Malaysian Media Coverage of Palestinian Presidents' Image during Crises 1996-2016

Maintaining a good image of political leaders is significant to ensure their political life. The image of political leaders, including presidents of any country, is threatened when they are facing critical situations. There is a necessity to repair the image of presidents when threatened with crises. This effort of image repair by presidents is mostly covered by local or foreign media, and this coverage might be positive or negative. This study examines the coverage by the Malaysian media, specifically New Straits Times (NST), on the Palestinian Presidents, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and their portrayal towards several crises. Both image repair theory and framing perspective were used to guide the study. A total of 2715 news stories have been found about Palestinian issues in the 21 year period covered from 1996-2016. A total of 531 stories were related to Palestinian Presidents, 456 stories were on crises. This study employing content analysis has revealed three main crises faced by the Palestinian Presidents, namely political, social, and economic crisis. The political crises included: peace process, internal conflict, foreign pressure, Israeli attacks, Israeli blockade, Palestinian attacks, Israeli threats, clashes, demonstrations, Israeli spying, kidnapping, and relations breakdown. The social crises included: corruption, information leakage, cheating, false information, Israeli rumours, and Israeli slanders. The economic crises included only financial crisis. Palestinian Presidents have used all the main image repair strategies, namely denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. These strategies have been included in the 50 news stories. The number of used sub-image repair strategies was 61. The employed sub-strategies were simple denial, shifting the blame, provocation, defeasibility, attack accuser, correct/solve problem, confess/admit, and apology. Neutral slant of news stories was the most prevalent slant by NST, followed by positive, negative, and balanced slants respectively. But President Arafat received more coverage than President Abbas. The contribution of study came through matching the types of crisis with image repair strategies since understanding the crisis and determining its type is important for choosing the most suitable response strategy for it. Observing the framing of crises by certain media provides crisis managers and their organisations the most fitted crisis response through using image repair strategies which reduce the damaged image. Another contribution is by combining image repair as public relations theory with framing as journalism theory in this study