Sometimes, it's the pressure of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, which promotes a rush to publish before necessary information is in. Sometimes, it's because the topic is complex and requires a backstory and context most Americans (even journalists) don't already know. Worse yet, it's hard to fit such complexity into short paragraphs, concise lead sentences, and even more concise headlines, which are often all the news that its consumers have the time to take in.
Sometimes it's that word-packages displaced, surgical strikes, humanitarian crisis become so routine we essentially stop noticing. The camera, too, can be an aid or a weapon, and even grammar comes into play, as in the difference between Israeli civilians were killed (by stated or implied actors), while Palestinians civilians died, as if by some unknown force or their folly in being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I've been hung up lately on the word horrors and its variations: horrible, horrific, horrifying. Examples of their use in such media coverage are legion. The writer in me wants to come up with a fresh word that would really allow us to absorb and truly consider the yes! horrors of what's now happening in Gaza. Then I recall these two lines from Pablo Neruda's searing poem about the Spanish civil war:
"and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood."
This war, like all war, is indeed horrible.
Sometimes the coverage problem is what's pejoratively called bothsideism or, more generously, balance. But assuming there are only two sides to every story misses the reality that most stories have many sides. The protesters in recent demonstrations, for instance, embraced a remarkable range of demands, intentions, and sympathies, but reporting was so much easier if positions were clear-cut and uniform. So, coverage has tended toward a Manichaean view of the hostilities and those demonstrating about them: pro or con, allies or enemies, Zionist or anti-Semite, good for America and Joe Biden or a blow to democracy everywhere and the Democratic Party in particular. Such a way of reporting, however, closes down so many other possibilities.
This is particularly apparent when political demonstrations against atrocities like those committed in Israel on October 7th and in Gaza (and the West Bank) thereafter are seen mainly as a spectacle in which reporters count the numbers, repeat the slogans, and focus on a random few who supposedly represent the whole. Individual stories may humanize an issue and draw eyes to an article. Such reporting, however, can also play into a particularly American version of dissent in which the individual resister becomes the story, not the resistance movement. Such a skew can make political protests seem more like a series of individual temper tantrums, at best tolerable outlets for sometimes justified anger, and not much more.
What doesn't make it inside such a news-media framework is revealing. In this country, as an issue, peace itself has been ceded to the left, which effectively means banished. But imagine, for a moment, what a different world we might be in if our news platforms were to set up peace beats alongside their war beats. What if the opinions of peace workers were as routinely sought out as retired generals and politicians in the pockets of arms manufacturers? What if it was considered a crucial part of the news to explore the complexities of, possible conditions for, and likelihood of peace, rather than presenting it as just the absence of war or a zero-sum game? What if our reporting explored moral issues along with economic and political ones and maybe even figured out how to make peace seem as exciting and newsworthy as war?
I'm not so na??ve as to think that a shift in the business of news coverage here in America would end years of animosity and violence in the Middle East. Still, over time it could reorient our thinking about militarism and, given this embattled and battered planet of ours, that doesn't seem to me, as least like such a bad idea.
Copyright 2023 Nan Levinson
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