DECONSTRUCTING MEDIA NARRATIVES ON THE ISRAEL–PALESTINE CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF AL JAZEERA AND BBC

Abstract

In addition to its being a longstanding geopolitical conflict, the Israel–Palestine conflict is one that is also communicated, in which news outlets pick events, package them, name them and place them on the map for readers and viewers. The current study compares the way in which Al Jazeera and BBC News narrate the conflict in a six-article corpus in 2023. The original research sequence has been preserved with improved conceptual and methodological aspects. The detection and analysis of data consists of a combination of approaches including: thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis, framing theory, a constructivist paradigm, and grounded-theory-informed comparative coding. Historical context, headlines and labels, emphasis on sources, humanitarian representations, personal testimony, emotive language, metaphors, statistics and the role of Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are highlighted. The results show a systematic variation in the emphasis of the narration and not only a binary distinction between objective versus biased narration approach. Occupation, historical injustice, humanitarian suffering, international criticisms, activism and structural explanations of violence are put more strongly in the selected Al Jazeera texts. The use of specific BBC texts highlights more of the immediate security implications of the 7 October attacks, Israeli civilian experiences, Hamas' military positioning, security failure, deterrence and individual stories of loss. These and other variations illustrate a discursive selection and an importance of framing in reporting processes about international conflicts. The study suggests that the media do not simply report events; they render specific elements of an event more salient and thus create an interpretive context where audiences perceive responsibility, victim and legitimate, as well as potential responses. At the same time, the small purposive sample means generalizing the findings to the whole editorial output of either organization is not warranted. The results are therefore not to be interpreted as a quantitative evaluation of institutional bias but as a qualitative comparison of delineated corpus.