PJ Media

Nearly every day we hear words, ideas, place names and even foreign language phrases, that mean absolutely nothing to us. Without a helping hand we’d be hopelessly lost.

Luckily, by the time we reach adulthood, most of us have developed the ability to hear and read unfamiliar things and then quickly mine our experiences and accumulated knowledge for connective information with which we are familiar in order to place the new stuff into a usable frame of reference.

This trick of ‘using context’ is sometimes all that stands between us and drawing a complete blank. Sadly, when the new information lacks the ‘contextual landmarks’ necessary to translate it into usable knowledge, we often lose our way.

For instance, if I send an email to a friend in Manhattan telling her that my daily commute here in Israel from Efrat to Beer Sheva is about 80 kilometers, she probably won’t be able to put that information into a usable context because;

a) she likely isn’t familiar with the metric system, and as a result can’t make the mental calculation that 80Km is about 50 miles;

b) she doesn’t know if my commute takes me on urban, suburban or rural roads, so she can’t picture if I sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic or speed effortlessly through rolling countryside; and…

c) she lacks sufficent cultural references to know if most Israelis would consider 80 Km to be a reasonable distance to drive to and from work every day.

Since my friend can’t place my commuting information into a usable context, she will probably push it quickly from her mind and almost certainly won’t remember it on the off chance that anyone should ever ask her about my daily commute.

No big deal, right?

It does, however, become a big deal when one considers how much of the information reported in the media about Israel and the Middle East is delivered with too little or too much contextual information to help with comprehension and retention.

For example, when most people read the headlines, “Rockets fired from Gaza hit Sderot“, and “Rockets fired from Gaza hit Ashqelon“, they lack some basic information to be able to put these into a usable context.

Saying that the rockets were fired from Gaza, rather than providing a useable landmark or distance within Gaza from which rockets are typically fired, denies the reader the ability to evaluate the threat or its source. Secondly, it is rare indeed to see any meaningful background information on how long it takes for a rocket launched from ‘somewhere’ in Gaza to reach Sderot or Ashqelon. These may seem like niggling observations but think about it, when the range and speed of the rockets are omitted, the casual observer is denied the ability to weigh the threat or even do a rough calculation of how long residents of the targeted cities have to find shelter.

[Source: Wikipedia (public domain)]

Also, few people outside of Israel are aware of the substantive and strategic difference between a rocket strike on Sderot (which is about less than a mile from the border with Gaza), and a strike on the much larger Ashqelon (which is significantly further from the border).

But if an audience in Southern California were given the contextual information that Sderot was as far from the Gaza border as Tijuana is from the US border, most people would instantly grasp the proximity. Likewise, telling an audience from Westchester that Ashqelon coming under rocket attack from Gaza was geographically like New Rochelle launching rockets into upper Manhattan, would make things equally clear.

Yet sometimes clarity and context don’t seem to be the aim of media reports. After all, a well-informed news consumer who has the tools to think critically is a much tougher audience to serve. If the conflict remains in the realm of inscrutable attacks and counter attacks, the news consumer will be much more likely to buy into an unhelpful phrase like ‘the cycle of violence’ rather than ask critical questions like ‘who fired first?’.

Yet other times the media tries to give too much context, with the result that it tends to skew the perceptions of those following the news.

For example, Qassam (alternately spelled Kassam) rockets are frequently described as ‘homemade’, ‘inaccurate’ and ‘primitive’ in an attempt to downplay the danger they pose to Israeli civilian population centers near Gaza. They are described as being ‘only’ about as big around as the pole holding a typical stop sign, ‘only’ capable of traveling about 7 or 8 miles, and ‘only’ carrying about 20 pounds of payload (e.g. explosives and ball bearings). That doesn’t sound so bad!

Yet who doesn’t remember how in October of 2002 the when the ‘Beltway Sniper‘ (actually two men working together), managed to paralyze the entire eastern seaboard of the US from Virginia to Delaware with a single rifle that had an effective range of a few hundred yards, and capable of firing a projectile smaller than a pencil eraser. At the time everyone knew that statistically the odds of being shot were roughly the same as hitting the PowerBall numbers. But nobody was poo-pooing the seriousness of the threat or downplaying the fears of those who couldn’t bring themselves to venture onto the street.

Context can mean everything.

Further, if one takes the time to look up statistics on how many of these ‘homemade’ Qassam rockets have been fired at Israel, it becomes clear that these aren’t one-off ‘hobby weapons’ being thrown together in someone’s basement. They require an extensive supply chain of materials, dedicated facilities for assembly and storage, and considerable know-how to make sure they actually work.

Graph showing the number of Qassam rockets fired from Gaza Strip by month [Source: Wikipedia (public domain)]

During a recent visit to Israel which was intended to push Israel and the Palestinians a few steps closer to a peace agreement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had plenty to say on a wide range of topics. But what was reported was a contextual desert for those who haven’t made a close study of the Middle East conflict.

Take, for example, the article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Rice Faults Israel on West Bank Settlements“. The article went into granular detail of proposed new settlement activity including “…plans for building 600 new homes in Pisgat Zeev, a neighborhood built on West Bank land annexed to the city after the 1967 Middle East War.“, but didn’t offer contextual background on where this community is located, who the land had belonged to before the war and whether or not Israel had offered any reasonable pronouncements on the status of the area under discussion.

The article also neglected to point out that Rice had praised Israel’s Defense Minister’s offer to ease restrictions on Palestinian travel by removing scores of checkpoints, or the fact that she had reiterated the need for both sides to live up to their Roadmap [peace plan] obligations, which for the Palestinians means disarming terror groups.

In short, a piece devoid of context which was written at the end of a visit by Rice to the region left uninitiated readers with the impression that Israeli settlements remain the only stumbling block to peace in the Middle East.

For the news consumer, context is a lot like the zoom function on websites like Mapquest and Google Earth. Too little and you end up looking at an overly simplified view from 30,000 feet. Too much and you’re too close to discern any useful landmarks.

I doubt much will change in the way news from our region is reported. It also isn’t reasonable to assume that editorial bias is going away anytime soon. But a critical media consumer should at least be able to recognize when not enough context is being offered or perhaps too much is being pushed.

The simple act of scanning the morning paper or watching the late evening news shouldn’t mean ending up hopelessly lost.

David Bogner, formerly of Fairfield, CT, lives in the West Bank city of Efrat. Since moving to Israel in 2003, David has worked in marketing in Israel’s defense industry. David blogs at Treppenwitz .