posted By Hamad Al-Tourah on December 12, 2007

After the public outcry charging the elite media, lead by the New York Times, in wrongly leading the charge to war, you would think that the paper would reconsider leading a similar charge. Instead, the audible new drum beat against Iran is being heard across its coverage of the Annapolis Conference. Littering its Op-Ed and editorial pages, the coverage confounds all logic. To think that a “peace process” of all events accompanies a lead on war, instead of informing the public of the significant proceedings of such a conference, certainly kicks the ideals of investigative, critical journalism out the window. This kind of coverage damages public concern for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and undermines the conference’s ability to consummate peace. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky trace a line around this logic. “The media do, in fact suppress a great deal of information, but even more important is the way they present a particular fact – its placement, tone, and frequency of repetition – and the framework of analysis in which it is placed”(Chomsky and Herman 407) The media suppression of the factual proceedings of the conference undermine public knowledge of the failings of peace conferences like that came before it, making it impossible to highlight development in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the same time, this void allows reports to more conveniently place the current conference into a larger framework of analysis that highlights Iran and the strategic significance of national security regularly used in the current administrations war narratives.
During the week leading up to the conference, Times contributor Denielle Pletka left readers with this final word of Condoleezza’s Rice involvement in the process: “Rice is making her legacy dependent on the future behavior of … Palestinian pretenders. Ultimately, that will serve neither selfish nor national interests.” This precedent allows reporters to take up space not with conclusive data about the conference, but to actually avoid reporting on the matter. It is appropriate then that a sister article printed on December 3, days after the conference, doesn’t take up a portrait of the conference at all, but places Bush’s photo-op alongside the photos of Carter and Clinton, notorious for their failed attempts at brokering the same peace. The headline, “Peace? Sure, I’ll See What I Can Do,” insinuates the weak impetus at achieving peace while synonymizing the failed attempts at Camp David with Annapolis.
The media failure to report on and encourage development in this arena can be assessed by simply looking at the way in which the conferences’ aims are detailed. The Baltimore Sun, reporting on the story because of the “local aspect of this event,” makes only one mention of the proceedings of the conference in its reporting(“…an agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to create a democratic Palestinian state…”). Such reports do nothing to develop the detail’s of the conference as delivered by President Bush in his address in the White House Press Room. By pairing historical repetition of news with coverage that blatantly undermines any detailed analysis of the conferences’ provisions, these reports are non-committal to actually developing the conference itself as a news item. An explanation of this refusal to report can be explained using a concern voiced by Gaye Tuchman when she notes “there is a possibility that there are questions and answers they do not know, reporters may not be able to get a handle on innovation….To make it a suitable topic of news, they may dismiss it, mock it or otherwise transform it”(Tuchman 404). The coverage of the Annapolis conference only naturalizes a status quo of failure of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, at the same time downplaying the need for progress in coverage that under-informs the public.
A dearth of knowledge on the conference itself allows attention to the Annapolis Conference to shift to the attempts of the Bush Administration at “saving face” in lieu of their failed foreign policy in the Middle East. Commonly, reports give credit to the strengthening of a “coalition of countries”, such as Syria, once in direct opposition to American political affairs. In this way, the media partakes in solidifying a positive representation of the current administration by constructing the narrative of “a positive war, a war more easily constructed by the dualism of good versus evil…eliding all other narratives”(Shohat 136). Article after article, we are seeing a press that undermines the peace process as politically viable solution while dually playing an active role alongside an administration whose public support continues to wane. By placing the president and his call for alarm against Iran at the center of a peace conference, the press continues to play a complicit role with the current administration. The precedence for the war narrative is built into the infrastructure of American media organizations, specifically because of the ease in which international events can be framed as American foreign policy concerns.
Media creates neat narratives for current administrations by shedding light on the failure of previous peace conferences, with special regard to a failure ensured by Israel’s earnest attempts at peace met with Palestinian’s stingy refusal to accept it. At once, this kind of coverage only frames the current peace conference in a more positive light, assuming that in this case of political déjà vu, nothing could be worse than Camp David, an example of “the failure of the peace process and the eruption of the intifada in the Fall of 2000”(Reinhart 16). Paradoxically, the media coverage of the current conference is surprisingly unwelcome to peace prospects, characterized by a mood of disillusionment in response to the futility of conferences passed. This constant recycling of responses conference after conference is atavistic, a term used by Martin McLoone in his essay, “Traditions of Representation: Political Violence and the Myth of Atavism.” His essay chronicles representation trends in the film industry as a response to noted conflicts. Of note is his discussion of “the cinema of the peace process” whereby “the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the subsequent need for American genre cinema to find new ‘villains’ to sustain the conventions of the thriller narrative” (McLoone 213). McLoone establishes a useful framework for reading media representations to sustain audience attention. In this sense, we can interpret the news media coverage trends following the Middle and Near East as once dominated by the war narrative against Afghanistan and the Taliban, then by Iraq and now in its increasing attention to an impending war against Iran. All these trends closely concern the tie between the United States and its democratic ally in Israel with Israel’s shared interests in the current administrations war on Iraq embodied by Minister of Defenses Yitzhak Mordechai’s interview on Israeli television, saying, “Israel can not rest unless Saddam Hussein is eliminated.” In the current tide rising against Iran, the American media has been more active in placing Iran at the core of the Annapolis Conference to fit into these war narratives, alongside Israeli and American administrations. Al-Jazeera’s cognizance of these narratives were published in a recent report criticizing Israel for, “hyping the intelligence about an Iraq nuclear threat prior to the invasion…a recent example of Israel's disinformation.Iran is another.”
