Soccer Dad

Maybe don henley was right

We got the bubble-headed beach blonde,
Comes on at five,
She can tell about the plane crash,
With a gleam in her eye.
It's int'resting when people die,
Give us dirty laundry.
"Dirty Laundry" - Don Henley

I'm regularly complaining about the anti-Israel bias in the media, but Noah Pollak assistant editor of Azure has a more charitable explanation in Video made the Terrorist Star* at NRO.

The bizarre combination of Curry’s hostility towards the soldiers and her overt sympathy for Oren left me puzzled. What I realized, from watching her and other journalists like her, was that contrary to popular belief, most of these journalists are neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel. In fact, they are not exactly journalists at all, at least not in the sense that we have been taught to believe. They do not seem interested in reporting what is traditionally understood as news — that is, information that attempts to convey as complete and realistic an accounting of events as possible.

They can be more accurately described as entertainers, who stimulate their audiences with that which is factual and passing. The most striking thing about the producers and on-air reporters who show up in Israel is how deeply ignorant they are of the conflict and its history. This is not exactly their fault: It is the product of their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. The skills required of them are technical and theatrical, not historic or intellectual, and thus they do not approach their task with much in the way of rigor; they are looking for interesting personal stories and manufactured mini-dramas, whose correlation to reality is only occasionally discernable.

I guess it's more charitable to say that they're ignorant instead of venal and I think that the assessment is accurate. Even if reporters are essentially entertainers they still attach a self-importance to their job that they are safeguarding freedom and fulfilling the public's "right to know."
Still the effect can't be ignored as Pollak notes toward the end of his article

As a means of physically damaging Israel, Hezbollah’s military capabilities are almost laughable. But as a means to demoralize, isolate, and promote the ridicule of Israel, Katyushas and mortars aimed at civilian populations are the perfect weapon: Sufficiently ineffective to exculpate Israel’s legions of scrutinizers from apprehension about Israeli deaths, they invite a predictable military response from Israel that Hezbollah can use to cause maximum political and media damage to the Jewish state.

Gen Moshe Yaalon similarly noted in The Rules of War

The rules of war boil down to one central principle: the need to distinguish combatants from noncombatants. Those who condemned Israel for what happened at Qana, rather than placing the blame for this unfortunate tragedy squarely on Hezbollah and its state sponsors, have rewarded those for whom this moral principle is meaningless and have condemned a state in which this principle has always guided military and political decision making.

(Do you think he's been reading Elder of Ziyon?)

He also gives an example of how considering civilians can carry a cost

In 2003, at the height of the Palestinian terror war against Israel, our intelligence services discovered the location of a meeting of the senior leadership of Hamas, an organization pledged to the annihilation of the Jewish state and responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever carried out against Israel.

We knew that a one-ton bomb would destroy the three-story building and kill the Hamas leadership. But we also knew that such a bomb would endanger about 40 families who lived in the vicinity. We decided to use a smaller bomb that would destroy only the top floor of the building. As it turned out, the Hamas leaders were meeting on the ground floor. They lived to terrorize another day.

(Gen. Amos Yadlin who was one of the pilots who bombed the Osirak reactor and now has the position of Director of Military Intelligence that Gen Yaalon once had, has written similarly about ths dilemma, "Ethical Dilemmas in Fighting Terror")

There's a lot more in these two articles. Read both of them. All of them.

* Talk about 80's music references. The very first video played on MTV that just celebrated its 25th birthday was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Technorati tags: Media Bias, Moshe Yaalon, Israel.