, 2012). At the French newspaper of record, Le Monde, the story was told by Sylvain Cypel (now a correspondent in Washington):

In the ’50s and ’60s, the local correspondent, who was both Jewish and Israeli, was considered ‘too close to Israel’, and was replaced by Amnon Kapeliouk, a francophone Israeli-Jew. However, he was subsequently accused of being too critical of Israel, and was replaced by a string of non-Jews whose neutrality was questioned as well.

For the Israeli government, Jewish correspondents are not preferred, far from it in fact. Daniel Seaman, head of the Israeli Government Press Office from 2000 to 2010, addressed one particular correspondent in the following way: ‘You, the Jews, you are the worst, and those who speak Hebrew are the worst of all’ (Allouche, 2010: 89, see also Lema, 2003: 113). His approach reflected a popular Israeli-Jewish opinion that the country was the victim of unjustified hostility. The accusation of anti-Semitism was leveled by some Jewish journalists at others, but this was always off the record and hard to uncover. One exception was the most vocal US interviewee, Jay Bushinsky: ‘When they told me, how can you be sure, as a Jew, that you are not biased, I would answer, how can you be sure, as a non-Jew, that you are not an anti-Semite?’

The targets of the preceding accusations exhibit complex reactions. They all start, in one way or another, with the classic journalistic position (whether they use the language of ‘objectivity’ or not): ‘There are professional norms anyway, which we have to respect’. The Israeli-Jews or Palestinians recruited as journalists on location have an even more complex position. They do not deny the impact of their ethno-national identity on their work but claim that there is no tension or contradiction between professional and ethnic identities and find that the two can converge harmoniously in their professional practice. A Jewish-Israeli producer states:

I am left-wing on the conflict, but I think that the world tends to blame Israel and stresses only Palestinian suffering. Our job is to present a more balanced view, to give both sides a voice, and this is exactly the job of the journalist.

The same discourse can be found among Palestinian fixers and image people. A Palestinian fixer: ‘The world does not see the occupation anymore, it’s important to remind them of the reality of what takes place there, and this is my job as a journalist’. According to Bishara (2013), this is typical of the Palestinian view of the status of journalists killed by the Israeli army:

Journalists emphasize that they are not parties to the conflict, and yet they also express their willingness to die for their work in terms similar to the way an activist or militant might (…), killed for the ‘truth’ rather than for any particular party or faction. (p. 158).

This is said in a context where Israeli armed forced in the territories have killed mostly Palestinian photographers and cameramen (8 out of 10 journalists killed in the territories in 2009 were Palestinian – see Committee to Project Journalists, 2010) and where Israeli authorities have justified the attacks on Palestinian journalists.

Thus, the ‘professional’ identity of each group (Jews and Palestinians) is fissured in complex ways. The divisions are reminiscent of the distinction that Pedelty (1995) makes regarding coverage of the Salvadoran civil war, between the elite, primary Western, correspondents, and the locally recruited stringers, who were low in the hierarchy and experienced a sense of peripheral belonging (even more so for locals). But the group studied here is more complicated, as some Jewish journalists may well belong to the elite Western group (which will not always prevent them from being suspected of bias or from feeling uncomfortable), while locally recruited Jewish-Israeli journalists generally occupy a lower position in the hierarchy. The question of the impact of their Jewish identity on their work is debated, but much more freely in an American context than in a European one. Finally, Palestinian stringers and fixers are the most dominated group, both within the journalistic world and as part of the occupied ‘nation’ and those most exposed to violence.

Facing audiences: Angry, networked diasporas

Adding a new dimension to the existing literature on the relations between diasporas and the mainstream media, this study shows that certain populations identified with larger diasporic groups (Jews, Arabs, and Muslims) interact with journalists covering the conflict, demonstrating complex connections to one of the implicated parties (Jews to Israel and Arabs and Muslims to Palestinians). Journalists are affected by these groups’ reactions, especially in light of empowering new technologies that permit even more involvement, surveillance and feedback from remote audiences. The sense of being watched by involved audiences matters a great deal – again, some journalists may deny the importance of this in public but acknowledge it more readily in private contexts or off the record.

