Thursday, October 18, 2007
At Honest Reporting: A project sets out to prove that any country can be made to look like a pariah.
The media is the most powerful tool for "branding" a country. The enormous number of foreign journalists based in Israel has certainly played its part in keeping the Arab-Israeli conflict in the public eye, far beyond other conflict zones around the world, such as Darfur.
Despite being a global leader in hi-tech, science, agriculture and many other fields, Israel suffers from negative branding by the media primarily within the context of a conflict situation.
In stark contrast, what is the Netherlands associated with? Many of you will conjure up benign images of windmills and tulips. It would be hard to find anything particularly offensive or negative to say about the Netherlands. Yet, this is precisely what Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has done with his new blog site "Bad News From the Netherlands"...
This is interesting.
Why are people surprised? What happens when Madison Avenue is hired to promote political ideologies?
I wonder how many billions are spent to promote an antiIsrael agenda?
People are aware of the amateur productions that are nevertheless so damaging: as you all know this is the subject of the lawsuits against France2 concerning al Dura, of course all the hard work by people like Richard Landes et.al.
What I think we're missing is the professional contribution to this mess. Journalists by definition are theoretically duty bound NOT to pontificate but they do it all the time. I see it on CNN International, they way exceed the bounds of reporting when it comes to Israel; they flat out editorialize. And they are probably tame compared to Reuters and BBC and France2 -
But what about the impact of professional PR firms on the Arab/Israeli conflict? I'll bet it's huge, just huge - along with that of NGO's who also play a propaganda role.