Political strategy (Another paper review on “Attack When the World Is Not Watching? US News and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” by Durante and Zhuravskaya in 2018)

I already wrote a paper review on this paper yesterday; however, I feel there is a lot more to discuss. One of the important functions that media has is to make policy makers and governments accountable. However, media reports have lots of constraints. One of the constraints is that media has to report information within a limited time period. Media is run by businesses whose target is to maximise profits, so they have to spend more time on the news that their audience love to watch instead of giving equal weight to all kinds of news. Here comes to the second constraint, which is media’s audience. For example, the reports of Fox News are very pro-Trump, since their audience are mainly conservatives (Republicans) and blue collar white workers. Because media has to target different groups of population, their reports could be potentially biased. When biased information is provided, the general public do not have correct access to information, so they do not have a close-to-truth image of the world. The reason for media to target different types of audience is again a business based decision and to maximise profits, since differentiation can help these media companies to gain some oligopoly market power. Overall, we can see that since media companies need to maximise their profits, people will never get perfect access to all information with equality and unbiasedness.

Another thing I want to discuss about in this paper is that countries’ unpopular actions. The US, China, and Russia are three major powers at the centre stage of the world politics, their actions are reported by media around the world, so they have to be very careful of making their decisions and even choosing correct words in their government announcements. However, there are many small countries which are not in many people’s eyes. Just aks one question how many countries a person can name. Those countries which people can hardly name are not reported worldwide. Their governments are not held accountable by the world media, so it is easier for these government to be corrupt. In addition, when the governments are commonly corrupt and the majority of the media audience do not care about these governments, these governments’ news will be less and less frequently reported. Therefore, the left-out countries will be more left-out.