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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Staying On Message

The media, more generally, has left little doubt in the minds of a majority of American news consumers that the Israelis are the good guys, the aggrieved victims, while Hizbollah is an incarnation of the same evil responsible for bringing down the World Trade Centre, a heartless and faceless organisation whose destruction is so important […]

The media, more generally, has left little doubt in the minds of a majority of American news consumers that the Israelis are the good guys, the aggrieved victims, while Hizbollah is an incarnation of the same evil responsible for bringing down the World Trade Centre, a heartless and faceless organisation whose destruction is so important it can justify all the damage Israel is inflicting on Lebanon and its civilians.

The point is not that this viewpoint is necessarily wrong. The point – and this is what distinguishes the US from every other Western country in its attitude to the conflict – is that it is presented as a foregone conclusion. Not only is there next to no debate, but debate itself is considered unnecessary and suspect.

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Often, the coverage has been hysterical and distasteful. In the days following the Israeli bombing of Qana, several pro-Israeli bloggers started spreading a hoax story that Hizbollah had engineered the event, or stage-managed it by placing dead babies in the rubble for the purpose of misleading reporters. Oliver North, the Reagan-era orchestrator of the Iran-Contra affair who is now a right-wing television and radio host, and Michelle Malkin, a sharp-tongued Bush administration cheerleader who runs her own weblog, appeared on Fox News to give credence to the hoax – before the Israeli army came forward to take responsibility and brought the matter to at least a partial close.

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The hysteria has extended into the realm of domestic politics, especially since this is a congressional election year. Republican have sought to depict last week’s primary defeat of the Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq war, as some sort of wacko extremist anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli stand that risks undermining national security. Vice-President Dick Cheney said Lieberman’s defeat would encourage “al-Qa’ida types” to think they can break the will of Americans. The fact that the man who beat Lieberman, Ned Lamont, is an old-fashioned East Coast Wasp who was a registered Republican for much of his life is something Mr Cheney chose to overlook. ~The Independent

This is an interesting outside view, which provides another example of the way in which our perception of the rest of the world and particularly the conflicts in the Near East is shaped inordinately by what I think we can all acknowledge to be heavily slanted news and editorial coverage.  Every position starts from the assumption that Israel is basically in the right, because there is the assumption that anyone hostile to Israel is obviously in the wrong; you may be able to express sympathy for civilian victims on both sides, but there is no way, particularly on the right, that you can entertain for a moment that the cause of Israel is anything but a good one and, what is more, it is extremely difficult even to maintain the basic distinction between their cause and our own.  We like to think this is because everything is very clear and only deluded (and prejudiced) Europeans are unable to see it, but it is actually a function of the complete bias of all our sources of information and our lack of anything resembling free discourse on one of the rather more pressing issues of the day. 

What is particularly remarkable about our media is the capacity it has to put forward an almost identical message in every newspaper, every television broadcast, in ways that would and do strike Europeans as bizarre and frighteningly uniform.  Many have commented over the years on our media’s capacity to repeat, state television-like, the exact same phrases and report on exactly the same stories, but when it comes to the Near East and particularly in the last several years it has become even more noticeable. 

Somehow, perhaps thanks to the consolidation of media companies into a relatively small number, our “free” institutional media manages to come up with more or less the same analysis and reporting.  It is as if it were being centrally organised, but it is not–there is simply an understanding, an awareness of the right sort of uniformity of opinion that all should embrace, that would, if we saw it in another nation on any other issue, strike us as stunningly conformist and almost like a state of being conditioned for mindless obedience.

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