ABSTRACT
Israeli television periodically mounts public service announcement campaigns for the prevention of traffic accidents; Israel leads the democratic world in per capita protest participation, and its media do not hide the dimensions of extra-parliamentary activity. More germane is the fact that virtually all the television news reports are on important news events which are normally covered by all the newspapers, so that qualitatively it would be very difficult to argue that television news adds much to the general informational fare. The extremely marked reduction in the number of protest events that took place during the TV strike, and subsequent sharp increase, indicate that a conscious process of media selection was at work. As Gadi Wolfsfeld found in his field research of Israeli protest groups: "Television, and by association, its reporters were seen by all of the participants as the most powerful of all the media."
