| Abstract: | This article analyzes television news reports, from five countries, dealing with an incident that took place in the West Bank village of Nahalin in April 1989 during the Palestinian uprising. The analysis of both the verbal and visual texts attempts to explicate "open" and "closed" presentations of the incident by referring to three dimensions: the rhetoric of balance, the rhetoric of facticity, and the rhetoric of neutrality. The analysis suggests that the stories by both Israel Television and CBS are relatively "closed," with the Israeli case being "defensive" while that of CBS being "offensive." The other versions are appraised as lying somewhere between poetic closure and journalistic openness. |
