New study by finance professor documents bias in coverage of Israeli-Arab conflict

Posted: 02/02/2012

Henry Silverman, assistant professor of finance and an expert on factors that may influence investor behavior in the stock market, regularly sifts through corporate documents in search of messages that are false, biased and/or which misrepresent the truth. In a word, he looks for propaganda.

The Roosevelt professor, who pioneered the use of Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) in reviewing corporate documents, also is an avid consumer of business news, regularly following the latest coverage by media outlets including the Reuters international news agency.

“In my work, I regularly look for particular words, phrases and material omissions a company may employ to misrepresent its objectives and the risks to which it is exposing its investors. I began to notice similar patterns of language and omissions in Reuters coverage of events in the Middle East,” Silverman said.

Using ECA and traditional quantitative statistical analysis, Silverman examined a sample of 50 news articles related to the Israeli-Arab conflict that were published on Reuters.com websites between May 31 and Aug. 31, 2010, a period which included a deadly encounter between Israeli commandos and supporters of the Palestinian group Hamas aboard the Mavi Marmara passenger ship.

Findings of the three-month study, recently published in Journal of Applied Business Research, revealed more than 1,100 occurrences of propaganda and fallacies, as well as violations of Reuters own corporate governance charter and handbook of journalistic ethics across 41 distinct categories.

Thirty-three Roosevelt students who volunteered to participate in the study and were relatively neutral about the Israeli-Arab conflict were asked to read the news articles. Their attitudes toward the conflict were then measured for shifts in sympathy and support.

“The results were significant,” said Silverman. “While they started out fairly neutral, these students ended up siding with the Arabs in the Mideast conflict after they read the articles. These shifts were associated with particular propaganda techniques employed by Reuters,” he said.

In published reports, Reuters has maintained that its agency and reporters are committed to the company’s charter requiring accurate and impartial reporting. The company has denied propaganda techniques are being used in its coverage of the Middle East.

For his part, Silverman sees the study as merely an extension of work he regularly does reviewing financial prospectuses, which can be persuasively misleading without always being upfront about the risks.

“The idea was to apply the same techniques I have been using in the business arena to the media,” said Silverman, who teaches investment theory and international finance at Roosevelt’s Heller College of Business. “My hope is that other academic scholars will follow my lead and further investigate all kinds of information out there that affects decisions we make every day.”

For study results, visit http://sites.roosevelt.edu/hsilverman/about/.

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