Mission & Goals. 1
Know your target. 1
Setting up the appointment. 1
The Meeting. 1
General tips for the meeting. 2
The Reports. 2
Letters. 2
General advice. 2
Your mission is to ensure fair, honest, and accurate media
coverage in both news and editorial page departments. The goals are:
* Bring about equity in the space
given to various Israeli and Palestinian perspectives
* Push the editorial line to
adopt a human rights stand consistent with
facts
* Push the news coverage to be
more journalistically solid, based on facts and not propaganda
and myths.
Your first achievable goal is to get noticed: to become
someone they
recognize and respect.
Set up a meeting with the paper’s editorial board.
Build a map of the editorial board: who is who, who is
sympathetic, who is hostile, and who is in the neutral. Try to enlist the help of the sympathetic
ones, try to convince the neutral ones with strong arguments,
and try to avoid angering the ones in the hostile camp.
Try to learn about how editorials are written. There is always someone in the board who
is the point person on any particular issue.
Find out who they are and build a strategy: e.g., take
them out to lunch, give them reports and findings, and try
to get into a debate over the substance.
The main thing is to force them to justify their paradigm.
If you get them to even look at the underlying framework
of thinking ? in this case, the notion
that Israel is merely defending itself -- as something
challengeable you have won half of the battle.
There are books and web pages that will show you who are
the people in the positions in the media outlet you are interested
in. We subscribe to the Media Yellow book which
gives updated information quarterly (with phone numbers and
email contact information).
There are also some web pages that will allow you to
do that. An example is at http://capwiz.com/adc/home/
Most newspapers (unless very small) have two separate groups
of editors: news editors and opinion page editors. You will usually need to meet with those
two groups separately. Contact
the managing editor to set an appointment with the News Editors. Contact the editorial page editor to set-up
an appointment with the editorial page staff. In large newspapers thsi would include assistant
and associate editors. It
would include Op-Ed and letter editors.
If you decide to make a first contact by phone, that is
fine but they will usually ask you for a letter stating the
same things. Here is how we approach speaking and writing
to them to get attention:
1) We represent a group of organizations and activists
for human rights with emphasis on the Middle East. List those groups, many of us are members of several groups, list
them all (Al-Awda/Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Palestine
Media Watch, ADC, Amnesty etc).
2) We would like to set up a meeting with the editorial
board to exchange information and discuss coverage in the
media outlet in question.
Have a get together with the activists selected to go to
the meeting.
Recommend no more than 6 activists and that brief presentations
be given
from no more than 3 (maximum 4 of the activists). Time will be limited and
this will not be a history lesson or a lengthy lecture.
One important function of the meetings is to let the editorial
board know
that we are a serious enterprise and not a transient group
of malcontents.
Here is how we successfully did this on Palestinian issues:
- As you get in the room and meet people, try to relax,
mingle (ask about
the paper, the building, the weather whatever).
- When the meeting starts (usually the chief editor wills
ignal this), the
lead person (person who made the appointment) usually starts
as follows.
Thank them for meeting with us, state that we really appreciate
the
opportunity to exchange information and present our perspective.
State that
what you think we should do is have a round of brief introductions
and that
then we have very brief areas that some of our team members
will address.
- Team member introductions should be brief: name, what
you do in life for a
living, groups you volunteer with.
- "Chair" then asks the first presented for 3-4
minutes. That segment
would
show maps (Salman Abu Sittas's map with all the Palestinian
villages
depopulated 1947-1949, maps of the present WB/Gaza areas
in perspective, the settlement blocks, apartheid). Brief and to teh point.
- Presentation on current conditions: apartheid, occupations,
present
reports by international human rights groups (Amnesty,
HRW, PHR, UNCHR etc)
- Presentation on the analysis of the paper's coverage
(research should have
been completed ahead of time and hand outs prepared).
- These three core presentations can be accompanied with
handout, visual
presentations, etc.
- Chair sums-up, asks for feed back and Q&A from the
editors. Be very
thoughtful in thsi section as thsi is where mistakes can
be made. You can
do role playing before the actual meeting and anticipate
questions and
defensive postures from the paper's editors. Do not be too
confrontational. Speek
of teh facts and the desire for better coverage.
The past cannot be changed, the future can.
