152 Douglas J. Glick
Here however the mass media in Israel need only be assumed to be a societal institution that
is influential in contributing to the focal discursive construction. That is, it need only be
assumed to be a site at which the focal propositions are at least in part learned. This turns out
to be a relatively easy assumption to justify in the Israeli case.
Consider the following relevant facts.^6 General rates of participation in the mass media
are quite high in Israel. In addition, news shows are typically the most watched programs. As
it is a small nation, in which the same newspapers, magazines and television and radio shows
are available to essentially the entire population, the agendas and issues across the various
media repeat with great frequency. These facts in conjunction with the high rate of literacy
and newspaper readership in Israel justify at least in part the selection of the newspaper as the
̳site‘ of this study. This site is further justified when one reflects on how different kinds of
newspapers and the different genres within them reflect a microcosm of the different kinds of
cultural framings in which the focal propositions are found. That is, all be them in written
form, objective reports, short factual notices, op-ed pieces and letters to the editor constitute
genres that reflect and sometimes even directly and indirectly cite or quote a wide variety of
socially-located positions on the problem.
In order to get a wide variety of instances of propositions, several additional steps were
taken. First, four different newspapers were surveyed over roughly a two-year period. Second,
the newspapers themselves were selected to vary by type. They included the most popular
national newspaper, an urban religious newspaper, a national literary/intellectual newspaper
and a local urban newspaper.^7 Third, within these newspapers, all genres of newspaper
articles were read. It is with all of the above reasons in mind then that the newspaper was
selected as a justifiably significant and interesting ̳site‘ at which to collect instances of the
discursive practice under investigation.
What then was the actual data for this particular study? If by a discursive construction
one means ideally, as we do at first here, regularly repeating propositions from within any and
all ̳talk about school violence‘, wherever and however it occurs, another problem becomes
immediately apparent. This problem is a general one that exists no matter how broadly or
narrowly one defines the sites for finding instances for any particular discursive construction.
Even within the world of newspapers, propositions about the problem of school violence
know a virtually unlimited number of contextual framings for determining ̳types of talk‘.
Types thus multiply very quickly when looking at the data returned by the methods described
above. Consider only a few possibilities: A local factual account that merely reports that one
student attacked another and gives details about the school, city and students involved; the
details of a particular incident reported from a soccer match; an historical perspective on the
Israeli case based on histories of school violence in other areas of the world; and an argument
that accounts for the problem based on general principles of human behavior and then
appends to it a list of proposed solutions. All of these include many propositions about the
problem of school violence and, as such, participate in its discursive construction. On the
(^6) Though available in numerous places, the relevant facts here were taken from an online site run by the Israeli
7 government (http://www.mfa.gov.il).
The specific newspapers studied were read from cover to cover on Fridays as these issues were longer and tended
to review, in any event, the major stories covered during the previous week. The papers included in the study
were: Israel‘s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Achronot, the left-leaning intellectual newspaper, Ha‘Aretz; ;
a conservative religious newspaper based in Jerusalem, HaModi‘a; and a local urban newspaper in the
Northern Galilee, Kol Karmi‘el.