Many commenters have wondered why several of my co-bloggers and I have spent so much energy discussing the MSM’s participation in the staging of photographs by the Party of God in Lebanon, as opposed to other issues regarding the war in Israel and Lebanon.
Speaking for myself, the most important reason is comparative advantage. I’m not a military strategist. I don’t have sources in the Israeli government, or in any government for that matter. My Hebrew is adequate for basic conversational purposes but otherwise limited, my Arabic non-existent. Spending tons of bytes giving you my personal “insights” into the war would be a waste of my time and yours.
If you don’t think that the question of whether elements of the media have been serving, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, as Party of God propaganda agents, I’m not going to try to persuade you in this post. But if we (rightly)assume that it’s a very important issue, it’s one regarding which bloggers have a comparative advantage.
Picking out inaccurate, biased, fraudulent, or staged media (MSM or new media) reports is something that anyone with some patience and determination can do. For example, here’s one that I’ve been meaning to write about. Last week, I noticed that Professor Juan Cole, perhaps the most prominent “Middle East expert” on the left, wrote in his blog on Wednesday: “When the victims’ families and friends held a funeral procession on Tuesday, the Israelis hit them again, killing 6 more innocent civilians. (This terror tactic, where you kill people and then kill their funeral party later, as well, is commonly used by the Baathist insurgency in Iraq).”
A little digging shows the incident reported by Cole (“kill their funeral party”) never actually happened. Very early reports claimed that Israel had bombed the funeral procession. Later reports corrected that. Indeed, the link in Cole’s own post, now states that Israel bombed NEAR the funeral procession (half a kilometer away), which is quite different from intentionally bombing a funeral party (which, I would note, would not itself be objectionable if the mourners were armed Party of God terrorists). Reuters was even more emphatic that the funeral was not bombed or even targeted, correcting its own story to read that “At least two rockets hit Ghaziyeh during the funeral, though not in the immediate vicinity, a Reuters journalist reported.” Other reports confirm that the funeral processoin was not hit, and that Israel was apparently targeting the home of a Party of God poobah.
I am fairly confident that Cole is aware that the early reports were corrected, and that his post is inaccurate. The reason is that I emailed him (anonymously) at two separate email addresses on two separate days to inform him. First, on the day he made his post, I provided a link to the corrected Reuters story, which appeared just hours after the initial report. A few days later, I sent him another email, with a link to both the Reuters story and the story he himself cited, pointing out that neither of them supported what he wrote. This did not lead him to correct his report, even though it had been the lead entry on his blog for an entire day.
So, while I can’t tell you what’s on Ehud Olmert’s mind, or predict the ultimate outcome of Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, or translate Arabic news reports to you, I can report to you that Professor Juan Cole has published some very serious misinformation on his blog, in which he accused the Israeli government of engaging in a horrible “terror tactic” of intentionally bombing a civilian funeral procession, and failed to correct it after the inaccuracy was called to his attention twice via email; in the unlikely event he read neither email, and no one else informed him of his error, he certainly didn’t bother to check himself to see whether the initial reports he saw were validated [anyone with a modicum of objectivity regarding Israel should have been suspicious of claims that it was intentionally targeting a civilian funeral party]. Given that Cole, as I said, is considered something of a Middle East “guru” by many on the left, and is a frequent guest on NPR and other media outlets, that seems like useful information to have.
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