Social-political environment, journalism practice and coverage of minorities: the case of the marginal cities in Israel

Abstract

This research demonstrates how the social-political environment affects news media organizations’ well-researched tendency to focus on subjects like crime, disasters and disorder when covering minorities. The analysis showed that the social-political environment affects many key internal decisions, routines and journalistic practices of media organizations that shape the coverage of marginal groups. The aspects covered include the social and professional backgrounds of the newspeople who cover and edit news about minority groups; the news organizations’ definition of news that focuses on crisis reporting; the selection of information sources that reinforce this news definition; and the decision regarding the target audience. The case study looks at the image of marginal cities in the Israeli national press. To do so, we employed two research methods to analyse the research questions: content analysis of news articles published and in-depth interviews with editors and journalists.