In its May-June issue, the Columbia Journalism Review has published three perspectives on the media’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead, also known as the Gaza War. One of them is by your favourite Israeli blogger (that’d be me).

Taghreed El-Khodary is the Gaza correspondent for the New York Times. Her reporter’s notebook piece is called The Smell of Paradise: under pressure in Gaza.

Taghreed and I spoke jointly at a conference in Norway this past March. Here’s a photo I took of her on the last day in snowy Tonsberg, as we were waiting for our taxis to the airport.

J.J. Goldberg is the former editor of The Forward. He compares the British and American media’s coverage of Gaza in his piece, called A Matter of Trust.

(I’ve never met J.J., so I don’t have any photos of him).

My piece is about the Israeli media’s coverage of the war. It is called Covering Gaza from Israel: what Israelis wanted to know about the war. It starts like this:

“During the first week of Israel’s winter military operation in Gaza, a broadcaster for Channel 2, which has the highest rating of Israel’s three television stations, sparked a small firestorm by expressing what was perceived as excessive sympathy for the enemy. Summarizing a report during the evening news, anchorwoman Yonit Levy said, “It’s hard to convince the world that the war is justified when we have one person dead and the Palestinian nation has 350 dead.” Channel 2 was soon inundated with letters of complaint and came under fire online, where somebody set up an Internet petition to have Levy fired. Several of Levy’s colleagues, horrified by what one called a ‘lynch,’ came publicly to her support.

In the end the controversy was short-lived: Levy continues to anchor the Channel 2 news broadcast, which maintains its high ratings, and she remains Israel’s most popular news anchor. But the reaction to her statement is interesting as a demonstration of the solid public support—polled at more than 90 percent—for the twenty-two-day military operation, which finished with around 1,200 to 1,400 Palestinians killed and 11 Israelis, including 3 civilians. It also suggests what kind of wartime coverage the Israeli public wanted from its media.”

Click here to read the rest. You can comment on the CJR site – or, come back here to speak your mind.

Credit: ISRAELPRESS by Tomeriko/Flickr

“Since the start of the current Gaza campaign, the Israeli government and army have repeatedly said that they learned many lessons from the Second Lebanon War. Ostensibly, they are referring to the tactical and political breakdown outlined in the devastating postwar report issued by the Winograd Commission. But it seems that the government also learned a powerful lesson from Hezbollah — i.e., whoever controls the media wins the war.”

Click here to continue reading “Eyeless in Israel,” my opinion piece for the Forward.

UPDATE: Hmmm. It looks as though Haaretz’s Yossi Melman reads my blog.