Soccer Dad

Media myopia

In When the Camera Lies Richard Cohen uses a now famous picture of 9/11 to discusss the CNN effect.

The complaints of the people in the photo struck me as similar to what I heard from Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, twice in the past week. Both at a briefing in Washington and a dinner in New York, she mentioned how stunned she and her colleagues in the Israeli cabinet had been at how fast world opinion turned on Israel after it recently invaded Lebanon. At first the world understood that Israel's borders had been violated, three soldiers killed and two more kidnapped. Everyone agreed: Retaliation was in order.

A day later, Israel did just that. It began a bombing campaign designed to cripple the Lebanese infrastructure -- bridges, roads, the Beirut airport -- so that Hezbollah could not be rearmed. At the same time, it hit residential areas of Beirut where Hezbollah ran the show, supposedly targeting the leadership but inevitably killing civilians, including children. It was these pictures that horrified world opinion. For some reason, Israel expected that the accidental killing of children would be seen in context. But there is no context for the death of a child. The eye does not permit it -- never mind what the mind knows.

But that's not the whole story. When NATO bombed Serbia there was plenty of collateral damage. But since Miolosevic and the Serbs were the bad guys there was little concern for their losses. As Cohen does, the media doesn't give a full accounting of the evil of Hezbollah. If the world understood Hezbollah as a terror organization devoted to the destruction of Israel, there'd be a lot less sympathy for the collateral damage caused by Israel. If Israel was portrayed as striking back against an organization that had been violating the international border for six years despite having no cause for those violations (Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000). But the media's not interested in the big picture. It's interested in romanticizing terrorists and questioning democracies. The reaction to Israel's invasion of Lebanon is a function of that kind of media perversity.

Technorati tags: Richard Cohen, CNN Effect, Israel.