I'll give you my perspective in the form of an anecdote you may find amusing or alarming(and granted this only pertains to television and radio news, a bottom-feeder area):

In the summer of 2000, I went to visit my aunts and uncles and cousins in Palestine (a little village outside of Ramallah and adjacent to Bir Zeit University)for the first time since I was an infant. A few weeks later, the Intifada broke out, and I ended up being caught up in the excitement of the clashes in Ramallah. I went out every day for a week or so, but eventually found it to be a somewhat useless, and fundamentally depressing experience. We threw stones (that landed a few dozen meters from any Israeli soldiers), and others threw molotovs that only managed to scorch the asphalt, and still others lit tires on fire that only made a big mess (and polluted our environment and sooted our faces and lungs). The IDF broke our bones and put out our eyes with rubber bullets and poisoned us with tear gas. The Israelis positioned snipers on the roof of a former luxury hotel at the border of the Israeli-controlled areas, and from this position managed to kill one or two of the gatehered there every day.

Anyway, here's the story. Right about the second week of this, I was tired and angry (at us, at them, at everything), and a friend I had made there came over and grabbed me by the arm. A foreign tv journalist was there and wanted to talk to someone who spoke English. I was somewhat unsteady, I wasn't sure I had anything in mind to say. The journalist--she may have been from Germany--and her camera man positioned, and then she asked the question. "What will happen tonight"?

I thought about the question. It was obviously meant for me to segue into how we would continue to fight the Israelis in the night, and I knew she wanted me to say with bullets and bombs. THere had been a few gunmen in the evenings taking potshots at the Israeli positions, at the settlers and soldiers at the settlement a few miles away, though they had never hit anything. And I didn't know how to answer her ridiculously leading question. And so I repeated her question, "what will happen tonight". She dropped her microphone to her side, and yelled out, "Oh come on, doesn't anyone here speak English." And walked away. I threw a small stone lightly at her camera man's behind as they walked away, and it bounced off harmlessly. "Come on," he said, "we're on your side."

A few minutes later, I settled behind a burnt out husk of a car. A radio reporter came up to me and asked me if he could ask me a few questions. I was dubious, but eager to reverse the fortune of the day. He carefully turned on his recorder, held the mike to me and said, commenting on my shirt "Why do you wear red? Is it to symbolize the blood that has been spilt? The blood you will spill?"

I couldn't bring myself to say anything, and I left, and I never threw another stone.

To wind down this story, and in case the point has escaped, these and other experiences convinced me that the media came with the story written in their head already. All that was necessary was to find a way to make us say the words that they needed to use as sourcing. I'm sure the alternative, wasting time to find out how people really felt by spending time with them and attempting to see the situation from their perspective seemed a charming but ultimately dead-end strategy. On another occasion I had witnessed a CNN crew filming very close to where the snipers were positioned. Later that night when I watched the footage on CNN, the fact that there were Israeli snipers picking off Palestinians was presented as a Palestinian assertion--despite the fact that the snipers had been visible from the crew's position.

The logic, to me, became clear. Imagine spending all that time and coming back with the Intifada-story--crazed Arab hordes assaulting the noble IDF--that bucked all the tropes of the Palestine story. I suppose you wouldn't be back anytime soon.