Posted on 08/16/2006 3:06:00 AM PDT by goldstategop
As staff at some of the world’s most prestigious press organizations effectively take Hizbullah’s side in its war with Israel, they inadvertently reveal a profound transformation in the logic of warfare.
Some examples of their actions:
· Reuters: Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer with over a decade’s experience at Reuters, doctored his pictures to make Israeli attacks on Lebanon look more destructive and Lebanese more vulnerable. His embellishments created thicker and darker plumes of smoke from bombing raids and posed the same woman bewailing the loss of her bombed-out residence in three different locations. Reuters fired Hajj and withdrew 920 of his pictures from its archive. Further research by bloggers uncovered four types of fraudulent pictures by Reuters, all exaggerating Israeli aggressiveness. The bloggers even documented how a Reuters picture was staged.
· The BBC: Editors actively trolled for personal accounts to demonize Israel, posting this request on its news pages: “Do you live in Gaza? Have you been affected by violence in the region? Send us your experiences using the form below. If you are happy to speak to us further please include contact details.”
· CNN: an anchor on its international program, Rosemary Church, implied that Israeli forces could shoot down Hizbullah’s rockets but chose not to do so when she asked an Israeli spokesman, “would Israel not be trying to shoot them out of the sky? They have the capability to do that.”
· The Washington Post: Similarly, military affairs reporter Thomas Ricks announced on national television that unnamed U.S. military analysts believe the Israeli government “purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.” Having one’s own people injured, he explained, offers “the moral high ground.”
All these media activities stem from a perception that taking casualties and looking victimized helps one’s standing in the war. Adnan Hajj’s distortions, for example, were calculated to injure Israel’s image, thereby manufacturing internal dissent, diminishing the country’s international standing, and generating pressure on the government to stop its attacks in Lebanon.
But this phenomenon of each side parading its pain and loss inverts the historic order, whereby each side wants to intimidate the enemy by appearing ferocious, relentless, and victorious. In World War II, for instance, the U.S. Office of War Information prohibited the publication of films or photographs showing dead American soldiers for the first two years of fighting, and then only slightly relented. Meanwhile, its Bureau of Motion Pictures produced movies like “Our Enemy – The Japanese,” showing dead bodies of Japanese and scenes of Japanese deprivation.
Proclaiming one’s prowess and denigrating the enemy’s has been the norm through millennia of Egyptian wall paintings, Greek vases, Arabic poetry, Chinese drawings, English ballads, and Russian theater. Why have combatants (and their media allies) now reversed this age-old and universal pattern, downplaying their own prowess and promoting the enemy’s?
Because of the unprecedented power enjoyed by the United States and its allies. As the historian Paul Kennedy explained in 2002, “in military terms there is only one player on the field that counts.” Looking back in time, he finds, “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” And Israel, both as a regional power in its own right and as a close ally of Washington, enjoys a parallel preponderance vis-à-vis Hizbullah.
Such power implies that, when West fights non-West, the outcome on the battlefield is a given. That settled in advance, the fighting is seen more like a police raid than traditional warfare. As in a police raid, modern wars are judged by their legality, the duration of hostilities, the proportionality of force, the severity of casualties, and the extent of economic and environmental damage.
These are all debatable issues, and debated they are, to the point that the Clausewitzian center of gravity has moved from the battlefield to the op-eds and talking heads. How war is perceived has as much importance as how it actually is fought.
This new reality implies that Western governments, whether the United States in Iraq or Israel in Lebanon, needs to see public relations as part of their strategy. Hizbullah has adapted to this new fact of life but those governments have not.
(No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)
It's hard to win a war when your own press is against you winning. Iraq is an example. Our men and women would probably be home today, but because of the constant "another bombing" in Iraq, the bad guys are getting all the media attention and they revel in it. Why can't they show the good stuff, the rebuilding of schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc.? They never tell the good news. The terrorists have their own PR firms, it's called the MSM.
bump
Strange logic?
