| News is a highly national product which takes as its object the nation-state and presumes a national audience. On the world stage, the international news mediates relations between nations and groups, not only reflecting or transmitting reality, but producing a social and political reality. For Palestinians, the local news is omnipresent. International news is a means through which Palestinians have asserted their identity as a national group, with claims to national rights, on the world stage, just as other forms of media have shaped and strengthened diverse claims for identity and rights for other groups. Yet, Palestinians do not control these news products. Instead, Palestinians are reporters, photographers, camerapeople, producers, and fixers whose views of local politics are filtered through U.S. foreign correspondents and editors before they reach international audiences. Palestinian media workers also include the wide array of Palestinians who speak to the international press, including official spokespeople, political analysts, militants, farmers, articulate children, and grieving mothers. These spokespeople's words and views are likewise filtered through not only the hierarchies of authority within Palestinian society that selects certain Palestinian voices and neglects others, but also by the norms and values of international news. These are the multiple voices which create U.S. news, and which, have a hand in creating Palestinians' political futures. Even as news is a production of international norms and institutions, it also exists in a continuum with local ways of discussing politics, experience, and political futures. This is true around the globe, but it is especially true in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the everyday is entangled with national politics to an extraordinary level.; This ethnography of U.S. international news production about the West Bank asserts that news is a highly nationalist medium---but it is produced through complex international networks of institutions, values, laws, and labor. Even in a media form which is highly centralized and constituted by large corporations, an ethnographic analysis of the media world where news is physically made---the local processes of production far from corporate headquarters---is essential to understanding the full process of production of U.S. news about Palestinians. |