Some background on those involved audiences is in order here. While not all Jews would agree with the State of Israel, which considers each Jew as a potential Israeli, they certainly share, for the most part, a specific concern for Israel (whatever their political inclination) (Noga, 2012; Sasson et al., 2010). As for the Palestinian side, the Palestinian diaspora is most affected, but the broader Muslim world also pays special attention to the conflict (Pew Research Center, 2006).

Although the older generation recalls that the topic has always been a sensitive one for audiences in their respective countries, all interviewees added that audiences have grown more sensitive since the start of the second intifada. Many possible explanations were proposed: the failure of the peace process (which shattered hopes of normalization, and gave many Jews a sense that Israel was unfairly attacked as responsible for thefailure), the second intifada, the Islamist attacks against civilians since 9/11, and the rise of new forms of hostility toward minorities (both Jews and Arabs) in the West. Additionally, the correspondents all mentioned the role of technologies such as satellite TV and the Internet, in particular, the fact that Jews (including binational Jews in Israel) can now easily monitor the media of their countries of origin and take local correspondents to task through diffusion lists. For Jews, says Didier Epelbaum, former correspondent (and himself a Jew and a French-Israeli citizen) later turned ombudsman for French channel France2, ‘the image of Israel has long been a highly sensitive question’ (see also Pew Research Center, 2006). Recently, other publics have also become more vigilant, as Epelbaum notes, ‘After 2000, Arab and Muslim audiences have woken up, although the protests still largely come from Jews. Protests may come from francophone Tunisians who watch our station across the Mediterranean, comparing with Al Jazeera for example’. Anecdotes about ‘virtual contact’ with audiences, be it through direct mail or diffusion list ‘bombings’, are numerous. Less important to correspondents, it seems, are the media monitoring sites. To quote a Spanish correspondent: ‘If one looked for all the dirt thrown at you on the net, there would be no end to it’.

There is disagreement regarding the effects of these attacks, which have replaced ‘the occasional letter’, ‘or the pack of letters sent by Paris every month, in the pre-internet days’. In public, for the most part, correspondents insist that it does not matter, that they just continue to do their jobs. Rarely, some correspondents (mostly in private) acknowledge that some critics may have a positive effect: ‘After all, it might be important to call the “Esplanade of the Mosques” the “Temple Mount” as well, to remind readers that the place is sacred for many’ (AFP bureau chief). Others are critical of the effect, especially of pro-Israel monitoring:

In the end, of course, there is an effect. Your editor knows that he will get still more emails about this specific word, this kind of report, or you may be tired of being insulted, and it may affect the way you write even if you don’t realize it.

The most violently attacked correspondent has been Charles Enderlin, from France2. His October 2000 report showing the death of a Palestinian child in his father’s arms became, at least in the Arab world, an icon of the second intifada. A long campaign was waged to prove that the whole scene had been staged by Palestinians, with some intellectuals joining the fray, notably Pierre-André Taguieff (2010), a well-known scholar of anti-Semitism. Enderlin, however, is still holding his job, and his pro domo plea (Enderlin, 2010) was well received in France, which suggests that the pro-Israel critiques, at least in a French or European context, cannot easily breach journalistic solidarity.

This form of criticism might be considered a form of diasporic (Jewish or Arab-Palestinians) nationalism, but it retains a national dimension: as many correspondents noted, criticism and attacks are still mostly generated and framed as, say, French criticism directed at French journalists. Even monitoring websites are mostly devoted to specific national media and managed by national activists, whatever their other affiliations may be. The Internet may globalize the ability to criticize, but it also gives more strength and a specific platform to local criticism. Take the case of a correspondent (2001–2006) for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Matza (which we followed on the Internet). His city has both strong Jewish and Muslim communities. In 2001–2002, Palestine Media Watch, an organization created by a resident of Philadelphia, uploaded two reports critical of Matza’s coverage. The ‘Greater Philadelphia District of the Zionist Organization of America’ soon followed suit. Thus, all the way in Jerusalem, Matza felt the pressure from his readers in Philadelphia.

