1. This etnomethodological analysis examined the ABC, NBC and CBS reportage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The data were drawn from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and a detailed explication of the texts elucidated the ideological phenomena embodied in them.

2. By 'members', I intend to include all perceptually relevant categories, such as 'readers', 'hearers', 'listeners', 'viewers', etc.

3. By employing the masculine gender in third-person references, I am only trying to help establish a convention which would stipulate that male members employ masculine pronouns and female members feminine ones in their discourse.

4. The Kantian-inspired classical tradition of literary criticism and hermeneutic approaches to texts more generally have exhibited this assumption. (For an illuminating discussion of the hermeneutic schools, see Palmer, 1969.) A more contemporary preoccupation with the mind's 'assignment of meaning' to cultural objects, including texts, is to be found in the verstehende methodology of Weber and the interpretive sociology of the symbolic interactionist perspective in the social sciences. A good reference for these and some contrasting views is Truzzi (1974).

5. I am ignoring here a consideration of the other major inferential option recoverable from the text concerning antisemitism in the Soviet Union.

6. For a political discussion which argues the opposite, i. e. that the US coverage was pro-Israeli, see my '"News Speak" About the Lebanon War' (Jalbert, 1984b).

7. Note that Muravchik also drew upon print media coverage to construct his argument. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall restrict myself to an assessment of that part of print media coverage. See my unpublished paper, 'Media Analysis: On Distinguishing a Polemic from a Critique' (Jalbert, 1984a), which can be obtained from the author.

8. Muravchik complains that

...a number of commentaries by Bill Moyers... though tempered by an effort to understand Israel's point of view, were clearly critical of Israel's actions, sometimes hyperbolically so. On 15 June, Mr Moyers said that Israel had waged 'total war' and added that 'war unbounded follows the logic of hornets - everything in their path is their enemy' (1983: 43).

The contrary can be argued: in a number of commentaries, Bill Moyers can be found articulating opinions hostile to the Palestinian cause. On Friday, 11 June 1982, broadcasting on CBS News at 17:52:30, Moyers characterized the Palestinian people as 'a people displaced and abused, bloodless abstractions and born losers', after having remarked 20 seconds earlier that 'the war has improved Israel's security to the north'. Two months later, on Monday, 23 August 1982, broadcasting on CBS News at 17:51:40, Moyers castigated 'Arafat and his allies' for not having accepted 'the reality of Israel', and adds that they had 'established within Lebanon a terrorist state sworn to Israel's destruction'. This is surely hyperbolic commentary in the reverse direction to that lamented by Muravchik.

My purpose here is not simply to score points against Muravchik's untenable assessment of US network coverage as biased against Israel. Rather I am drawing attention to the dangers involved in playing the sampling game. Perhaps Muravchik could dredge up further examples to suit his purpose and I could reply with a similar volley of counter-examples until both of us ran out of patience. (My own data set consists of hours of video recordings of network coverage spanning all four months of the war; only by subjecting these materials to the most distorting operationalization could it be rendered amenable to sampling of any kind. Muravchik does not even raise this issue, let alone supply a solution.)

9. For a more extensive methodological discussion of this issue, see Coulter (1983).

10. In reproducing in transcript from actual excerpts from US television network news broadcasts, I adopt the convention of italicising words, phrases or larger linguistic units solely fro the purpose of highlighting those fragments to be analized or discussed. In no case should this practice be taken to signify anything about the original broadcast, e.g. emphasis, intonation, affect or any other endogenous property of the report. In addition, I have included references to the exact time of the broadcast fragments reproduced as data by using EST as the metric. Thus, after giving the date, the reader will encounter a series of numerals such as (17:30:40) marking the beginning of the fragment and another at its conclusion.

11. Two years prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a clear linkage had already become widely established in the US between the categories 'Palestinian' and 'terrorist', largely due to media depictions of the Israel - Palestine conflict. A 1980 time poll reported that 30% of the US public think Palestinians are the best described as terrorists, 17% regard them as displaced persons who will eventually settle in another country, and 19% think of them as refugees seeking a homeland (time, 14 April 1980: 42, col. 3). One is left wondering, however what sentiments the remaining 34% of the US public might have expressed on the issue, as this was not reported.

12. As I argued in News Speak About the Lebanon War

Miller use of the category terrorist in this way instances a point made by the logician W. B. Gallie (1955 - 6). He argued that, to the degree that descriptions and categorisations of social phenomena are (uncritically and contentioulsy) taken to be what those who have an interest in them and who have already described and categorised them assert they are, to that degree one is involved in the use of contestable concepts. To the extent that Miller uncritically takes the categorisation of the PLO by the Israelis and imports it into the apparatus of his own report, to that extent he is involved in an ideological enterprise.

For further discussion of the notion of the contestable concepts see Shapiro (1981:ch.7).

13. Building upon Sacks' notion of standardized relational pairs Coulter develops the notion of disjunctive category - pairs

At the level of the social organization of their use, we can speak of the categories belief and knowledge as forming disjunctive category pair. We shall mark this by the use of an oblique as follows: knowledge/belief. Other such pairs would include: vision/hallucination, telepathy/trickery, ghost/illusion, flying-saucer/UFO, and ideology/science. Where one part of these pairs is involved to characterize some phenomenon seriously, the speakers belief - commitment may be inferred, and the structure of subsequent discourse may be managed in terms provided for by the programmatic relevance of the disjunctive category - pair relationship. Thus, to the nonbeliever, Joan of Arc suffered hallucinations, to the believer, a telepath and telecinethicist, and so on.

In every conflict, disjunctive categorization operates and very often through the use of disjunctive category pairs such as government/junta, mob/crowd, extremist/moderate, etc. Israeli general Ariel Sharon became highly sensitive to the operation of one such pair in the description of the departure of Palestinian forces from Beirut: during CBS news report from Jerusalem on Friday, 19 August (17:38:40), he protested (this is) about the expulsion not about withdrawal. It is not a withdrawal. It is an expulsion. It is not a withdrawal. (17:38:50).

14. On the logic of disjunctive categorization practices, see Coulter (1979), Jayyusi (1984: ch. 5) and Jalbert (1989).

15. De dicto/ de re conflations were occasionally avoided, as in the following extract from NBC news, Wednesday, 30 June, 1982 (17:36:20), presented by Tom Brokaw: in south Lebanon, meanwhile, the Israelis presented what they called evidence against the PLO and Rick Davis has that story... (17:36:30). The use of the explicit de dicto marker what they called disaffiliated the reporter from the truth value of the object - complement evidence against the PLO. After all, evidence is to be distinguished from putative evidence: had Brokaw simply asserted that the Israelis presented evidence against the PLO, its status as evidence would have been presupposed de re. For further discussions of the properties of de re/de dicto modalities, see Jalbert (1983).

16. Muravchik even invokes the FCC's fairness doctrine against chancellor on the grounds that his many commentaries on the Lebanon war were consistently critical of Israeli policy (1983: 53).

17. For details regarding elision and categorial phrase War of independence, see Jalbert (1994: 143).

18. David Bogen (1989) alerts us to several problems which arise in attempts to reconcile Habermas's universal pragmatics with ethnomethodological studies of practical action and practical reasoning. My own perspective differs from that of Habermas while preserving his interest in grounding critical reflections on communication and other social phenomena within the domain of the lifeworld.