Community media, their communities and conflict : A mapping analysis of Israeli community broadcasting groups

Community media organisations are famously difficult to define, as this media field is highly elusive and diverse, even if there is a certain degree of consensus about a series of basic characteristics. One key defining component is the objective to serve its community by allowing its members to participate in self-representational processes. Yet this component raises questions about what ‘community’ means, and how the community that is being served relates to other parts of society. This article studies a particular social reality – Israel – where community television is the dominant model, community television production groups are separated from the actual distribution of the produced content and different configurations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ characterise political reality. Following the methodological procedures outlined in Voniati et al. (2018), a mapping of 83 Israeli community broadcasting groups was organised, allowing us to flesh out the different ways in which these community broadcasting groups deal with their community/ies and the ‘other’. The analysis shows that many of these Israeli community broadcasting groups have fairly closed, singular-community articulations of ‘their’ communities. They rarely engage in interactions with other communities (limiting internal diversity) and their external diversity is even more restricted, with only one Arab–Israeli community broadcasting group able to be identified. The analysis did, however, identify a dozen groups with more open approaches towards their outer worlds, and thus the potential to assume a more conflict-transformatory role

Community media, their communities and conflict : A mapping analysis of Israeli community broadcasting groups

Community media organisations are famously difficult to define, as this media field is highly elusive and diverse, even if there is a certain degree of consensus about a series of basic characteristics. One key defining component is the objective to serve its community by allowing its members to participate in self-representational processes. Yet this component raises questions about what ‘community’ means, and how the community that is being served relates to other parts of society. This article studies a particular social reality – Israel – where community television is the dominant model, community television production groups are separated from the actual distribution of the produced content and different configurations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ characterise political reality. Following the methodological procedures outlined in Voniati et al. (2018), a mapping of 83 Israeli community broadcasting groups was organised, allowing us to flesh out the different ways in which these community broadcasting groups deal with their community/ies and the ‘other’. The analysis shows that many of these Israeli community broadcasting groups have fairly closed, singular-community articulations of ‘their’ communities. They rarely engage in interactions with other communities (limiting internal diversity) and their external diversity is even more restricted, with only one Arab–Israeli community broadcasting group able to be identified. The analysis did, however, identify a dozen groups with more open approaches towards their outer worlds, and thus the potential to assume a more conflict-transformatory role

Ourselves and Our Others

The publication of the now famous twelve cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in Denmark in 2005 was followed by a heated controversy in the spring of 2006 that become a dramatic high point in (recent mediated) tensions between what has often been defined as the “Islamic world” versus the “West”. Although the actual news events provoked by the conflict during the spring of 2006 have now largely died down, it has become clear that the event has left an enduring residue in the form of a repertoire of images and assumptions. To a considerable extent, and from both “sides”, this residue has to do with modes of portraying each other as well reinforcing existing clichés that have been used to make sense of later news. At least on the short term the controversy seems to have become a defining moment, a landmark event. This volume is a selection of readings that exhibit many of the ways in which the controversy has illuminated important trends and developments in the current transnationally-mediated world of politics and social values. These interpretations are based on a two-year long transnational media research cooperation which began by examining the coverage or reception of the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons, as it played out in fourteen countries; then, in this second phase, this collaboration has tried to take stock of wider, transnational issues and questions