The Palestinian- Israeli Peace Process in the Alternative Palestinian Media: A Case Study of Palestine Today News Channel

On September 13, 1993, a peace agreement was signed between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to end 45 years of conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, which began since the declaration of the state of Israel on the land of historic Palestine in 1948. This peace process was supposed to lead until establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel within the borders of June 4, 1967, but things did not go well. Today after 27 years of signing the agreement, there is no clear horizon for resolving the conflict. The peace process received local and international media coverage and received a share of focus or marginalization according to the region's development of events. This study focuses on the coverage of alternative media for the peace process, considering Palestine Today's satellite TV news channel as a case study. It is one of the most famous Palestinian news channels, and the channel is distinguished as informal and has its own ideological and intellectual background. The study aims to fill in the gap in the literature, as there is a genuine absence of studies in this field, particularly in English. It aims to study how the alternative Palestinian media operate on issues that are conflicting with it. The study dependent on testing three media theories, first, agenda-setting, second, gatekeeping, lastly, framing analysis theory. Additionally, the content analysis method was implemented to reach the results. The researcher analyzed the study sample that includes 43 newscasts broadcast on the channel from 2017 until July 2020 with 12 newscasts every year taken randomly. The main results of the current study can be summarized as follows: Within the channel's opposition to the peace process based on its ideological principles, it adopted only one point of view in all the news and interviews carried out by the channel, to reinforce the viewer's view that the peace process is useless. It was never neutral in its coverage of the peace process and was a platform for all voices opposing the Palestinian Authority and the peace process. Keywords: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media power, Peace process, Palestine Today channel, Palestinian media.