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Wednesday, 02 August 2006 03:09 |
 | | Mark West |
Watching the television coverage of the Israeli incursions into Lebanon has been instructive.
Rush Limbaugh??s fulminations against U.S. citizens in Lebanon, whom he described as spoiled brats and crybabies because they had observed that other nations ?? France, say ?? had been able to evacuate comparable numbers of their citizens more rapidly, spoke volumes about that notable broadcaster.
Fox Network??s incessant whining about how this whole situation??s was Bill Clinton??s fault was similarly interesting.
To my mind,
though, the award for the least palatable moments of coverage so far
consisted of watching Wolf Blitzer, particularly in his interviews.
Blitzer??s show, ?®The Situation Room,?∆ manages to book important guests,
to be sure. But when Wolf talks to those guests, he inevitably insists
on a ?®two-sided?∆ approach to coverage, an approach that obscures the
important geopolitical issues embedded in the current crisis.
On Blitzer??s
show, for example, a spokesperson for the Lebanese government was
discussing the civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure
that the relatively indiscriminate Israeli bombing and shelling had
caused. Blitzer would have none of it. Israeli civilians had died, too;
thus, the two sides were equivalent, Blitzer argued. And the crisis
started when Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, Blitzer
asserted, despite the protestations of the expert Blitzer was allegedly
interviewing to the effect that the actions of Hezbollah were merely a
part of a long and ongoing sequence of acts whose initial provocation
was in 1948.
My mistake, of
course, was thinking that Blitzer does interviews. Interviews consist
of asking pertinent questions, then listening to answers; the
sophistication of the questions, and their ability to elicit telling
responses, was once the hallmark of the skilled interviewer. But
Blitzer, like most of the modern crop of talking heads, can??t let
answers pass if he should disagree. Any interview he conducts soon
becomes about Wolf and his belief in the legitimacy of ?®tit for tat;?∆
the only question to be answered is who started the conflict ?? and the
conflict started for Wolf when CNN began its coverage.
Thus, in Wolf??s
mind, Hezbollah is guilty of inciting the trouble; all that follows is
morally equivalent. While that is a position one might take, it
certainly isn??t particularly nuanced, nor is it the only one someone
reasonable might hold ?? but you couldn??t tell that from recent episodes
of ?®The Situation Room.?∆
This sort of
journalistic ?®fairness,?∆ this sort of unwillingness to discuss anything
beyond who struck the first blow in fights whose perimeters are defined
by media attention, is yet another reason that Americans are so
woefully ill informed about the Middle East. Israel??s public relations
apparatus is vastly more sophisticated than that of its opponents; the
two kidnapped Israeli soldiers are personalized, made human, while the
far larger number of dead and missing Palestinians and Lebanese are
just statistics to an American audience conditioned to be more
interested in who started this round of the fight than in the
atrocities being committed while we watch.
Perhaps this
?¥boxing match?∆ approach makes for good ratings. But it makes for lousy
coverage and for a singularly poorly informed populace. And the latter
is a luxury we can scarcely afford as we come into what may well be the
most critical elections in our nation??s history ?? elections in which,
among other things, we will determine the shape of foreign policy for
the Middle East for years to come.
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC at Asheville.
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