printBrent Bozell pointed out this week that media coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has been quite fair, with few acknowledged exceptions.
I happen to agree with him this once.
It has become as clear as crystal that those who slept with their sources in the ramp up to war in Iraq actually know quite a bit about unbiased reporting. They understand the need to report both sides but to avoid moral equivalence between them; they get the necessity to warn viewers when they’ve been taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. And they’re good at showing the misery on both sides, while not ignoring that because the one side is inflicting so much more suffering on innocents, the legitimacy of its cause is at stake.
The same people who hyped the Iraq war, its prosecutors, and their propaganda, and concealed the destruction to that country’s infrastructure, have remained so far relatively detached. They’ve simply stepped aside so the viewer can survey the damage for himself.
And get this: one-time jingoists who suffered Alzheimer’s when it came to Just-War ethics and the international law (the naturally compatible type, not the UN version) vis-Ã -vis Iraq are suddenly debating concepts such as proportionality.
To be fair, a great deal of credit goes to the Israelis. Washington controlled and shaped every snippet of emerging information in the count down to war, and thereafter. It did so through an elaborate set of limits and conditions imposed on reporters in exchange for access via the embed program.
Embeds were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany Western journalists. Even so, American TV networks went beyond the call of duty in green-lighting the home team.
That journalists are doing an adequate job covering the war in south Lebanon has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve a far freer hand; Israel hasn’t an “In Bed with the Military program. Their soldiers — unlike ours — are not allowed to propagandize. In fact, they can’t even talk to the press about any aspect of the operations, much less pose for staged photo ops.
So much for the “formidable Israeli propaganda machine.” If they had one, they’d have set up an embed filter.
Ultimately, it’s good to see reporters doing their job — it’s good to know that when they try, they are not entirely incapable of telling right from wrong.