Public Order Events in the Headlines: The Media Construction of Threat and Dangerousness of Public Order Events in Israel

This paper examines the role of levels of threat on the newspaper coverage of public order policing. We distinguished between macro/national and micro/local types of protest involving the Arab minority in Israel, and tried to illustrate how threat was constructed differently by the media. Following the protest paradigm and the threat hypothesis, we focused on the newspaper construction of the threat of two violent public order events in which police used live ammunition against members of the Israeli Arab minority: the October 2000 events (macro) and the Pki'in 2007 event (micro). Our analysis shows that the newspapers highly emphasised the perceived threat of the October 2000 events — much more than in the Pki'in 2007 event. Furthermore, in the October 2000 events the coverage was mainly episodic and profiled the Israeli Arab protesters as ‘an enemy within’, while in the Pki'in 2007 event, reporting was more thematic and contextualised the protest within the social problems of the Druze minority in Israel society. The fact that the Israeli Arab minority is perceived by the State as a dissident minority (‘the enemy within’), whilst the Druze Arabs are not, influenced the way public order events were covered by the media.