What are the others doing? (Paper review on “Attack When the World Is Not Watching? US News and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” by Durante and Zhuravskaya in 2018)

Today I want to review another political economics paper, “Attack When the World Is Not Watching? US News and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, written by Durante and Zhuravskaya in 2018. This paper is also about media, studying media coverage and political strategies. I will again ignore the methodology and focus on the results and their implications. This paper uses the conflict between Israeli-Palestinian to study if policy makers conduct unpopular actions strategically to coincide with other newsworthy events. The authors focused on the Israeli attacks on Palestine and the data about Palestinian victims caused by the attacks, because of the lack of data on the Israeli side and the Israeli defence system has blocked a large number of Palestinian attacks. The results find that policy makers do strategically conduct unpopular actions to coincide with other newsworthy events, as the number of victims increased when other expected newsworthy event happened (such as US elections).

This result is generally true, then when there are some major events happening, some unpopular policies may be conducted in some small countries or less “newsworthy” countries. Currently, there are many newsworthy events happening, such as the trade tension between China and the US, the Russian Probe in the US, the mid-term election in the US, and unignorable newsworthy US president, Donald Trump. However, at the meantime, we need to ask how much of other news we are ignoring. We do not only ignore and forget to help some tragedies happening in other countries, we also tend to ignore things happening surrounding us or in some less “newsworthy” classes in our own society.

Therefore, when big things happen, we still need to remember those left-out groups and help them.