The only exception to the predominance of localized or nationalized criticism might be some English-language monitoring websites that occasionally devote some analysis to the European press. Honest reporting, created in the United Kingdom at the onset of the second intifada, has a US and a Canadian branch but remains focused mostly on the country where it was created. Its attacks were largely directed at The Guardian, for reasons linked to its intellectual status, Jewish readership, and the (ex)-Zionist position of the paper (Baram, 2004: Chapter 10). Critiques cross national lines more frequently for major agencies that work in several languages: The bureau chief of the Agence France Press provides one example:

February 2005: big Israeli operation in the Gaza strip. A stringer said the operation had killed many Palestinian children. It was a mistake, corrected right away, but not on Yahoo in English, which triggered a flow of more than 1000 insulting emails, many identical, mostly from the US.

Thus, from the correspondents’ point of view, ethnic diasporas matter but are always mediated by the national framework for the production, reception, and criticism of their work (although these frames seem to have become more fragmented and fragile).

In sum, this process of reception by audiences who appropriate the conflict through a sense of belonging to larger, supranational groups with which they express solidarity through largely new transnational identifications and mobilizations complicates the work of journalists in new ways. For the most part, and excepting the occasional direct ‘snail mail’, the interaction with audiences was previously mediated by the editors back home, who have their own political and commercial concerns. Now, journalists have direct contact with audiences, at least with the more committed or critical audience members. There is no accepted discourse on the impact of this new factor, which is acknowledged differently, then again, following the contexts (public, private, off or on the record).

Conclusion: Fissured journalism

This study has shown how the work of the Jerusalem correspondents illustrates both older and more recent divisions that affect the journalistic world, with implications that go beyond the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. As in Pedelty (1995), the journalistic world appears hierarchized, from (mostly) Western staffers to local fixers (especially Palestinian), staffers and stringers, although even the elite staffer has to answer to an editor. Journalists, especially Americans and Europeans, are also divided according to different styles of journalism, but this is less important than the political division between more pro-Israel Americans and more pro-Palestinian Europeans. More subtly, the question of ethnic origin weighs on the work of journalists, overlapping somewhat with political divisions. There is an ongoing debate, which varies according to the country, about the ability of a Jew to cover Israel–Palestine. Within this debate, a diasporic Jew might be treated differently from a local, Israeli citizen. For Arabs and Palestinians, for hierarchical reasons, this debate has applied mostly to fixers and photographers. Finally, correspondents now have to face the digital feedback of angry ‘diasporic audiences’.

In a situation where they are pressured to declare their loyalties, whether by a party to the conflict, a member of their own ethnic group, an editor (and member of their own organization and nation), or simply by an anonymous member of their national audience, my subjects are ill at ease and use different repertoires of justification depending on the context. Many start with the universal professional discourse (‘we just do our job’), with increasing dogmatism when faced with a hostile audience. Some combine national-ethnic values with professional ones, while others insist on the superiority of one national form of journalism over another. Some may deny the impact of audience involvement in one context and admit it in a more private one. This variability speaks volumes about the difficulty adjusting to this new context.

In short, journalists can by no means close themselves off in a world of ideal journalistic professionalism and ‘just do their jobs’, as some claim to do in public debates. They are vulnerable as a result of both political affiliations and overlapping national and ethnic identities. Audiences are stratified to an even greater extent by these various allegiances, and they can now make their voices heard by interacting directly with correspondents through modern technology.

This has implications for the study of foreign correspondence and foreign news beyond the present case. Coming back to the first issue, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is certainly unique in the amount of long-term coverage and the extent of the ‘domestication’ of the topic in each national-political landscape. But the second and third issues are more broadly applicable and increasingly so in a global, connected, and controversial world. As noted by Hamilton and Jenner (2004), new profiles of foreign correspondents include many ‘hybrids’, locally recruited journalists with multicultural profiles, so that ‘foreign’ correspondents can be sent ‘back’ to their countries or communities of origin; these hybrids must delicately negotiate two cultures, that of the ‘reported’ and of the ‘reporter’. This is bound to create conflicts and tensions like the ones explored here between journalists and editors and journalists and local actors, as well as internal tensions caused by journalists’ individual conflicting identities. Finally, contact with multicultural audiences matters more and more as large multicultural communities with their own complex worldviews, especially in Western Europe, are news consumers with the ability to interact with the content creators. Foreign correspondents might thus become less like reporters for a specific nation and more like multicultural mediators for citizens who are not so different from themselves.