While the role of the mass media during conflict and war has been the subject of numerous studies in the field of mass communications, there is a paucity of research on mass media during peace processes. Media and the Path to Peace is an important step in remedying this lack. A study such as this confronts an unfortunate reality: The news media are attracted to war and conflict, while peace processes make for paltry news footage and thus are for the most part undercovered by the news media. Indeed, it is Gadi Wolfsfeld's thesis that news values and peace processes are inherently contradictory.

The book comprises seven chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter establishes the theoretical framework and the second discusses the preliminary stages of the Oslo peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Chapters 3 to 7 explore media roles in peace processes, with Chapter 3 discussing how the Israeli media affected the debate over the Oslo peace process, Chapter 4 teasing out how the Palestinians related to the Israeli media during Oslo, Chapter 5 looking at the news media in the Israel-Jordan peace process, and Chapter 6 using Northern Ireland as a comparative case study with Israel. Chapter 7 focuses on the collapse of Oslo and the conclusion provides policy recommendations.

The book's structure rests on six central arguments. First, because of the fundamental contradiction just mentioned, the media often have a destructive impact on peace processes. The four dominant news values of immediacy, drama, simplicity, and ethnocentrism are incompatible with drawn-out peace processes. The search for drama leads to sensationalism, while the values of immediacy and simplicity prevent systematic analysis grounded in historical facts. Ethnocentrism is especially detrimental to peace processes whose progress often depends on concessions that require public support, which depends on knowledge of and tolerance of the Other.

Second, the more support a peace process enjoys among the elite, the more likely it is that the media will play a positive role in the peace process. If the elite on each side is divided over the peace process, the news media will focus on that division and as a result will be distracted from focusing on the peace process itself.

Third, the media's role becomes more negative as crises associated with the peace process increase in frequency and severity. The author convincingly argues that “when things get bad, the news media often make them worse” (p. 30).

Fourth, the media influence a peace process following a politics-media-politics cycle, in which the political environment impacts the media environment, which in turn affects the political environment. This cycle is especially important during political waves, which Wolfsfeld defines as “sudden and significant changes in the political environment that are characterized by a substantial increase in the amount of public attention centered on a major political issue or event” (p. 32). The author demonstrates that the news media amplify political waves and give them structure and direction.

Fifth, the more sensationalistic the news media, the more negative their role in a peace process. For example, the author shows that the melodramatic style that characterizes sensationalistic media presentations has come to pervade the increasingly commercial media environment in Israel. Bottom line and peace concerns are mostly incompatible.

Sixth, the more the news media are shared by the different sides in a peace process, the more positive the role of the news media will be. This is clearly shown in Northern Ireland, where protagonists with a shared language and culture shared media, while linguistic and cultural differences between Arabs and Israelis prevented the sharing of media sources. This is a major reason explaining the positive role of the news media in the quest for peace in Northern Ireland. Shared media tend to mitigate ethnocentrism and foster self-criticism. After unionist militiamen murdered a Catholic workman, for example, the Belfast Telegraph—a unionist newspaper—referred to the killers as “terrorists.” This trenchant criticism of one's own side is nearly never found in Israeli or Palestinian media.

The author of Media and the Path to Peace uses a combination of quantitative content analysis of news media and interviews with journalists, activists, and politicians. The analysis is fair overall, a laudable achievement in view of the highly politicized context of Middle East peace negotiations. Other strong points include an accessible style, a crisp theoretical framework, and attention to the intricate details of peace processes, including a clear chronological rendition of key events.

Missing, however, is a comprehensive analysis of the larger media sphere impinging on peace processes. Descriptions of news outlets, such as Haaretz in Israel, al-Ra'i in Jordan, and the Belfast Telegraph in Northern Ireland, are excessively brief and lack comparison with other media outlets in those countries. The rather general statement that “the Jordanian [media] model is more of a hybrid between a developed and developing state” (p. 140) is not elaborated. Expanding the range of media outlets beyond national newspapers and television would have made the analysis stronger. Notably, the exclusion of transnational media (Al-Jazeera gets a mere footnote on p. 110; The “CNN Effect” is acknowledged on p. 13 but not belabored; Hizbollah's Al-Manar, influential among Palestinians during crises, is not mentioned) leaves important questions about news media roles in peace processes unanswered.

Despite these issues, perhaps caused by space restrictions, this is a valuable book for scholars and policymakers interested in the role of media in peace processes and, to a lesser extent, in Middle Eastern politics and media. It is only to be hoped that more researchers in political science, mass communications, and Middle East studies will emulate Wolfsfeld and take the road less traveled of researching the less exciting but all the more important role of the mass media in peace processes.