Digital public sphere and Palestine-Israel conflict: A conceptual analysis of news coverage

Abstract

The news coverage of conflicts has transformed with the introduction of digital media and social media platforms. The available literature on media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict is mainly focused on traditional news coverage or social media dimension of the conflict information. There exists a literature gap on social media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict by the traditional news organizations. This study explores the changing pattern of traditional media’s coverage of the longstanding conflict in the wake of new communication technologies through appraisal of the existing literature. The analysis revealed that the traditional news organizations have adopted social networking platforms as a business model to cover the Palestine-Israel conflict. It was found that the traditional news outlets use the new media because it is cost-effective and have instantaneous outreach to maximum number of netizens. The new tools of communication offer multimedia platforms where conflict-related text, videos and images can be posted simultaneously. The study proposes to conduct future research on media-conflict relationship by focusing the use of new communication tools by the traditional media