Canadian Press Coverage in the Middle East :: Canada Media Middle East News Essays

Canadian Press Coverage in the place EastIn December 1985, the Canadian press reported the termination by suicide of hundreds of field mice in the middle East. In an evidently instinctive reaction to a problem of over-population, the mice willfully plunged to their doom sour the cliffs of the Golan Heights. This bizarre business relationship was the subject not only of straight give-and-take reporting in the Canadian press, but also of an editorial in the Globe and air on December 20. On November 1, 1985, the Globe and Mail also ran a photograph of a visiting Roman Catholic priest from Brazil, saying prayers on the banks of the Jordan River at the site where Christ is tell to have been baptized. Standing alertly near the priest was an Israeli pass with a rifle slung over his shoulder, his eyes carefully scanning Jordanian territory across the river. For the analyst of the media and media depict-making, these rather unusual press items get on an interesting question abo ut news selection and presentation by the editorial departments of the workaday press. Had the mice toppled off Mount Kilimanjaro would this essentially scientific story about animal behavior have found its way so prominently into the Canadian press? Had the priest been peacefully saying stilt on the Mountain would this religious item have been deemed worthy of coverage? Or was it the newspapers sense of the irony of these events, of their news value as symbols depiction the pervasive conflict and violence we have come to associate with the Middle East that led to their selection for publication from the reams of teletype endlessly flowing into the editorial departments of the Canadian press? It would seem that even when the subject matter is scientific or religious--about mice or monsignors--the press is inclined to remind its readers of the inherently uncultivated nature of the Middle East, and a fundamentally negative image is develop or reinforced. It is, Canadians are told in effect, a region so sensitive and hopeless that even its despairing mice are driven to take their lives. The pop the question of this study is to examine in an empirical fashion Canadian daily press coverage of the Middle East to establish, inter alias, what type of image of the region and of its principal actors (Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states) is, in fact, resented to the Canadian reader and what impact, if any, the character of that coverage has had on the shaping of Canadian foreign policy.