Pens and Swords:
How the American Mainstream Media Report
the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

By Marda Dunsky
ISPU Fellow

In Pens and Swords, ISPU Fellow Marda Dunsky, examines American mainstream news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By examining hundreds of reports published in newspapers and newsmagazines and broadcast on network and cable TV and radio over a four-year period, Dunsky offers fresh insight into how media framing affects the public's and policymakers' understandings of this decades-old conflict, which is central to U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Dunsky concludes that the coverage, over time and across platforms, all but omits reporting and analysis of key aspects of the conflict: how U.S. policy has affected its trajectory for the last 40 years; and how international law and consensus address the issues that embody its demography and geography: the Palestinian refugee issue and Israel's settlement and annexation policies in the occupied territories. To lay the groundwork for her analysis, Dunsky presents the very type of contextual information that is largely absent from the reporting itself.

The book also addresses how U.S.-based, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups apply pressure to media organizations; and it features a chapter of interviews with 15 journalists who reported the story from Jerusalem for major American news outlets between 1985 and 2002. The final chapter offers a formula for how working journalists can change their approach to covering the conflict.

About the Author
Marda Dunsky is a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU). She was a former Arab affairs reporter for the Jerusalem Post and editor on the national/foreign desk of the Chicago Tribune. She teaches a unique media literacy course on American mainstream reporting of the Arab and Muslim worlds at DePaul University. Dunsky's work on U.S. media coverage of the Middle East has been published in the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, Arab Studies Quarterly and Nieman Reports. Her op-ed pieces on the Middle East have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

"Written by a journalist and scholar who has reported from the region, 
this book is a perceptive, careful, and factual assessment of why the American 
mainstream media do such an exceedingly poor job of conveying the realities of
the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, instead perpetuating stereotypes
and echoing the conceits of policymakers in Washington."
                      - Rashid Khalidi, Edward W. Said Professor of Arab Studies, 
                                      Middle East Institute, Columbia University 

"This detailed work should be on the shopping list of all American correspondents
moving to Jerusalem."
                                     - Simon Wilson, Washington bureau chief, BBC