The American media off course: An anchored between Obama, Clinton and Middle East
Posted By George S. Hishmeh
April 27, 2008
The US media, print and electronic, are facing serious and damaging criticism in the wake of self-inflicted blunders in the midst of a heated fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as the misguided pontificating on US foreign policy issues, especially relating to the Middle East.
The top anchors of ABC News, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, who anchored the last televised debate between senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton last week, a few days before the primary Democratic election, in the key state of Pennsylvania last Tuesday, have been blasted by colleagues and others for their mean attempt at “taking down” Obama, the front-runner, by repeatedly asking questions raised in earlier debates.
“For many viewers, including me,” wrote David Carr, the media columnist of The New York Times, “it was a disgusting spectacle, a tableau that etched not the bankruptcy of politics but of the people covering it.”
The fact that Stephanopoulos had once served in the Clinton White House was not overlooked by some TV watchers and critics.
Another scandalous expose, unearthed by The Times, dealt with the so-called “military analysts” who appeared regularly on various television programmes to give “authoritative and unfettered judgements about the most pressing issues of the post-September 11 world” and, as The Washington Post wrote, “to help sell [the Iraq] war that was not going well”.
The Times revealed that “hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favourable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance”, an effort that began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day.
What was more appalling was the revelation that “most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air”.
The American media, by and large, are not much better off when they focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, allowing pro-Israeli columnists, some of them Jewish, to have a field day in decrying Arab views or actions, but rarely, if ever, condemning Israel’s bloody attacks against the Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, described nowadays as an open-air prison.
Much to the surprise of some of its readers, The Washington Post published last Thursday a well-argued op-ed by Mahmoud Al Zahar, a surgeon and founder of Hamas and a former foreign minister in the Palestinian unity government. His bottom line: “No ‘peace plan’, ‘roadmap’ or ‘legacy’ can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.”
But it seemed the paper had mischievously carried Zahar’s column only to cut down his views in its editorial on the opposite page, as well as to condemn former president Jimmy Carter for “embrac[ing] Hamas terrorists” during his Mideast tour in the hope of energising the peace process. It ridiculed Carter’s justification for meeting the Hamas leaders and his “arguments about the value of dialogue with enemies”.
The Post’s pugnacious editorial argued that Carter missed the point: “Contacts between enemies can be useful: Israel is legendary for such negotiations, and even now it is engaged in back-channel bargaining with Hamas through Egypt.”
But the paper failed to note, for example, that Israel had not bothered to move a single inch out of the occupied Palestinian territories since the launching of the Annapolis Mideast peace conference nearly five months ago in the hope of reaching an accord by the end of Bush’s term next January.
The Post’s editorial writer would have done well, and may have learned a lesson or two, had he noted the front page photo in The New York Times, appearing on that same day, that showed two Palestinian boys atop each other with their bicycles after being gunned down by Israeli troops.
In fact, the lackadaisical Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations have “regressed”, as the former president correctly observed, much to the chagrin of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who is scheduled to be in Washington this week along with King Abdullah in an uphill effort to convince Bush to inject more life into the peace process.
It was ironic that both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Zawahiri, should find themselves on the same side this week, each criticing the talks between the much-respected former president and the Hamas leaders.
Rice chided Carter for meeting with Hamas “because there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow party to peace negotiations”. Likewise, the Qaeda leader lashed out at Hamas for its reported willingness to consider a peace deal with Israel: “How can they put a matter that violates Sharia [Muslim law] to a referendum?”
Maybe we have to look in other international newspapers for more commonsense and fairness.
The Independent of London editorialised: “The policy of isolating the Islamists is destructive and myopic,” while Gideon Levy wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz: “The terrorists of yesterday all became the statesmen of tomorrow, once they came to power or became partners in negotiations.”