Book Review: Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style

Abstract

News reports, they suggest, which are bereft of historical background, both disadvantage the Palestinian position, which as a consequence is rendered motiveless (the assumption being that historical context will always work to the advantage of a Palestinian perspective), and add to general confusion about the conflict. Much more challenging is the task of providing historically informed and 'balanced' news reporting in a context where not only are histories and narratives of the conflict deeply contested, but in which day-to-day accusations of blame for the recent outbreak of violence are themselves subject to multiple and competing truth-claims. Reductionist, chromatic and 'bite-sized' views of 'H'istory (either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli) used in the service of explanation, would no doubt aid comprehension of the present conflict but compromise the complex and multiple histories involved, as well as the process(es) by which audiences reach their opinions.Drawing upon a quantitatively focused content analysis of news, the authors suggest that Israelis were given twice as much opportunity to present their case as were Palestinians and that when doing so their speech was given added legitimacy by the trappings of institutional power. Israeli government spokespersons were, the authors report, afforded the opportunity to speak from 'calm and relaxed' surroundings, unlike Palestinians, who tended to be interviewed in the street against the noisy backdrop of demonstrations and violence. Clearly, speech derives its authority from the power in which it is invested. Yet the authors appear to underestimate the extent to which such reporting merely reflects the vast power imbalances of each side relative to the other, or to fully account for the media's choice of Palestinian vox populi over official voices within the Palestinian Authority.Somewhat tautologically, the authors' claim that 'news implicitly assumed the status quo' (p. 157) -in which Palestinian militants were typically described as 'gunmen' or 'terrorists' whilst Israeli soldiers were described neutrally as just thatelides the extent to which language is, ab initio, and by its very nature, political; governed by a binary nexus of alterity in which all speech is classification, through which oppression operates. It is indeed difficult to see how reporting could function in these circumstances without recourse to such classificatory terms, other than by a complete reversal of words attributed to each side -an inversion of the present hegemony of language -whereby power relations themselves would need to undergo an equally dramatic shift.