After the now-revealed absurdity of the Plame Affair, you would think the gang at the NYT would be exhibiting a little humility … but nooooo! Their oh-so-predictable Jerusalem correspondent Steven Erlanger is inveighing against the IDF for not allowing enough war access to him and his colleagues and for a lack of … ready for this?…. “proportionality.” (Wonder how Erlanger would have dealt with the fire-bombing of Dresden. Hope his father wasn’t involved.) Thank the Goddess we’re in the post-Jason Blair/Internet era when most of us know the NYT is just another dead-tree publication with its stock heading into the toilet and not the “Newspaper of Record,” a concept so inherently totalitarian it’s amazing a democratic society could have ever countenanced such a thing in the first place. It’s also particularly ironic that all this jejune bullshit by Erlanger and his colleagues was being shoveled at a conference held in Jerusalem itself. Imagine them arranging a similar event in South Lebanon or Gaza to criticize the locals. [Which group of jihadists would kidnap them first?-ed. The Anti-Boredom Society.]
UPDATE: In the old days I would just have laughed about the Photoshopping of Katie Couric by CBS News. But somehow things have gotten a little more serious and this seems oddly all of a piece with those corrupt slime buckets who brought us Dan Rather’s lies. I’m not laughing.
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17 Comments
1. Terrye:I don’t think he would want to hang out in Gaza. They do not like American reporters, even reporters like him.
Aug 30, 2006 - 4:34 pm 2. Jamison1:This is off topic, but if you haven’t read Ben Stein’s last column, you really need to spend a couple of minutes and read it:
Aug 30, 2006 - 4:49 pm 3. David Thomson:How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?
Laurel Leff wrote Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and Americaís Most Important Newspaper. She convincingly argues that the New York Times essentially sold the Jews down the river during the era of the Holocaust. It deliberately hid the truth of the Naziís murders from the general public. Stories concerning the Holocaust were generally published deep in the Timesí back pages—if at all. The Sulzberger family has always seemed ashamed of its Jewish heritage. The New York Times consistently bashes Israel. Steven Erlanger is merely carrying out a not so grand tradition.
Aug 30, 2006 - 5:16 pm 4. Charlie (Colorado):jejeune bullshit
Now there’s a phrase that deserves to be preserved.
Aug 30, 2006 - 6:08 pm 5. Charlie (Colorado):I’ll be damned. Is that the French spelling? I tried to look it up and got pointed to “jejune”, but I swear your way looks right to me.
Aug 30, 2006 - 6:11 pm 6. Skookumchuk:Are you guys still talking about that newspaper over in New York City? Sheesh.
And I’m sure “jejeune” is right, Charlie.
Aug 30, 2006 - 6:31 pm 7. photoncourier.blogspot.com:“the fire-bombing of Dresden”…not just Dresden, but Hamburg, Berlin, and many other cities.
Luftwaffe General Adolph Galland, in his memoirs, remarked on how pathetic Germany’s bombing raids on Britain were compared with the thousand-bomber attacks hitting the German cities.
I guess if the pundits of “proportionality” had been around then, they would have insisted on cutting the Allied raids to a level equivalent to what the Germans were able to do.
Aug 30, 2006 - 7:28 pm 8. Jonathan Cohen:There were clearly a number of doctored photos (Beirut smoke), there were staged scenes dramatizing civilian suffering (Green Helmet) and there were completely fabricated events (ambulance hit by missile). These all undermine media credibility. But what is more important is what happened at the editor level.
What has become an unfortunate aspect of the MSM and in particular the New York Times is that the mission of PRESERVING NARRATIVE has taken precedent over reporting the news.
Once the narrative became Lebanese suffering, the issues were selection and captioning of photographs, choice of headlines, placement of articles and assignment of reporters. And what is perhaps the more important aspect of editorial decision making is what gets left out.
It is clear that Israel was targeting military targets: rocketlaunch sites, roads, command and communication centers and concentrations of highly trained, non-uniformed Hezbollah soldiers, interspersed among the civilian population. It was equally clear that Hezbollah was firing missiles containing cluster bombs and aimed randomly at civilian areas with the hope of causing a maximum number of civilian casualties. This is the narrative that comes closest to describing the actual situation of combat.
For some reason, the major networks and papers like the New York Times portrayed the Lebanese as being the target of deliberate attacks on civilians. They also allowed themselves to be used for staged displays of anger and grief which was played in the US, Europe and the Arab world that could only provoke anger and hatred towards Israel from those who were watching.
What they didn’t show was how little of Lebanon was actually targeted. Most of Beirut carried on with life as usual while the upper third of Israel was confined to fallout shelters. The casualty figures listed for Lebanese made no attempt to distinguish between soldiers and civilian deaths, listing all deaths as civilians. The pictures of devestation in towns in South Lebanon that were the centers of fighting got lumped in with all other damage with the implication that it was all caused by Israeli attacks on civilians.
A typical nightly news had from the Lebanon side pictures of hospital patients, distressed relatives and angry Lebanese saying there were no military targets in the vicinity. From the Israeli side there would be pictures that included tanks firing off into Lebanon. Pictures of people in shelters stressed normalcy rather than tragedy and distress.
The clear message of this was Arab victimization at the hands of callous Israelis.
The question is not so much what was the nightly narrative of the war but why the media chose to promote it. I don’t think that you can pass this off on the individual photographers or reporters. The choices made at the editorial level, which stories to run, which pictures to show, what video to air on TV, those decisions are made by editors and while influenced by the reporters on the ground, they reflect the biases of the producers of the news.
So one is left asking what are the biases of the MSM and why?
