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Spinning cynically as ever

Thursday, January 8, 2009

"THE CYNICISM IS THE WORST part of it – if it weren’t for the sheer horror.” So a young American journalist, a radio producer, summarized for me his take on the Gaza invasion, and its attendant media-spinning, through which he’s had - for the first time in his particular career - to pick his way professionally.

The spinning has been conducted, of course, in conditions of maximum control by the Israeli authorities, since they’ve effectively banned the international press corps from any front-line reporting.

 

“The cynical predictability of it all gets me most,” the media-man went on, refining his reaction a few days ago. “I know we’ll soon have some kind of cease-fire, presented as a generous gesture on humanitarian grounds.”

 

And sure enough, yesterday a 3-hour "recess in offensive operations" was announced by Israeli Defense Force spokesperson Peter Lerner - to enable food and other humanitarian supplies to be trucked in to Gazans.  This after more than a week of Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (above left) repeating insistently to banks of reporters’ microphones from Paris to Tel Aviv’s own TV stations that, quite simply: “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.

 

It’s an old saw that “the first casualty in war is truth”. Coming hard behind it must be public credulity.

 

But Israel’s public – with local media offering polling evidence to indicate that 65% of the nation supports the military action – is far from monolithic in what it believes. After I was criticized because THE MEDIA BEAT last week highlighted the (I thought very obvious) point that the IDF’s version of a “shock-and-awe” onslaught looks decidedly “disproportionate” to much of the world, I found myself turning back once more to a reliable analyst - Larry Derfne at the Jerusalem Post. His paper is hardly the most dove-ish among Israel’s opinion-centers, but in its columns he has – even before the current massive escalation – pointed out that:

 

“Gaza is getting so much the worst of it. Kassam rockets have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them”.

 

Within those casualties can now be included the estimated 600-plus Palestinians killed in the last twelve days. That compares with Israeli fatalities which, if we count since Hamas first launched its rocket attacks in 2002, now total 29 (and of which four were victims of IDF “friendly fire” this week).

 

Derfne has also tellingly put his finger on that pernicious tendency to dehumanize the enemy, or simply “the other”, which we can sense underpinning the cynical calculations that go on during a war. He says of his own fellow-citizens:

 

“We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, so we block it out of our minds — which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might.”

    

     

 

**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.

 

  

BUT HOW’S THIS FOR CYNICISM?  – This time it comes from the lips of a human rights activist, Jerry Fowler, Executive Director of the Save Darfur advocacy group.

 

After our soon-departing President George W Bush (above right) ordered, so remarkably late in the day, that 75 tons of much-needed vehicles and equipment should now be quickly sent to the badly overstretched international “peace-keeping” force in the Sudan, Fowler pointedly described the decision as “a little bit of last-minute legacy-shopping by the Administration”.

 

And lest anyone should think that the White House’s action was merely a logical, if long drawn-out, conclusion drawn from some objective appraisal of facts on the ground, we have the National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to remind us how vital the media-spinning game remains to the Bush crew.

 

In a lengthy and (frankly) whiney statement justifying his boss’s tardy move, Hadley took pains to single out a particular journalistic critic – Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has been consistently razor-sharp in his dissection of the Bush non-policy on Sudan.

 

“Today's announcement,” pouted Hadley, “is further evidence that Nicholas Kristof's portrayal last week of this Administration's response to the genocide in Darfur was inaccurate. President Bush has been committed to resolving the crisis there since the United States first labeled it genocide in 2004”.

 

Somewhat in line with all those farewell interviews Bush has been giving (count them – it’s ten already, three more than the garrulous Bill Clinton gave) this senior staffer's quote might well be another case for modernizing a Shakespearean assessment. Now it’s the Security Advisor who “doth protest too much”.

  

 

AND MAYBE THE LADY DOES TOO, AFTER ALL. The First Lady, that is.

 

Following quite bit of shopping her memoirs around, Laura Bush now finally has a deal with the Scribner subsidiary of publishers Simon and Schuster. It’s rumored in Bookville to be earning her several million dollars, but nowhere near the $10.5 million that Hillary Clinton pulled in with “Living History”, published by the main S&S imprint.

 

I marveled at the adjectival choice so carefully made by Scribner’s Executive Vice President Susan Moldow to describe the past eight years, when she said Mrs Bush has been “witness to the private moments of one of our country's most consequential presidencies”.

 

That’s good. “Consequential”. It certainly was that.

 

Mrs Bush’s husband has of course alluded several times over to the book he himself is, er, thinking about.  It can’t be long in being announced, once some wretched group of publishing executives have held their noses long enough to look over the proposal.
 

 

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