Joe Sacco's Palestine: New Journalism vs. Objectivity

Introduction: Sacco's New Journalism Approach

In Palestine, Joe Sacco primarily incorporates New Journalism techniques and rejects objective reporting in order to make his work more credible and authentic. The central question this paper addresses is whether the use of New Journalism tendencies, as opposed to objective reporting, compromises or strengthens the credibility of Sacco's account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

New Journalism Techniques in Palestine

New Journalism is a literary reporting style used by many comic and mainstream journalists. It encompasses three major sub-branches: intensive reportage, dramatic literary techniques, and the reportage of acceptable subjectivity. Sacco integrates all three of these sub-branches in his comic and dramatic work Palestine. The New Journalism writing technique encourages a journalist's opinions, ideas, and personal involvement to enter the story, even as the characters themselves carry a greater share of the narrative (Flippen).

This journalistic approach requires reporters to conduct in-depth coverage while attending to the most minute facts and details of any given event. When writing up their reporting, journalists are expected to use scenes and images rather than plain narrative wherever possible, employ conversational speech rather than formal quotations, and render each occurrence through the perspective of a particular character. Sacco fulfills these requirements in his book by providing detailed, character-driven viewpoints. He engages in conversations with the people he meets in order to offer a step-by-step analysis of daily life during and after the Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Palestine is a book that highlights the plight of Palestinians on an individual scale — a dimension that Western media often ignores in favor of narrating the "bigger picture." The people Sacco meets are individuals the world has largely forgotten; their stories remain unresolved, yet they retain hope that the war will end and the future will be brighter. Sacco embarked on his journey to Palestine in 1992, frustrated by the limitations of Western mass media, its narrow perspective on journalistic writing, and its claim to objectivity — which, in his view, was biased and ill-serving. Western media, he observed, presented a one-sided narrative of the conflict, consistently foregrounding the Israeli perspective at the expense of the Palestinian one. Sacco therefore went to Palestine to write what he believed to be the other side of the story, and this commitment places him firmly within the New Journalism tradition, which demands detailed, unfiltered engagement with events.

Palestine is a work of comic journalism that represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of Muslims — the individuals whose suffering is consistently ignored and underrepresented by the mainstream American press. Sacco ensures his readers receive what they are denied in mainstream foreign reporting: the immediacy and material reality of the Muslim experience during the 1991–1992 period. He conveys the violence through striking images depicting mass killings and civilian mistrust — a mode of presentation previously rare in mainstream journalistic publications. Rather than leaning on journalistic convention or speaking on behalf of others, he turns directly to the victims and perpetrators themselves, recording their voices and their accounts of lived experience.

First-Hand Accounts and Media Bias

In Palestine, Sacco interviews a man who provides a truthful account of the violence. The media had run headlines based on what this man witnessed, but framed the events in a controversial and biased manner. The man, whom Sacco meets in Hebron, witnessed a violent confrontation between Palestinians and Jewish settlers and tells Sacco:

"[The Jewish settlers] attacked homes and caused damage… The people wounded [the Arabs] were passing by, not the ones throwing the stones" (Sacco, p. 132).

In sharp contrast to this eyewitness account, a newspaper clipping cited in the same pages claims: "A group of Jewish families, members of the Kach-affiliated Committee for Safety on the Roads, were passing through the dangerous Harat a-Sheikh district of Hebron when they were attacked by several hundred Arabs. They said they were pelted with rocks and bottles from rooftops and alleys" (Sacco, p. 132).

This juxtaposition illustrates the media's tendency to align with a particular side while obscuring the fuller truth. Sacco departs from this pattern by providing a clear, first-hand account of the violence — a major component of New Journalism that he uses effectively to keep his audience both informed and engaged. He presents events as they occurred, without dilution, going further than mainstream media by depicting the scenes as characters describe them, however disturbing or contrary to editorial convention those scenes may be.

Conclusion: Credibility Through Subjectivity

Since Sacco wrote the book, a number of significant changes have occurred in Palestine — including the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, a second intifada, and renewed peace talks — though the author and his readers would need to be particularly optimistic to find much cause for hope in any of these developments. As Sacco himself acknowledges, none of the major unresolved issues he documented in Palestine have been resolved. His use of New Journalism techniques, far from undermining the credibility of his account, ultimately strengthens it by grounding the narrative in lived experience, individual testimony, and an honest reckoning with his own perspective — qualities that conventional journalistic objectivity frequently fails to deliver.

Works Cited

Flippen, Charles C. Liberating Media: The New Journalism. Acropolis Books, 1974.

Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Non-Fiction Novel. University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Mindich, David TZ. Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American History. New York University Press, 1998.

Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Jonathan Cape, 2004.