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Media and Political Conflict: News from the Middle East. By Gadi Wolfsfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 386p. $19.95 paper.
This important book explores the influence of the news media in the frequent instances when political conflicts occur between unequal sides, such as a large state acting against a smaller one, or a government against a protest group. The defining characteristic of these circumstances is that one side has far weaker coercive resources than the other-or none at all. Wolfsfeld terms the side with the preponderance of resources "authorities," and they confront "challengers." He advances a "political contest model" to describe and explain the ways media shape and are shaped by struggles for control over outcomes. Although the model is applicable to international conflicts, the book concentrates on domestic conflict between protest groups and government authorities. Wolfsfeld seeks to explain how antagonists and the media influence one another and, in particular, when the media are most likely to play an independent role in political conflicts. Adding a much needed non-U.S. focus to literature in this area, after elaborating his model, Wolfsfeld offers several illustrative case studies based on political conflicts in Israel.
Wolfsfeld argues that the political process is more likely to influence the media than vice versa: The media usually react rather than initiate or control events. But this is not a brief for the minimal consequences of the media. In many circumstances, the media's decisions do help set the public agenda, magnify political success and failure, serve as independent channels for challengers, mobilize new participants into a conflict, and affect the understandings of events held by elites and ordinary citizens alike. The degree to which the media exert some independent influence heavily depends on the degree of control over newsworthy political events that authorities...