Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land: U.S. Media & The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The recent wave of issue documentaries has, for the most part, offered articulate dissident voices with valuable information to impart. But while the movies may inspire debate in the lobby, that debate rarely makes it onto the screen. Political docs from the left and right have been shouting at each other from opposite wings of the multiplex, with arguments that would be more persuasive if they weren't so suspiciously uniform.
Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff's Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land tackles the American media's misleading coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and much of what the movie has to say seems reasonable. Jhally and Ratzkoff's interviewees break down the major news networks' loaded language: how Palestinians "attack" while Israelis "retaliate," how Israeli "settlements" become "neighborhoods," and how the Middle East is in "relative calm" when only Palestinians are being killed. But detailed media analysis consumes only a fraction of the documentary, while the remainder is dedicated to presenting the side of the story that the news ignores. The Promised Land argues that Zionists have been using the media to conduct "a PR war," and since Jhally and Ratzkoff want to hold up the other end of the battle, they narrow the context, diminishing the Israeli point of view while leaning on the moral weight of U.N. resolutions.
In speculating about Zionist conspiracies, Jhally and Ratzkoff's interviewees essentially ignore alternate explanations for the alleged media bias, like the way almost all broadcast reporting on international conflicts offers sound bites from both sides while skimming over the true weight of each's actions. The Promised Land also fails to consider the audience of the American mass media, and how they might be inclined to embrace Israel's more Western values over those of the Palestinians, no matter who's actually in the right. But as with too many contemporary documentaries, the main problem with The Promised Land is that Jhally and Ratzkoff are eager to foster dissent, but not to invite it into their own movie. Their talking heads sound rehearsed and repetitive, and the righteous anger dissipates without a contrary opinion to provide a ceiling.