Program Overview

USAID is supporting Search for Common Ground’s (SFCG) efforts to achieve a sustained shift in the way Israeli and Palestinian mid-level media professionals report on the Arab-Israeli relationship to their publics. SFCG provides training to help journalists expand public horizons and encouraging a culture of positive engagement. The project will empower journalists with personal development skills that will support sustainable change as well as acumen to produce “common ground” journalism. The journalists will thus become agents of change, writing in, and broadcasting to, their regular outlets in a manner that expands possibilities for dialogue and that focuses on the whole Palestinian-Israeli relationship, not just the conflictive aspects of it. This project will run for 24-months and have a total estimated cost of $1,031,548.

Goals

This project’s overall goal is to build popular support amongst Israelis and Palestinians towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict by shifting the way it is portrayed in the media. This goal will be supported by the following main objectives:

• Raising personal awareness amongst media professionals of their role and responsibility in how they report on the conflict.

• Promoting more balanced and solution-oriented reporting patterns that distance themselves from aggressive and conflict-fomenting media.

• Raising awareness amongst Israeli and Palestinian audiences of solution-oriented approaches to resolving conflict.