Daily Archives: March 7, 2008

CAMPAIGN 08 EDITORIAL: A monstrous attack?

A monstrous attack?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, March 7, 2008

What’s worse? Being called a monster, or being likened to Kenneth Starr? I guess it depends on who’s keeping score.

Samantha Power could have referred to Hillary Clinton as Lady Macbeth. She could have said that Barak Obama’s Democratic opponent is displaying an “unalloyed lust for power.” She could have said that Clinton seems to have become “unhinged” — so desperate to win the nomination that she is jeopardizing the Democratic party’s chances of winning back the White House.

Had she said any of these things, Power would now still be a key adviser to Senator Obama. Instead, she used the utterly shocking word “monster.” She fucked up — and at the very same time that she was acknowledging that the Obama campaign “f***** up in Ohio.” (Note that The Scotsman, a newspaper whose journalistic integrity compelled to run with this important story, is also so high-minded that it must protect its readers from the shocking f-word.)

This then is the state of politics and the way it gets reported: lies, distortions, exaggeration and deviousness provoke neither shock nor penalty, but an ill-chosen word and an indiscreet honest expression — this is what must always be denounced and rejected.

Power needed to acknowledge that she had blundered, but she didn’t need to resign. Her remarks were inexcusable not because of their content but because she was dumb enough to express them to a reporter.

REVIEW: Flat Earth News

Riots, terrorism etc
By John Lanchester, London Review of Books, March 6, 2008

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve.

His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story of what he calls ‘flat earth news’: ‘A story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.’ That’s flat earth news, and Davies became interested in the phenomenon, via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did so many papers get sucked into producing so many millions of words of, it turns out, total nonsense about the impending implosion of all government, all commerce, all human activity, by the catastrophe which was going to be caused by the bug? ‘National Health Service patients could die’ (Telegraph); ‘Banks could collapse’ (Guardian); ‘Riots, terrorism and a health crisis’ (Sunday Mirror); ‘Pensions contributions could be wiped out’ (Independent); ‘Nato alert over Russian missile millennium bug’ (Times). The British government spent a figure variously reported as £396 million, £430 million and £788 million. And then, on the big night, a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour. That was pretty much it. Countries which had spent next to nothing – Russia, for instance, whose government of 140 million citizens spent less on the bug than British Airways – had no problems.

There are several ways of looking at this story, which has some of the aspects of a panic and some of those of a hoax or job-creation scheme.[*] Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn’t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies’s view, is to check facts. Journalists don’t just pass on what they’re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don’t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic. [complete article]

NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: March 7

8 burials for Jerusalem seminary’s dead
By Isabel Kershner and Steven Erlanger, New York Times, March 8, 2008
It was unclear what group, if any, was responsible for the massacre. The radical Islamic Hamas movement, which praised the deed on Thursday but did not claim it, on Friday took responsibility in an anonymous phone call to the Reuters news agency and said that details would come later. But Fawzi Barhoum, a senior Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said that no claim was official unless made in a written statement signed by the military wing of Hamas. The gunman’s family said he was intensely religious but did not belong to any militant group.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that the government would act after proper investigation and deliberation, and he condemned those, like Hamas, who celebrated the killings with parades in Gaza. “That Hamas calls this a heroic act, and praises it, this exposes them for what they are,” he said.

The young men died as they were studying in the library of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, a major center for the national-religious movement that provides the backbone of Israeli settlement in the West Bank — settlements like this one, which Israel intends to keep in any future peace treaty.

Gazans see attack on yeshiva as unusual achievement
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, March 7, 2008
The celebratory shooting in the air in Gaza that followed the terrorist attack in Jerusalem last night showed that the penetration of Merkaz Harav was viewed as an unusual political and military achievement for the group responsible.

The attack brought something to a wide public in the Gaza Strip that it had been waiting for all week – revenge.

The horror scenes from Gaza at the beginning of the week sent Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups racing for a terror attack, knowing that whoever managed to pull one off first would score major points in the Arab and Palestinian street.

Talk to Hamas
By Nehemia Shtrasler, Haaretz, March 4, 2008
In these days “all of Gaza has become Hamas,” a former Fatah security officer who is far from being a Hamas supporter, told Haaretz. Al Jazeera is broadcasting to every home the horror pictures of the deaths of dozens of children and women.

In this situation, hatred triumphs and the only hope is the desire to take revenge. The rocket launchers are thus the heroes who gain the people’s sympathy, and support for Hamas is not getting any smaller – it’s growing.

So there is no escape but to talk to Hamas. We cannot choose our enemies. We embraced Yasser Arafat after saying for dozens of years (in the words of Yitzhak Rabin) that “we’ll meet the PLO only on the battlefield.”

U.S. policy is gasoline on the Gaza fires
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, March 4, 2008
Once upon a time, Israelis and Palestinians looked to the U.S. to intervene at moments of heightened confrontation to mediate between the two sides and contain the damage. The Bush Administration, however, has proved entirely incapable of playing this role, because its own diplomatic efforts are hidebound by the requirements of its own war on Hamas.

Condi Rice is sticking doggedly to that script, even though all the other players are making clear that the game is up. The New York Times tells us, for example, that U.S. officials are worried that efforts to broker a cease-fire to end the carnage in Gaza might undermine Washington’s priority, which is not to restore peace, but to isolate and eliminate Hamas: “Ms. Rice wants to avoid the word ‘cease-fire’ because administration officials believe that a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas — which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization — would legitimize Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people,” the Times reports. “The fear, administration officials said, is that a negotiated cease-fire would likely undermine Mr. Abbas and make it look like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating, and not Mr. Abbas.”

Israeli journalism
By Yonatan Mendel, London Review of Books, March 6, 2008
A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.