Since the 7th of october, the attack of Hamas in Israel and the war of the Israeli army in Gaza, the Middle-East conflict has returned to our attention and has provoked very different reactions in Europe, especially in France and Germany. We take this as a starting point to adress the question of media coverage of the conflict in German and French, but also other Western and Israeli and Arab media. The two communication researchers Carola Richter and Jérôme Bourdon discuss conditions, constraints and conflicts of this coverage and situate it in a wider historical and political context.
Carola Richter is a professor of international communication at Freie Universität Berlin. Her fields of expertise are media systems and communication cultures in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, especially in Libya and Egypt, communication strategies of social movements, especially Islamist ones, and more broadly media systems, media coverage of foreign affairs, media and migration and Islam and media. She is engaged in many institutions related to these topics, she is for example one of the editors of the German version of the Global media journal. She has widely published on the topic, for example an edited volume about the Middle East and the Media (Norderstedt: BoD, 2014) and an article about the same topic (Der Nahostkonflikt und die Medien. In: Global Media Journal – German Edition 4(1). URL: http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-29854/GMJ7_Richter_final.pdf). She also intervenes in public media, for example in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur about the role of al-Jazeera in the current conflict in the Middle East in January 2024: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/al-jazeera-unabhaengige-arabische-stimme-fuer-die-welt-dlf-kultur-9421ea4a-100.html
Jérôme Bourdon is a professor at the department of communication at Tel Aviv University and an associate researcher at Paris University 2 (Paris Assas) and the Center of Media Research in Paris. He has a wide exertpise on the history of television in France and in Europe, the sociolgy of media professionnels, Media, Memory and History in France and Israel, and the coverage of the Middle East-conflict in Western media. He has also widely published on this topic, for example his monograph on The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Media (“Le récit impossible. Le conflit israélo-palestinien et les médias“, Paris: De Boecke and Institut national de l'audiovisuel, 2009) or a co-authored article „Questioning Mediatization. A historical and anthropological critique”, in International Journal of Communication 15/2021, 2807–2826). He also intervenes in public media, for example an interview with Mediapart about the images of horror in the conflict between Hamas and Israel in November 2023: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/141123/les-images-de-l-horreur-diffusees-par-les-acteurs-du-conflit-sont-une-nouvelle-escalade