A lot has been written about the lopsided Western Media coverage of the worsening conflict in the Middle East. A couple of examples are this blog post by Sam Dealey at U.S. News and World Report and here at the Huffington Post.
We often see overall media coverage of issues that doesn’t reflect what people are really talking about. So a journalist friend of ours wondered – is the debate reflected as intensely in public debate? The short answer is “yes”. Here is the public discussion activity for “Israel”, “Gaza” and “Palestine” over the the last three months. You can see the big increase when the conflict started:
Israel had over 75% of the mentions for the December, but looking at only January you see a more balanced discussion with Hamas and Palestine getting almost 40% of the posts:
And this discussion is one of the most distributed ones we have seen with huge activity on communities as diverse as MySpace, Irandefense.net, Digital Spy, Bodybuiding.com (really!!), Investor Village and of course Twitter. What’s striking is just how broad and global the discussion is. And whatever the media bias, there is no doubt that this kind of global public discourse is very healthy.
