Gaza and Israel - the PR front

When the US invaded Iraq the first time round (ie when it was invited to do so...), much was made of missile-mounted cameras and the transformation of the war into a very immediate media spectacle.

When the US invaded Iraq the SECOND time around, it took the "media war" concept even further, embedding journalists with specific units - and in a masterstroke of PR, matched up regional journos with their local divisions, thus ensuring plenty of positive grass-roots coverage for what was otherwise a deeply unpopular war just about everywhere.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, it didn't capitalise much on getting the media onside, and suffered on that front as a result.

Now, the story is very different.

This report from The National paints a picture of an Israel determined to control the war agenda on the internet, and bombarding global users with more information than they can process.

Its target is not the Middle East, but those otherwise disinterested observers in the US and Europe - if it can persuade them it is defending itself from attacks, rather than slaughtering innocent civilians, then that's another chunk of pressure off its back.

But this a PR game - so there's no incentive to tell the truth.

In one rather harrowing YouTube video, the IDF purports to show militants loading up a van with rockets. In eerie silence, the camera zooms in and out, before a strike is called in, leaving an expanding fireball where the van once was.

Unfortunately, they probably weren't rockets. According to Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, cited in The National, the men were almost certainly moving gas canisters, as they shifted a workshop out of a damaged site.

As is all too common in the media, though, whoever gets in first gets to call the tune - and right now that's Israel, as far as the PR war is concerned.

Palestinians, and many across the Middle East and around the world, are fighting back with images of the carnage, but as long as people believe Israel is defending itself against bad men with rockets and bombs, the sad truth is they will accept the carnage as "collateral damage".

And things like this editorial, denying the WWII holocaust, in Gulf News of all papers, really does not help. To the outside world, this gives an image of Israelis as merciless but justified defenders, and Arabs as irrational, illogical terrorist sympathisers - if not terrorists themselves.

Neither of these labels are correct - and neither is the reverse entirely the case either. But like it or not, the Arab world has to get a lot smarter at the PR game and target not the people who will sympathise anyway, but those who do not have strong opinions either way.

AdNation doesn't do politics, but we will be carrying a token of our support for the innocent casualties in Gaza on the site for now.

You think the Gulf has it bad?

Perspective is a wonderful thing. A newspaper in Turkey is losing advertisers, partly due to the economic downturn, but also due to fear of a shadowy, Mafia-like organisation that stands accused of engineering a vast, right-wing conspiracy across the country, according to this report in The National.

In comparison to assassination lists and political intrigue, suddenly the loss of some property advertising doesn't seem so bad.

The National is very good at these big, in-depth stories - which is why, again, it was rather a shame to see the paper tow the Abu Dhabi Is Fabulous line quite so blatantly.

At least it writes in English, though, as opposed to certain other papers, as a Dubai Media Observer commenter noted.

I believe one is publicly horse-whipped at the Daily Mail for that sort of Atrocity Against Language.

March of 37,000 unemployed journos

Ulp. That's torn it.

Up until now, the received wisdom, especially on Dubai Media Observer, is that if you're working in the Middle East as a journalist, you're crap.

Or at least weird, suffering from a breakdown, or actually enjoying life in the Sandlands - which probably makes you a congenital arsehole, in the eyes of the naysayers.

Now, according to the report linked above, you won't be crap - just desperate.

All those layed off hacks are searching for work - any work, anywhere. And as a region that a) has a reasonable English-language media sector, and b) is still hiring, many highly-trained US journalists are making their way over here (and UK ones can't be far behind, but probably not on the same scale).

For the rest of us, this is good news and bad. Good, because it's likely the region is going to get its game raised, whether it likes it or not. Bad, because the days of nonchalantly job hopping once a year, and upping one's salary every time, will be of the past.

I for one welcome our new Yankee overlords - anything that improves the overall quality of the media in the region has to be A Good Thing.

And one interesting possible side-effect is that when all these hacks get visits, or go back home, or move back to the US for good, they will take with them a much more realistic view of the Middle East, for better or worse.

Who knows - maybe this will even filter down a little bit?

Peace and understanding through an economic depression - whoever would have thought?

SITE NEWS: As you may have noticed, it's nearly Christmas, which means I'm off for a break. There'll still be new stuff appearing on AdNation, but it will be back to normal service come the start of January.

Toodle-pip.

Everything is broken

Aaaah! Those blasted cable cuts are making life somewhat difficult here at AdNation Towers.

Being hosted outside of the region, AdNation is running a little slow today. Yes, even more than usual.

At least we still seem to be up, though - as I write, I can't access The National's website at all, depriving me of Keach Hagey's stories, and thus a major source of news (just joking! But not really...)

Amazingly, ArabianBusiness.com seems to be little affected - it's still as intermittent as ever, but hanging on in there.

Some are predicting some sort of domino effect, whereby corporate users deprived of their private networks will fall back on the public internet, putting it under more strain, causing more connections to fail - and so on and so on.

As this failed to happen in January, when the region suffered a couple of catastrophic cuts, I'm guessing things will just be a bit crap for a while.

Anyone got any more theories? I'll be taking a lack of comments as evidence of YET MORE DISRUPTION, by the way, rather than apathy.