Wolfsfeld, Gadi (1951–)

Gadi Wolfsfeld is best known for his research on the role of the media in political conflicts and peace processes. As an Israeli political science and communication scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, his main political laboratory is the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Wolfsfeld's research represents a life-long commitment to trying to understand how we can use political communication tools to make a contribution to resolving conflict and war. This started with his first article, which was published in 1977 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and looked at how Palestinians and Israelis perceived each other in ways that contributed to their mutual hatred and suspicion, and has continued into his latest book, Media and the Path to Peace, which was published in 2004 and is dedicated to “the victims of violent conflict and their families.”

In his first major book in the field of political communication, Media and Political Conflict: News From the Middle East, published in 1997, Wolfsfeld demonstrates that the news media play a central role in political conflicts. The major thrust of the political contest model developed in this book is that the best way to understand the role of the news media in politics is to view the competition over the news media as part of a larger and more significant contest among political antagonists for political control. He argues that the political process is more likely to have an influence on the news media than the news media have on the political process.

Wolfsfeld's second major book, Media and the Path to Peace published in 2004, turns the analytical lens to the opposite direction: the role of the media in peace processes and especially in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process (but including a comparative analysis with the North Ireland case). This is one of the first major studies to analyze the interaction between the media and the peace process, and its major finding is that the role the news media play in resolving conflict is very different than the role they play in the midst of conflict. Due to a fundamental contradiction between the nature of a peace process and news routines, the media often play a destructive role in attempts at making peace, as they have played in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process.

[Page 841]The most important contribution of this book to his earlier political contest model is the development of the politics media politics (PMP) model, which in essence states that the influence of the news media on a peace process is best seen in terms of a cycle in which changes in the political environment lead to changes in media performance that often lead to further changes in the political environment. Wolfsfeld stresses that it is not a “chicken and an egg problem” because politics almost always comes first. Although the PMP model was applied specifically to peace processes, he argues that this proposition can and should be applied more generally in efforts to understand the role of the media in large-scale and long-term political processes.