The narrative of Arab victimization and Israeli oppression fits into the world view of the academic left whose binary view of race, gender and class separates the world into good guys and bad guys according to these categories.
The realpolitic school of foreign affairs wants to abandon Israel for reasons of demographics, oil and avoidance of terrorism and the Arab victimization narrative eases the conscience of many who are still aware of the history of Jewish persecution.
Finally, there are Jews who fear that as Israel becomes the focal point of third world resentments against the west, Jews around the world will become targeted for their support for Israel.
For those of us who remember the desparate situations that led to the creation of the Jewish state and continue to empathize with their plight, the current situation is very troubling. The dishonest filtering of recent events in Lebanon through an anti-Israel narrative does not bode well for the survival of the Jewish state and the plight of Jews around the world.
Aug 30, 2006 - 7:43 pm 9. gumshoe:“Thank the Goddess we’re in the post-Jason Blair/Internet era when most of us know the NYT is just another dead-tree publication with its stock heading into the toilet and not the “Newspaper of Record,” a concept so inherently totalitarian it’s amazing a democratic society could have ever countenanced such a thing in the first place.”
i had they very same thought this evening,Roger:
how stunning that we would take the one-to-many
broadcast version of events for Reality.
yesterday,on NPR, i was half listening to a reporter from the radio network giving his
news from Baghdad…pretty sure it was Corey Flintoff(sp,one of the NPR regulars,in other words)…
i was listening with my usual skepticism and NPR-filter.
Flintoff,in response to some leading questions from the NPR interviewer “back home,embedded in the studio”, related the views of a Coalition/US General in Baghdad that the recent violence in Baghdad “is being engineered for media impact”.
i was stunned to not only hear
Flintoff report the general’s views on this “insurgent strategy”,but to
hear Flintoff speak as though the general was credible and his views were accurate.
the interviewer “back home” tried cynically, and several times,to move Flintoff off the central point the general had made: attacks are being coordinated and staged to get media air-play,but the actual level of casualties,while an ongoing tragedy, is not overly worrisome.
the point i was stunned by
was the open,if one sided discussion,
that the terror events are AIMED
at the media in the form of a campaign.
(and the 2006 mid-term US elections
would,of course, be the target of such a campaign).
and Flintoff got it.
and he said so.
and then he stuck to his view when challenged.
by contrast,Martha Radditz was doing
talking-head-duty on ABC news tonight,
and the evening ABC “PRESERVING NARRATIVE” SHOW(thks J.Cohen)was in full force: anchor Charles Gibson asking for Iraq updates in mawkish tones,
and Martha obligingly answering in her terribly “concerned” tones with her patented pained expression(and i’m sure she’s seen some real horrors)…but she and Gibson were and are the walking-talking-crawls-on-its-belly-like-a-reptile PRODUCT of the street murderers in Baghdad.
that the media STILL at this late date
doesn’t get how it has been played
OVER AND OVER is mind boggling.
nor do they seem to get how their “sympathy”
increases and prolongs the murderous behaviors.
as Daniel Pipes once said:
“education by murder” seems the only way
many will give up their denial.
but for many in the media,
Aug 30, 2006 - 10:22 pm 10. Charlie (Colorado):the conversion rate seems awfully slow.
And I’m sure “jejeune” is right, Charlie.
it looks right to me too, Skook. But find it in a dictionary.
That’s why I’m puzzled: a tiny typo wouldn’t bother (even with my incipient OCD) me. But where did the extra ‘e’ go in all the dictionaries I can easily access?
Aug 31, 2006 - 8:01 am 11. Skookumchuk:Charlie:
It is a puzzlement. The only time I can see a hint of how an alternative may have developed is in an old 1962 Cassell’s just pulled from the shelf. I always mess up accent marks in HTML, so here goes, without them. For the English jejune:
Vide, a jeun, maigre; sec, aride, sterilite.
Aug 31, 2006 - 9:28 am 12. Cynic:I presume that most people are aware of Ed Lasky’s two articles.
“The New York Times and the Jews”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4994
and part two:
“The New York Times and the Jews (2)”
Aug 31, 2006 - 9:52 am 13. Cynic:http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5682
“… correspondent Steven Erlanger is inveighing against the IDF for not allowing enough war access to him …
From ynetnews
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3297119,00.html
“Erlanger told the panel he turned down an offer by the IDF Spokesperson Unit to gain access to IDF efforts aimed at enabling humanitarian aid to reach Lebanon, saying he was not interested in the story.”
Aug 31, 2006 - 9:57 am 14. cubanbob:Israel should stop tolerating enemy propagandist and simply expell and ban the NYT, AP, AFP, CNN, BBC and Reuters. They have nothing to lose and plenty to gain.
Aug 31, 2006 - 11:12 am 15. zefal:So Steven Erlangeran belives in the old saying “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.
Maybe the IDF should just randomly launch rockets into his neighborhood and call it even. That should satisfy his need for “proportionality”.
PS ny times could hire Florence Henderson to sing a cute jingle about the need for “it”.
Sep 1, 2006 - 12:14 am 16. waterdragon52:Roger:
Are you quite sure that Erlanger is of German descent and not Jewish? I don’t have kin named Erlanger, but I do have some named “Langer”.
Ironically, it seems it has been the German press that started the questioning of reporting out of the PA and Lebanon when one of their larger newspapers took a second look at the now forgotten Gaza beach bomb party of earlier this summer.
Sep 1, 2006 - 9:47 am 17. ianfairchild:The concept of proportionality in war is, in my view, absurd. Proportionality, taken to the extreme only ensures that no victor emerges, which only prolongs the conflict. Turn the dogs loose and finish the damn thing!
Sep 1, 2006 - 5:00 pm