In September 2000 Palestine Media Watch (PMW), a group of activists who were critical of American journalism’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began to lobby journalists to revise their coverage. They lobbied by appealing to professional journalism’s ideal-typical traits and by bombarding news organizations with complaints. This study examines the period between 2000 and 2004 when PMW lobbied newsworkers and does so in order to uncover what journalistic responses to PMW—what criticisms journalists legitimized and what criticisms they rejected—reveal about journalism’s professional ideology. The study finds that journalism’s ideal-typical traits possess a core-like quality that allows critics to make professionally resonating criticisms but that journalism’s fluidity often prevents these criticisms from achieving a “journalistically useful” level in which coverage revisions result. Journalism’s ideal-typical traits are so fluid, in fact, that professional journalists will often denigrate their professional tenets in order to defend whatever content is produced by those denigrated tenets.
AadimorA. (2003, February1). A story of conflict: Coverage of fighting in the Middle East has brought war to many newsrooms. The Quill, 91(1), 12.
2.
Barker-PlummerB. (1995). News as a political resource: Media strategies and political identity in the U.S. women’s movement, 1966-1975. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, 306-324.
3.
Barker-PlummerB. (1996). The dialogic of media and social movements. Peace Review, 8(1), 27-33.
4.
BarkhoL.RichardsonJ. E. (2009). The impact of BBC production strategies on news discourse. Unpublished manuscript, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden.
5.
BennettW. L. (1990). Toward a theory of press-state relations in the United States. Journal of Communication, 40(2), 103-127.
6.
BennettW. L.LivingstonS. (2003). A semi-independent press: Government control and journalistic autonomy in the political construction of news. Political Communication, 20(4), 359-362.
7.
BensonR. (2004). Bringing the sociology of media back in. Political Communication, 21, 252-292.
8.
BouzidA. (2002). Countering the spin. Philadelphia, PA: Palestine Media Watch.
9.
BouzidA. (2003). Framing the struggle: Essays on the Middle East and the US Media. New York, NY: iUniverse.
10.
CarlsonM. (2009). Media criticism as competitive discourse: Defining reportage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 33(3), 258-277.
11.
CiolliR. (2002, May28). An electronic eye: Web sites evolve into media monitor. Newsday, p. A40.
12.
CollinsC. A.ClarkJ. E. (1992). A structural narrative analysis of Nightline’s “This Week in the Holy Land.”Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9(1), 25-43.
13.
Columbia Journalism Review. (2003, May/June). The other war: A debate, 42(1), 54-57.
14.
DeuzeM. (2005). What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism, 6(4), 442-464.
15.
DeuzeM. (2008). Understanding journalism as newswork: How it changes, and how it remains the same. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 5(2), 4-23.
16.
DunskyM. (2008). Pens and swords: How the American mainstream media report the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
17.
FrielH.FalkR. (2007). Israel-Palestine On record: How the New York Times misreports conflict in the Middle East. London: Verso.
18.
GansH. J. (2004). Deciding what’s news (25th anniversary ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
19.
GetlerM. (2001, July29). Middle East coverage. The Washington Post, p. B6.
20.
GetlerM. (2002a, January20). Covering the company. The Washington Post, p. B6.
21.
GetlerM. (2002b, March24). Reporters and readers—who’s biased?The Washington Post, p. B6.
22.
GetlerM. (2002c, April7). The shadow of the bombers. The Washington Post, p. B6.
23.
GetlerM. (2002d, May5). Caught in the crossfire. The Washington Post, p. B6.
24.
GetlerM. (2002e, June9). Tense times. The Washington Post, p. B6.
25.
GitlinT. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the lew left. Berkeley: University of California Press.
26.
GramsciA. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (HoareQ.SmithG. N., Trans.). New York, NY: International Publishers.
27.
HandleyR. L. (2008). Israeli image repair: Recasting the deviant actor to retell the story. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32(2), 140-154.
28.
HandleyR. L. (2010). Cascading activation: Bush’s war on terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journalism: Theory, Practice, & Criticism, 11(4), 445-461.
29.
HayesA. S. (2008). Press critics are the fifth estate: Media watchdogs in America. Westport, CT: Praeger.
30.
HermanE. S.ChomskyN. (2002). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York, NY: Pantheon.
31.
JurkowitzM. (2003, February9). Blaming the messenger. Boston Globe Magazine, p. 10.
32.
KingM. (2002, April27). “Balance” is often in the eyes of the beholder. Atlanta Journal Constitution, p. A15.
33.
KumarD. (2007). Outside the box: Corporate media, globalization, and the UPS strike. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
34.
MarrarK. (2009). The Arab lobby and US foreign policy. New York, NY: Routledge.
35.
MatusowB. (2004, June1). Caught in the crossfire. American Journalism Review, 26(3), 51-55.
36.
MindichD. T. Z. (1998). Just the facts: How “objectivity” came to define American journalism. New York, NY: New York University Press.
37.
NoakesJ. A.WilkinsK. G. (2002). Shifting frames of the Palestinian movement in US news. Media, Culture & Society, 24(5), 649-671.
38.
OkrentD. (2005, April24). The hottest button: How The Times covers Israel and Palestine. The New York Times, p. 12.
39.
PedeltyM. (1995). War stories: The culture of foreign correspondents. New York, NY: Routledge.
40.
Pednekar-MagalV.JohnsonM. (2004). International news and localized discourse: Re-presentation of Israel/Palestine conflict in local news. MICA Communication Review, 1(3), 34-42.
41.
ReeseS. D. (1990). The news paradigm and the ideology of objectivity: A socialist at the Wall Street Journal. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7, 390-409.
42.
ReeseS. D. (2001). Prologue—framing public life: A bridging model for media research. In ReeseS. D.GandyO. H.Jr.GrantA. E. (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 7-31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
43.
ReeseS. D. (2004). Militarized journalism: Framing dissent in the Persian Gulf Wars. In AllanS.ZelizerB. (Eds.), Reporting the war: Journalism in wartime (pp. 247-265). New York, NY: Routledge.
44.
ReeseS. D.LewisS. C. (2009). Framing the war on terror: The internalization of policy in the US press. Journalism, 10(6), 777-797.
45.
RyanC. (1991). Prime time activism: Media strategies for grassroots organizing. Boston, MA: South End.
46.
RyfeD. M. (2006). The nature of news rules. Political Communication, 23(2), 203-214.
47.
SaidE. W. (1997). Covering Islam. New York, NY: Vintage.
48.
SchudsonM.AndersonC. W. (2008). News production and organizations: Objectivity, professionalism, and truth seeking. In Wahl-JorgensenK.HanitzchT. (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (pp. 88-101). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
49.
TuchmanG. (1972). Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity. The American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660-679.
50.
WuH. D.SylvesterJ.HamiltonJ. M. (2002). Newspaper provides balance in Palestinian/Israeli reports. Newspaper Research Journal, 23(2/3), 6-17.
51.
VaneS. (2002, July/August). Days of rage. American Journalism Review, 24(6), 32-37.
52.
ZaharnaR. S. (1997). The Palestinian leadership and the American media: Changing images, conflicting results. In KamalipourY. R. (Ed.), The U.S. media and the Middle East: Image and perception (pp. 37-49). Westport, CT: Praeger.
