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Wildly varying perspectives

Thursday, January 1, 2009

AS REGULAR READERS know, I try to avoid the media temptation that seems hardwired into any turn-of-the year transition. I don’t do reviews of the dying year, or predictions about the new one.

It’s discouraging enough that an Israeli “major offensive on Gaza”, which I foresaw in last week’s column, should be unleashed with such horrific loss of life and injuries – and should have been unleashed within just two days of that edition of THE MEDIA BEAT being published.

 

It’s been no surprise, of course, to see how the American media have treated this story … in the main uncomplicatedly blaming Hamas for the breakdown and non-renewal of its previous six-month ceasefire, and echoing blithely the White House line, “the United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself” (to quote second-tier White House press spokesman Gordon Johndroe).

 

Presenting this argument, whether the presenter is in government or in journalism, has inevitably meant sidling around or ignoring the starkly contrasting statistics of the conflict: nearly 400 Palestinians killed (plus about a thousand injured  -  one young girl is carried into a Gaza City hospital, above left) compared with four Israelis killed by cross-border Hamas rockets.

 

The European media have been much less “understanding” of Israel, and of course the Arab press has been mightily outraged -- albeit with some commentators in Egypt’s and Jordan’s press trying uncomfortably to recall that Hamas’ strategic choices do involve a deep streak of self-destructiveness. The self-destructiveness of the desperate, it’s hard not to conclude.

 

Given those widely disparate casualty numbers, it was startling (though not surprising) for me to hear a Jerusalem Post media critic go on radio and bemoan international coverage of her country’s military action. She exhibited the kind of blindered perspective that Israel’s besieged society can all too easily foster even among serious analysts, when she complained that throughout many of the world’s media outlets “we hear the word ‘disproportionate’ a lot”.

 

Well, yes. We would, wouldn’t we?

  

 

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

 

 

HERE'S ONE NON-PREDICTION FOR 2009 – in that it’s so obvious and simply inevitable.  The personality and background of Caroline Kennedy (above right) will dominate the “who succeeds New York Senator Hillary Clinton” debate.

 

That’s unless she feels so humiliated by the citizenry’s reaction to her media appearances that she withdraws from the non-contest. I’ll hazard a wild guess that she won’t, and that she’ll be appointed the new Senator anyway.

 

But she can’t expect a comfortable ride. It’s perhaps unfortunate for her that the Republicans recently offered to the public such a well-nigh incomprehensible speaker as Sarah Palin, and we have attuned our ears afresh, attending more carefully perhaps to an office-seeker’s capacity to communicate.

 

One of Kennedy’s supporters, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg (himself no silver-tongued Barack Obama – more of a business-school jargon-spouter with a tendency to leave his sentences unfinished) has leapt to support the late President’s daughter.

 

It’s sad that the best he could say was: "If there's anybody who understands the pain and suffering of having the press criticize how you speak, it is me …the only way I know to make it better is to go out there and do it every day”.

 

The Mayor seems to believe that after all his practice he is a fine orator today.

   

 

MAYBE FOR HER PART KENNEDY will get better, and I’m sure her well-connected campaigners earnestly hope so. Her big verbal tic, her reliance on the phrase “you know”, was very evident even when she was chivalrously edited on the Time Warner local cable TV service NY1, and again - though it wasn't especially highlighted - in her New York Times interview. (The venue for this latter encounter, by the way, was what might at first seem a folksy choice, a Lexington Avenue diner – until you know that the entire back room of the diner was reserved by her staff.)

 

It fell to the often-blunt New York Post to offer a thorough-going editorial assessment, a count indeed, that “during a 40-minute interview with The Post on Saturday, she uttered ‘you know’ more than 200 times” and that she “came across as sometimes inarticulate and vague”.

 

Perhaps we should simply be grateful that her recurring speech-prop of choice is not a younger generation's "like ..."

 

But besides her low rating for articulacy, there’s also her even more troubling lack of familiarity with crucial policy questions. Oh, and there’s that little matter of being self-confessedly “surprised and dismayed” at her own failure to show up and vote in nearly half out of the 38 contested elections that have taken place since 1988, when she first registered as a New York voter. This was City Board of Elections information easily found by the New York Daily News.

 

I don’t think Kennedy is well served by her press aide Stefan Friedman, who displayed his own curious perspective on numbers (blindered almost to an Israeli degree) when claiming to reporters that: “Caroline Kennedy recognizes just how important it is to vote, and has a very strong record of going to the polls. She has not voted on a handful of occasions over the last two decades."

 

I suppose it would be too Clintonian to wonder what anyone’s definition of “a handful” is.

 

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