I.E.D.'s (International Enemies Devices, Internal Enemies Devices)
This isn't that new. The Palestinians started it, hiring themselves a PR firm and going from hated terrorists to tragic victims in a couple of decades.
With any luck, the new new reality is that we have alternative media to expose the clumsiness of the propaganda. Will you ever forget the first time you saw a picture of dozens of photographers surrounding one Palestinian kid throwing a rock? Will Reuters ever quite wash off the stink of Adnan Hajj? And how touchy will that make them?
"With any luck, the new new reality is that we have alternative media to expose the clumsiness of the propaganda"
Amen to that.
The mass media have proven themselves to be willing accomplices of evil, and are morally no better than Leni Riefenstahl.
Interesting (and not coincidental) side note . . .
The Hill & Knowlton representative who led that effort was Victoria Clarke, who later served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs in the second Bush administration -- and became something of a celebrity when she was giving daily press briefings on the war in Iraq in 2003.
And in northern Israel -- as they return, the attitude that will aggregate I do not guess at. I hope that the post-war trauma and constant low-key fear of falling missiles can be alleviated by some sort of workable plan for stopping that danger and for how to counter attack with sustained boldness and minimal risk next time.
Those who thought that they have "won" will have arrogance and reinforcement of the same tactics and generals on their side. And those who did what they had to do will come back to figure out how to change to do it not just better, but much better next time.
No different than our own liberals here bashing the president every single day for the prosecution of the war in Iraq.
That our own pundits are bashing Olmert for being liberal, is akin to the tories bashing Blair when he joined President Bush in the WOT.
Opportunistic in the extreme, and extremely dangerous.
I hate being manipulated by the media in general, but when it's our own so called right wing talkers, then it's doubly sickening.....IMO.
Public Relations: A Poem for the Fauxtogs
“Did you have relations with the public?”
“Why, I… I can’t believe you’d ask such a lewd”—
“Just answer the question please.”
“We have adapted our message to the reflect the reality of”—
“Isn’t it a fact you screwed the public?”
“That’s absurd, we were not aware that our pictures
were doctored, or that our reporters had diplomas
in fiction. Don’t shoot the messanger, that’s an old tr”—
“Speaking of tricks, isn’t it true that you lied
with a straight face, showed us the distraught face
of the enemy teddy bears tossed on the rubble?”
“Photography is artistry! How dare you”—
“A Pulitzer is not an Emmy, or hadn’t you heard?
And why do your editors salivate like admen,
your reporters, like screenwriters and madmen?”
“Look here, we’re the Press, we do the asking around here!”
“Then why are you so offended by questions?”
“We give you all the news that we see fit to print:
it is ours to expose, and yours to lick.”
“Why have you twisted the rules of ethics,
and violated the public’s trust?
Why have you raped in the Name of Truth,
and hidden behind your cameras and pens?”
“You are the public; you are unfit to judge us!
We are the professional scribes and Pharisees-
you are the rabble, the dumb, the unclean!
Ours is the job to make you see.”
“Sorry, if we had wanted blind guides
we’d seek professors;
if we had wanted twisted facts
we’d hire lawyers.
We didn’t solicit your news
pornography;
We do not believe your immoral
fauxtography.”
“But we mold opinions,
and we can make wars!
We manufacture
the placement of facts.”
“You’re nothing but pimps;
and we ain’t your whores;
we'er not bending over,
won't take it no more."
“Look here, we are the Masters
of the Free Press!
We have more Power
than Kings or Queens!”
“And we are the Public
you once screwed,
we were the slaves,
but now we’re the Free.”
“You’ll never get away with
this First Amendment mumbo jumbo—
we own more minds than you can count.
We’ll find laws to deal with you.”
“We own guns and we have brains;
We only succumb to the Higher Laws.”
“But We are the Fourth Estate!”
“And we are your worst fifth column…
Book’em Danno: indecent exposures,
and incest.
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