In comments to the previous post, Branko suggested I should google for the phrase “bad news from the Netherlands”, as that would produce some interesting results. It turns out there’s a blog with that name, and that this blog is part of a whole range of similar blogs for other countries, all of which only post about negative news from the country they’re dedicated to.
So why are they doing this? Well, it turns out this is an experiment/demonstration to show what happens if you subject people to a constant flow of nothing but bad news about a country: they start thinking badly about the country itself. And why is this done? Because the person behind this experiment, Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, believes this is what has happened to Israel:
In his words, he simply uses the same methodology as the mainstream media, publishing only the bad news in order to create a negative view of, in his case, the Netherlands, and, as a result, showing the power of the media to present almost anything in whatever light they choose: “People form their judgements on countries on the basis of nothing, just a few elements.”
And the Netherlands was just an easy target since the country has a generally positive image and he happens to be reading the newspapers already for his book.
There’s just one or two problems with this methology. Israel has problems with its image not because there’s an international media conspiracy against it, but because it’s an Apartheid state. All negative news out of Israel, with the rare exception, stems from this simple fact. Whether it’s about Israel attacking civilian targets in order to assasinate an alleged Hamas terrorist, a suicide bomber blowing up a pizza parlour, or the latest condemnation by Amnesty for how Israel treats its non-Jewish population, all stem from the same source, what is usually called the “Middle East Conflict”. Gerstenfeld’s blog with bad news from the Netherlands on the other hand is filled with a hodgepodge of news items you can find about most countries: reports about a failing school system, errors in hospital tests, a rise in xenophobia, etc. There’s no connection between the items, other than that they’re about Holland. And for those who might think that Gerstenfeld might have a point with regards as to how the “Middle East Conflict” is reported about: try reading the Israeli press itself sometimes.
This experiment is therefore nothing but propaganda designed to perpetuated the myth that Israel is treated hostile by the Dutch (and other western) press. The sad thing is that it has been partially succesful in this, as several newspapers and newsshows have reported on this experiment without challenging the basic assumptions behind it. Imagine Gerstenfeld doing the same experiment with Iraq and you see how absurd it is. Israel has a bad image because it does bad things, and Gerstenfeld is like the guy who murdered his parents and asked the judge at his trial for clemency, as he was sadly an orphan.