This is not to say that Israel and its press is fueling the flames of the media drum beat for a war on the Middle East. Quite the opposite, the Israeli press has been instrumental in providing a counter-narrative to the American press – at times much more critical to American and Israeli policy. Writers for the leading Israeli publication have challenged American press concerns throughout the Annapolis Conference with statements and questions positing that, “Iran is … losing its status as a strategic threat because of the report, and Israel will find it difficult to ‘enlist’ Iran to promote its regional policy… What good can come from emphasizing the ties between Iran and Hamas or Hezbollah when Iran is now portrayed as a state that no longer threatens the region? And why should the Annapolis conference be described as designed to stymie Iran?” This contrast points greater blame on those American newspapers and broadcast news networks that insist on framing the Annapolis Conference not on its ideal intention, finding a lasting peace in a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, but in the Conference’s importance in gearing up against Iran in a string of events that can only recycle the consequences of the press’s drum beat to war in Iraq. In the week’s following the conference, the New York Times published several articles epitomizing such charges. “For the first time a coalition of Western and modern Arab leaders has coalesced and declared its commitment to resist ‘extremism’ in the Middle East – a well-known euphemism for Iran,” wrote Op-Ed contributor Michael B. Oren. Just prior to the conference, Roger Cohen also wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that, “The rising Middle Eastern power, Iran, has not been invited. Nor has Hamas. What’s present in abundance is desperation. Bush must use it.” The latter example set a precedence inserting Iran into the grain of the conference, suggesting to readers that the conference has only led a wave of resistance against Iran. The former example allows that shadow to linger in the absence of the conference, so that what is left is not the proceedings of a U.S. brokered peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, but a call to action against the threats, though absent in this conference, still looming in the Middle East.
What the Annapolis should have opened up in the press is a space whereby the failure of peace processes passed could be opened up and dissected by the print and broadcast media in order to project how the possibility for peace in the current process could be realized. Instead, the recycling of the political myth of atavism as it relates to McLoone’s war narratives undercuts the presses efforts in detailed analysis and diagnosis in these matters. It only harkens back to the threat of war and “so underpins the necessity for continuing the search for peace”(McLoone 231). Norman Soloman accurately and succinctly points out this presidential spin and the medias complicity with it. While reading the New York Times on October 29, 2005, he spots two contradictory claims laying side by side, “‘there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,’” read one headline just above an editorial below, where “the Times flatly stated conjecture as fact: ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program.’” These contradictions are subtly placed in the midst of current political affairs, so only after the political proceedings have been emptied out as insignificant, can they take a larger precedence as an indicator of the looming conflict against Iran.
An article from the Los Angeles Times, published after the end of the conference on December 2, mimics this model, emptying out the possibility for peace before ending its coverage with a return to this Iran narrative. After outlining Bush’s approach of non-intervention in the peace talks, the article criticizes “the administrations insistence on a limited U.S. role” because of the “skepticism about the likelihood of the talks resulting in a peace agreement.” Not long before the article’s end do we see the predictable return to the Iran narrative, pointing out Rice’s intention of strengthening a coalition in the Middle East against Iran as an “initiative that could ‘change the narrative of the administrations foreign policy in that region.’” The blogging world, in addition to what we have already seen in the Israeli press, puts the mainstream newspaper coverage of the event into even greater perspective. In a Huffington Post article, Bruce Feiler frames the events critically between the press coverage inevitably turning to recycle formula’s already recycled in its predictable move “portraying the summit in Annapolis in strictly Bush v. Clinton terms…” He ends the article by recalling that this is the first “event of the post-war-Iraq-Middle East. The presence of these dissenting voices alongside those of Israel’s Haaratz and Qatar’s Al-Jazeera critically aim at dissecting a conference that the elite newspapers have only used to push forward news items that will last in the nation’s foreign relations conflicts with Iran.

Sources
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