- At the end of teh meeting, ask if you could meet with
them again in a
month or two (you may also indicate taht you get lots of
good speakers nad
intellectuals and it maybe worthwhile to have a meeting
with some of those).
- Ask for the business cards of attendees before you leave.
Make sure they understand that you are not there simply
to vent off or to
let out your anger or attack the paper. You are there to present your case
for better coverage.
The tone of your requests should be:
* All you want from them is to
be fair
* All you are trying to help
them be a better paper to their own readers
Whenever you go to a meeting with them, give them the press
kit. The package will contain:
- Human right group
reports
- UN findings
- Talking points
handout
- A package on
the media
In your meetings, stress the following:
- The great discrepancy
between the amount of space give to pro-Israeli columns vs
pro-Palestinian rights columns
- Absence from
mention of human rights findings
- Absence from
mention of UN findings
- Absence of maps
depicting offers made by Israel
- The myths about
the wars (48/67/73/82)
- The myth about
Israel being an underdog
Put them on the spot over why the discrepancy is so high
between the space given to the Israeli government version
of events. Ask them point blank: why the discrepancy, and
wait for an answer. They will probably come back with the following:
We do no know how to get hold of pieces on demand. When they say that, tell them that PMWatch
has syndicated dozens of well-known authors and will be able
to provide you well-written pieces from respected authors
on demand.
Schedule one meeting every three months. After your initial
meeting with the editorial board, you can schedule informal
meetings with individual key people.
Make sure you send them a thank you card - preferably both
via email and snail mail.
A thank you phone call is also good.
When possible, schedule meetings AFTER lunch. They will try to schedule them at 11:00 am
so that at 12:00 noon they will end it for lunch.
The reports are your bread and butter: they are the evidence
that gives substance to your arguments and your points. If you accuse a paper that they never mention
Human Rights findings, the other side will react by saying
that no, they do. Unless
you tell them that you have examined their work closely and
you know for a FACT that they don’t, they will try to contradict
you, even when they have no idea what they are talking about!
So, maintain those reports and keep them updated.
You will be glad you did when you are facing the editorial
board.
A painless way of doing this is to constantly update as
opposed to piling up. What
you can do is have a hard-copy of the report around and write
by hand on it any time a new column or editorial is added.
When an editorial is added, read it, highlight the
important points and enter your observations into the report.
This should take you 10 minutes a shot. You will be very thankful you did that when time comes for the
report to be ready.
Make sure you keep writing your letters. This will not only keep your name visible,
but will give you a great archive to go back to for issues
to raise during meetings.
Nothing impresses them more than seeing how you are
in total command of your criticism when you tick off specific
points in specific stories.
It will show them that you are totally on top of this
issue - and that does intimidate them.
Preparation is the keyword. Having a detailed report, and coming to meetings with specific
demands, will impress them.
When you present an argument, make sure you simplify it
and present only the strongest points.
A well-known technique of shooting down arguments (unfairly)
is to latch on to the weakest part of it, attack that part
(even if it is incidental to the argument) and then claim
victory when you step back on that point.
So, when you are presenting a set of facts, drop anything
that you are not 100% sure of.
Avoid embarrassing them too much when you have something
embarrassing about what they have done or said. Put them on the spot once in a while, but don't use all of your
ammunition. They will
be grateful that you held back.
Avoid using the term "Jews" or "Zionist".
Use "Israelis" or "Israeli occupation".
View your task as a long term one. They need to understand that you will always
be here. This will
force them to develop a long term strategy of managing you
as opposed to them trying to shoo you off - either by giving
you something and expecting you thank them and go away or
by intimidating you by rebuking you strongly.
Always be patient and polite.
They need to understand that you are a representative group.
Be persistent but don't be a pest in follow-up with them.
One mail every
two days should be the average. But make sure you do not go too many days
without having your name pop up in their mailbox. One easy way of doing this is submitting pieces on behalf of people
for publication in the paper.
You can also forward them relevant news items once in a
while.
Be responsive and useful: column editors have to deal with
hundreds of columns a month, with dozens and dozens of writers. You don't want to be a mere voice in the
crowd. You want to
be a resource for them that makes life easier and not tougher
for them. When they ask for information, help finding
a piece, try to be as responsive as possible.
Primer
prepared with Mazin Qumsiyeh of Al-Awda.
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