In a lengthy and detailed article, Marc J. Sirois, managing editor of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star, today delivered a full-frontal assault on the western media for its supposed failings in covering the current conflict. Given the topicality and the serious questions he raises, I'm running a very lightly edited version of his article, leaving my short comment to the conclusion:
The vast majority of western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children. A Reuters dispatch this week described Israel's choice of targets as "puzzling," but for the most part western TV viewers, newspaper readers and web surfers are reading highly sanitised versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.
Of course there are brave and honourable western journalists working here, and many of them are determined to tell the truth about what is happening. One has to assume, therefore, that what the decent ones report is being heavily edited somewhere along the line before it gets to the consumer. This is presumably intended as a prophylactic against the inevitable charges of "anti-Semitism" and resultant drops in advertising revenues that will follow unvarnished coverage of Israeli brutality. The product of this regime of fear has been a generation of biased reporting that portrays the Jewish state as weak when it is very strong, moderate when it is frequently extremist, democratic when it is often theocratic, liberal when it is commonly draconian - in short, "western" when it is anything but.
The two most commonly watched English-language news channels available in Lebanon are CNN and the BBC. With few exceptions, their reports are filed by reporters standing in the relatively safe and comfortable confines of downtown Beirut, the picturesque showcase of Lebanon's now-aborted recovery from its 1975-90 civil war. There has been no damage in this part of the city thus far (although there are concerns that that step in the escalation process is rapidly approaching), so the very background is highly misleading about what is happening. Just a few kilometres away in Beirut's southern suburbs, Israeli air strikes and naval gunfire have reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. No one knows how many people are buried in these piles of shattered concrete and twisted steel. A similar situation exists in the southern third of the country.
Why has the Israeli military singled out these two areas for punishment? Because they are populated primarily by the impoverished and largely disenfranchised Shiites who make up Hizbullah's constituency. Multiple ironies are at work here. For one thing, the population consists largely of Shiites from the South Lebanon who have fled successive waves of Israeli "retribution". For another, when Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978 (not 1982, as typically reported in the western media), many Shiites greeted them with rose petals. Life under the de facto rule of unruly Palestinian militias had not been easy, so despite the damage and casualties inflicted by Israeli ripostes, it was commonly believed that Israeli occupation might not be so bad. Then came 1982, when the Israelis rolled all the way to Beirut after promising Washington that they meant only to establish a 25-kilometre "buffer zone." The carnage in the South was horrific. The Shiites revolted, and Hizbullah was born.
Subsequent spasms of violence - usually caused by tit-for-tat exchanges between Hizbullah and the Israeli military - displaced more and more Shiites, filling Beirut's southern suburbs with an understandably resentful generation of young men determined to run no more. All of this goes unmentioned on CNN. Its idea of "balance" is to make sure that each report about a new massacre of innocents in Lebanon is aired alongside one about civilian injuries or deaths from Hizbullah rocket strikes, even if the incident is 36 hours old. Only rarely do the reports in question mention that while the southern suburbs are a giant refugee camp, northern Israel and the nearby settlements in occupied Palestine are prosperous areas with a substantial contingent of immigrants from places like the United States and Canada, many of whom voluntarily live illegally on occupied Palestinian land.
Hizbullah's decision to snatch two Israeli soldiers evinced poor judgment and even worse timing, but the Israeli response has been out of all proportion to the original incident. The numbers speak for themselves. As of Wednesday evening, Israeli attacks had killed at least 292 civilians in Lebanon, while Hizbullah rockets had killed 13 noncombatants in the Jewish state. Lebanon has approximately 3.5m people. On a per-capita basis, that means that as of Wednesday, the rough equivalent of 9/11 has happened every day here for eight days.
Well, that's the Sirois article, almost in its entirety. It is certainly not a minority view. I have close friends in the Christian community in the northern suburbs of Beirut and their text messages to my wife and I over the past week reflect their growing antipathy towards the actions of the Israeli military and increasing sympathy for the Shiites with whom, for the most part, they rarely mix. One message sent two days ago stated: "News on English channels is rubbish. Nobody explaining that the Israelis are targeting places like dairy farms and trucks transporting produce. Food becomes scarce as parts of the country become cut off. Or the tiny tots' bodies being dug out of the rubble. It's disproportionate".
But are Sirois and my friend right? Is this story not being told? I think some of this tragedy is unfolding in Britain's newspapers though much less so, if at all, in the US papers I monitor. The main charge seems to be against the international TV channels. Again, do we think that's true?
