Culturally unconscious

Abstract

In this article, the author critically examines The New York Times (NYT) representation of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the recent political contexts presented by US President Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 and leader of West Bank, President Mahmoud Abbas’s, imminent claim to nationhood at the UN in 2011. The purpose of the case study is to establish a theoretical framework for the connection between media representation of conflicts and influence on intercultural communication and relations between various cultural groups. The analysis of the editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor reveals that media representation of conflicts has deep implications for intercultural communication and relations, that representational politics allows for overrepresentation of dominant groups in the Israel–Palestine conflict context, that discursive use of conflict terms like ‘peace,’ ‘victim,’ etc., constructs particular identities that privilege dominant groups, and that there is unconscious projection of cultural expectations of the dominant groups in the discursive representation of the conflict.