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The Battle for Public Relations

(Economist-UK) In informational as well as military terms, the Palestinians are far outgunned. Israel has press officers in every ministry and embassy and an annual PR-training course in Washington, D.C., for selected spokespeople. The foreign ministry has a 24-hour monitoring center which analyzes coverage in several languages, counts the airtime given to Israeli and Palestinian spokespeople down to the last second, and sends out real-time electronic reports on it to officials. As a legacy of Arafat's one-man domination of power, there is no government press office (there is an information ministry, but nobody is quite sure what it does); no coordinated message; no systematic media monitoring. Public statements mostly come either from officials who do not have media training or from public personalities who do but are not in the government. The closest thing to a Palestinian makeover came during the intifada in the form of Diana Buttu and Michael Tarazi, Canadian- and American-born lawyers who conveyed a consistent message in perfect English. But the two worked not for the PA itself but for the negotiations branch of the PLO. Dissatisfied international donors cancelled funding for their communications project last year.
2005-04-01 00:00:00
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