The BBC is on the case of the orphanage massacre in Sri Lanka. Good for them. But the MSM seems eerily silent. What do you think the coverage would be if the Israeli government killed 61 children in an anti-terror bombing campaign? Front-page A-1. Sri Lanka? Nada. And people wonder why some of us believe much of the media has an anti-Israel bias. ~Andrew Sullivan

It is unfortunate that the Sri Lanka school massacre has gone unnoticed.  I have already commented on it and believe that it ought to have the same kind of prominence in international attention that Qana received during the Lebanon war.  But who am I kidding?  There are no Muslims fighting–which means there is no way to fit it into the handy narrative of WWIII/WWIV, no way for Gingrich to make asinine comments about the conflict–and Israel isn’t involved, which means there is no way for evangelical preachers to root for one side and describe the destruction of a nation as a “miracle,” and no way to spin this as part of the “war on terror.”  Because of this, Secretary Rice cannot say stupid things about the “birth pangs of a new Tamil homeland.”  President Bush will be unable in this case to call the deaths of children an “opportunity.”   

It is an old-fashioned separatist war, the same one they have been fighting for 20-odd years, based on “tribe or religion or whatever” in the immortal phrase of Charles Krauthammer, and there is nothing more likely to put an American audience to sleep than two ethnic groups they never heard of killing each other in a country they can’t find on the map over disputes that they don’t understand.  Imagine the perplexity if you explained that there are also Tamils in the south of India, and mentioned that it was an Indian Tamil who blew up Rajiv Gandhi because he opposed the LTTE, or the bewilderment at the revelation that the Tamil Tigers were the ones who invented suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic.  That might mean that terrorism has something to do with occupation or resistance to someone else’s rule, which obviously cannot be true, can it?  

Why would your average newspaper or cable news service devote any of its time to the deaths of combatants or noncombatants in a war that most people don’t even know about?  How often did the slaughter in Ivory Coast get anyone’s attention outside The Economist?  How’s the civil war in Nepal going?  Anyone know what’s cooking on the Eritrean border these days?  No?  Why not?  Oh, yes, it must be the anti-Israel bias in the media.  Because the anti-Israel bias in the American media is so pronounced, so very overwhelming, rather than evidence that our media are almost as ignorant about the rest of the world as the general population is.

In fact, I suspect that this is more proof that our media has such an undue, positive, myopic obsession with Israeli conflicts that similar conflicts elsewhere in the world don’t even rate a mention because, well, Israel is not somehow implicated and therefore it’s just a bunch of foreigners killing each other.  The fact that the first thing that pops into American bloggers’ heads when they see a bombing in Sri Lanka is “I wonder if this will get as much coverage as Israel‘s campaign” should tell you a lot about the sorry state of our media culture with respect to foreign affairs.  Everything–including conflicts that have nothing to do with the Near East or Muslims–apparently must be viewed through the lens of how it relates to Israel and the way Israel gets covered in the media. 

How many front-page stories do atrocities in Chechnya get?  None, that’s right, because nobody running the media companies cares how many Chechens or Russians die in that war.  There is media outrage over excesses and civilian deaths in Israeli wars because everyone is paying attention to everything that happens.  This is not because everyone in the MSM has it out for Israel, but because everyone in the MSM is microanalysing every detail of every minute of every Israeli action.  You have to feel sorry for the Israelis on this score, since it is true that no other nation is put under such scrutiny in our media–but then no other nation gets so much attention far out of proportion to its size and strategic importance as Israel does in our press.   

There are no “good guys” in the Sri Lankan war (quick, Sullivan: what is a Tamil, and what is a Sinhalese? who represents the forces of Light?), no “reliable allies” to cheer for, and no way for our government to tar our national reputation further by dismissing the suffering of innocents killed by bombs that we sold the government that is using them to lay waste to an entire country.  The American MSM occasionally includes some criticism of Israel when Israel errs and commits terrible excesses, but if any other country did to its neighbour what Israel did to Lebanon the cries of “genocide” would have been deafening.  They would, as it happens, also have been wrong, but the fact that you never heard any such thing, especially not in American coverage, ought to tell you something about how favourable our media are towards Israel in most respects. 

Interestingly, what is the news service that has been following the developments in Sri Lanka?  The terrible, horrible BBC, which is routinely accused on the right of pernicious anti-Israel bias.  Maybe it is biased–I don’t know, I don’t watch their broadcasts–but it is also just about the only global news organisation that is paying much attention to this atrocity in the Sri Lankan war.  Put that in your media bias pipe and smoke it.   

Update: One of Sullivan’s readers gets it.