Middle East And Canada
Middle East And CanadaIntroduction
In December 1985, the Canadian press reported the death by suicide of hundreds of field mice in the Middle East. In an apparently instinctive reaction to a problem
of over-population, the mice wilfully plunged to their doom off the cliffs of the Golan Heights. This bizarre story was the subject not only of straight news coverage in
the Canadian press, but also of an editorial in the Globe and Mail on December 20. On November 1, 1985, the Globe and Mail also ran a photograph of a visiting
Roman Catholic priest from Brazil, saying prayers on the banks of the Jordan River at the site where Christ is said to have been baptized. Standing alertly near the
priest was an Israeli soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder, his eyes carefully scanning Jordanian territory across the river.
For the analyst of the media and media image-making, these rather unusual press items raise an interesting question about news selection and presentation by the
editorial departments of the daily press. Had the mice toppled off Mount Kilimanjaro would this essentially scientific story about animal behaviour have found its way
so prominently into the Canadian press? Had the priest been peacefully saying mass on the Mattawa would this religious item have been deemed worthy of
coverage? Or was it the newspapers' sense of the irony of these events, of their news value as symbols depicting the pervasive conflict and violence we have come
to associate with the Middle East that led to their selection for publication from the reams of teletype endlessly flowing into the editorial departments of the Canadian
press? It would seem that even when the subject matter is scientific or religious--about mice or monsignors--the press is inclined to remind its readers of the
inherently violent nature of the Middle East, and a fundamentally negative image is developed or reinforced. It is, Canadians are told in effect, a region so bleak and
hopeless that even its despairing mice are driven to take their lives.
The purpose of this study is to examine in an empirical fashion Canadian daily press coverage of the Middle East to establish, inter alia, what type of image of the
region and of its principal actors (Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states) is, in fact, presented to the Canadian reader and what impact, if any, the character of
that coverage has had on the shaping of Canadian foreign policy.
Hypotheses and Methodology
A review of the existing, limited literature on Canadian media coverage of the Middle East together with the more extensive literature on the Canadian media and
international affairs generally led us to advance five hypotheses to test in our study of press coverage of the Middle East:
(1) It was anticipated that treatment of the region would be relatively substantial, given the prominence of Middle East events in the context of East-West relations
and issues of global peace and security, and that the predominant coverage would be of Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt and Lebanon because of their central role in
Middle East conflict (Hackett,...
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