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What did the world press say about the Hezbollah-Israel war?

Hezbollah won.
Israel was the victim.
Deaths were mere stats.
Qana was the turning point.

The Summer 2006 Conflict Between Hezbollah and Israel, One Year Later...

Understanding Results

Study Methodology

Authors

The study used five categories to evaluate the news outlets:

Authority: Was the coverage first-hand & from the battlefield?

Depth: How comprehensive, complex & diverse was the coverage?

Source Balance: How balanced was the use of sources?

Frame Balance: Was one side given more focus than the other?

Empathy: How personal & compassionate was the coverage of victims?

	Excellent
	Very Good
	Average
	Poor
	Not Acceptable

STUDY METHODOLOGY

This study looked at how news sources from all over the world reported on the war: Were the journalists on the front lines? Was the reporting in-depth? Did reporters interview sources on all sides? How balanced was the focus on Hezbollah and Israel? Did the pain and suffering of civilian and military casualties make news—or was the focus on the military and political repercussions of the fighting?

This study analyzed 14 major English newspapers from around the world and over 900 articles about the the Hezbollah-Israel war that erupted on July 12, 2006, and ended around August 15, 2006. The newspapers were:

Daily Star (Lebanon)	Los Angeles Times	The Independent (UK)
Financial Times (UK)	New York Times	The Nation (Pakistan)
Herald Sun (Australia)	Press Trust (India)**	Turkish Daily
Irish Times	South China Morning Post	Washington Post
Jerusalem Post (Israel)	The Guardian (UK)

Research Team and Funding

The research project was conducted over the fall and spring semesters of 2006-2007. It was designed and directed by Jad Melki, ICMPA's Research Director, supervised by Susan Moeller, ICMPA's Director, and edited by Paul Mihailidis, ICMPA's Director of Media Education Initiatives. Towson University seniors enrolled in the Research Methods class at the Communication & Mass Communication Department coded and analyzed the news material. Partial funding for the project was provided by the College of Fine Arts and Communications at Towson University and by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. See Authors for more details.

Research Design and Process

From an initial qualitative evaluation, a draft codebook with 96 questions was created by the project director. After extensive review and pre-testing by ICMPA's team, the codebook was revised, and the final version consisted of 74 questions dealing with several aspects of the coverage, including coverage of victims, coverage of leaders, framing of the war and of each side, sources used.

Twenty Five news outlets from around the world were chosen, but only 14 remained after a search on LexisNexis returned less than five articles per week for some sources. Up to three articles per day, published between July 12 and August 15, were randomly selected from the front pages and news sections of each publication. More weight was given to articles that came earlier in the newspaper. The final sample (over 1000 articles) was downloaded from LexisNexis and uploaded to a web site easily accessible to the research team. Each article was given a unique ID number and randomly assigned for coding.

Jad Melki, the instructor of the research methods class at Towson University, trained his student-coders extensively at the beginning of each semester on quantitative and qualitative content analysis methodology. Furthermore, two full sessions were dedicated to explaining the topic of the study and to introducing the codebook. A third session was dedicated for a test run of the codebook, where all students coded the same news article, compared their results and received feedback. Then, every four students were given a news article to code individually, and their results were compared and evaluated. Groups that received low consistency rates were given further guidance and instructions. The actual coding didn't start until after the middle of the semester. In addition, the first 10-15 minutes of each session, throughout the semester, were allocated for questions and feedback for the coding.

In order to ensure reliability, the coding process was divided into several phases. First, each news article was analyzed by at least two coders. Results were then downloaded into an excel sheet, and each pair of codings was compared for consistency. Articles that received an overall consistency rate of 74 percent or less were sent back for recoding by a different pair of coders. If on a second attempt they still received the low rate, they were thrown out. Those that achieved a consistency rate of 75 percent or over were given to "senior coders" who checked and recoded the inconsistent answers. "Senior coders" are a small group of the best and most reliable coders who were chosen from among the student coders. Those were the top one or two students in their class who showed deep understanding of the topic and a high commitment to research. Finally, the project director evaluated the work of the senior coders, prepared the data set and uploaded it to SPSS for analysis.

Analysis and Results

For this project, 27 variables were selected and analyzed using frequency tables, cross tabulations and time sequences. The independent variables were 'media outlet' and 'date of publication.' The dependent variables included questions about the dateline of the article; what/who was the primary focus of the headlines and leads; frames and meta-frames of the articles; quotes and attributions; killed and wounded civilians and fighters; names and relatives of the killed and wounded; tone of the article; etc.

The dependent variables were first analyzed individually and their results presented in the Overall Coverage section. The second section of the study combined several variables into five evaluation categories and ranked how well each media outlet covered the war based on those categories. Those results are presented in Comparing Media. For more details on how the five categories were constructed, see Understanding Results. The third section tracked several dependent variable over time, highlighted the main changes in coverage, and analyzed the main events that may have impacted that coverage on those days. Those results are presented in Coverage Over Time.

Disclaimer on Measurement

We followed a simple measure of 50/50 as the ultimate point of balance for media coverage, rather than using a proportional measure to mirror the proportion of destruction and casualties on each side. Many readers, especially from the Lebanese side may consider this not to be fair (or balanced) since the scale of destruction and the number of casualties were much higher on the Lebanese side than on the Israeli side.* Nevertheless we chose to use a 1:1 proportion in measuring balance because the traditional concept of balance and fairness in the news media industry is understood as covering both or all sides of the story fairly, and not necessarily proportionally. Despite that measure, the results revealed a slight bias in favor of Israel, especially at the beginning of the war.

_____________________________________________________
* According to a November 23, 2006, UN General Assembly report, there were up to 1,191 killed and 4,409 injured on the Lebanese side. A recent BBC article put the number of killed on the Lebanese side at around 1000, "most of them civilians." The same article states that 116 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians were killed. In addition, various sources estimate up to 418 Israelis were injured, with cases ranging from superficial to critical. All sources suggest that civilian casualties on the Lebanese side were higher than those on the Israeli side. All sources also agree that Lebanon experienced a greater scale of destruction and had a greater flow of refugees.

** The Press Trust of India is a news wire service. We chose it because it was the only English news source that was archived and accessible through LexisNexis.

A center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy. Copyright © 2006 International Center for Media and the Public Agenda. 1117 Journalism Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742