Marilyn E. Lashley
Embedded Files
Professor Emerita, Department of Political Science, Howard University
Conference Participation
Examining Inequality through Diverse Lenses
Paper: Who gets to tell their story? who doesn’t? and who gets to hear it? Media’s role in the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Abstract: This paper examines the media’s role in highlighting or ignoring humanitarian crises in Palestine and Israel and the media as a catalyst for peace or perpetual conflict. The chapter is a comparative case study that provides an abridged summary of the creation of the State of Israel and diminution of Palestine, situates the Israel/Palestine conflict in historical context, and analyzes archival data from a selected sample of English language right, centrist and left-leaning digitized print media to answer the questions posed in the title above. Data include coverage from the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wallstreet Journal, Guardian, Times of London, Hurriyet Daily News and Times of Israel of four event clusters: 1.) U.S. university students pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests in Spring 2024; 2.) the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Summary Order of January 26, 2024 in South Africa v Israel; 3.) Israel’s use of white phosphorous munitions in Gaza and Lebanon; and 4.) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly on October 3, 2024. The study finds that Zionism, antizionism and antisemitism are poorly understood concepts; that advocating humanitarian concern for Palestinian welfare does not necessitate being antisemitic; and that opposing the actions of the State of Israel does not necessitate being anti-Jewish. The chapter concludes that non-US print media tend to provide more coverage of Israeli breeches and violations of humanitarian protocols than US print media and that US media coverage generally conflates conflict events, ideology and history and, thereby, understates the peril of the Palestinian people.
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Biography: Currently a research affiliate fellow with the Purai Centre and former visiting Fellow at the Wollotuka Institute of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Dr. Lashley also held the Fulbright Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University (Canada 2017 and 2008) and a Fulbright Senior Research Award at the Turnbull Library in Wellington New Zealand. Dr. Lashley was a Crawford School of Public Policy Visiting Fellow at Australia National University and long standing Guest Scholar in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Her publications include In Our Own Way, The Parallel Development of Culturally Anchored Self-Help in African American and New Zealand Maori Communities in Historical Perspective, (2015), Customary Systems of Communal Land Tenure and Indigenous Land Rights in New Zealand, Fiji and Australia Pacific Studies (2011), Democracy by Coup, A Colonial Legacy? Western Hegemony, Indigenous Sovereignty and Governance in Multi-ethnic Fiji (2010) and Implementing Treaty Settlements via Indigenous Institutions: Social Justice and Detribalization in New Zealand (2000), Remedying Racial and Ethnic Inequality in New Zealand (2006), Balanced Budgets, Unbalanced Costs: Impact of the Zealand Experiment on Maori socioeconomic wellbeing(1999) and two books, Public Television: Panacea, Pork Barrel or Public Trust? (1994) and African Americans and the New Policy Consensus: Retreat of the Liberal State? (1996).
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