Abstract
This study measures the presence of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in online news worldwide. Employing the authors' “Global Salience Meter” – a novel multilingual news-mining technique, based on proprietary software – the relative prominence of news stories involving Israel and Palestine was traced over a six-month period in the course of 2009 in 35 leading news sites in 10 languages. The findings show that both polities are among the most prominent entities in international news coverage online, mentioned more frequently than world powers such as Russia, Germany, France, and Japan. The study also evaluates the extent of documented linkage of the conflict to the US in the different language groups. The study concludes by pointing out two directions for interpreting the surprisingly high prominence of the conflict in world news: journalism studies and its traditions of assigning news value; and cultural and religious studies which may help explain the particular resonance of this conflict, its protagonists, and its venue to the sensibilities of news organizations and perhaps news consumers the world over.
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