Media Double-Standard Needs Investigation

We’ve become accustomed to in-depth investigations of the common aspects of war, intelligence, tactics, decision-making, but ignore one of the key fronts in modern war, media.

Congress is not the venue, both for reasons of re-election timidity and avoiding any sense of government intrusion into the freedom of press. Media organizations, including drawing on outside experts, owe journalism, the American and global audiences, an immediate public self-examination, in depth, without the excuses and cover-ups journalists are so quick to accuse others.

In an age of instant communications, the media front is as important and determinative in the battle for the focus of world opinion and government leaders and for public opinion in the home-fronts and living rooms far removed. This is too fundamental an area not to be credibly investigated. That doesn’t mean in-house, lawyerly circumlocutions, like CBS’s of Rathergate, but rather one that meets the gold standard of former Washington Post editor Peter Braestrup’s Big Story, and then some, and then continues with widely disseminated programs in J-schools and newsrooms for reform.

Gross and offensive incompetence and bias among mainstream media has already cost it many millions of customers and much of its credibility. It has cost investigative journalists even reasonable federal shield protections. It is costing America, Israel, and all other peoples in the world with a hope for peace its opportunity, as it undermines almost any semblance of resolve. This goes beyond the survival of a vibrant mainstream media to the survival of a vibrant free world.

Both within the U.S. and abroad, there’s documented instance after instance of what’s called a double-standard: highlighting real or purported failures or injustices by the few resistant nations of the West, while underplaying or excusing common and purposeful depredations by terrorists, or even broadcasting their deluding propaganda with little or no caveat. Indeed, in too many cases this goes beyond double-standard to no-standard, belying the most basic standards of responsible journalism.

The latest instance, Israeli bombing in Lebanon, is the most striking abdication of factual truth.

There’s the far less sympathetic attention, if at all, to Israeli casualties and hundreds-of-thousands consigned to bomb shelters from purposely indiscriminate terror rockets compared to the featuring of Lebanese killed and injured when Hezbollah purposely places its rocket launchers and munitions among civilians. A Lebanese doctor just wrote how this works: [HT: Solomonia blog]

In a letter to the editor of the Berlin left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) a Lebanese Shia explains how after Israel’s withdrawal from South Lebanon, Hezbollah stored rockets in bunkers in his town and built a school and residence over it.
I lived until 2002 in a small southern village near Mardshajund that is inhabited by a majority of Shias like me. After Israel left Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to take have its say in other towns. Received as successful resistance fighters and armed to the teeth, they stored rockets in bunkers in our town as well. The social work of the Party of God consisted in building a school and a residence over these bunkers! A local sheikh explained to me laughing that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or if they attacked the rockets depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population, they use them as shields, and, once dead, as propaganda. As long as they continue existing there, there will be no tranquility and peace.
Dr. Mounir Herzallah
Berlin-Wedding

Aside from clueless anchors and HQ’s editors, on top of all their talking-head former military -- almost all of whom have no experience in the area or specific methods of war they’re pontificating about, there’s the failure to analyze the actual precision bombing efforts and restraint by Israel. For example, here’s photographic bomb-damage-assessment of strikes in Lebanon.

Then there’s the acceptance of obviously staged depictions, if not actually Hezbollah created, of deaths at Qana. Only in the blogosphere does one see the contrary or mitigating evidence, as of the paraded baby and the justifiable targeting of Hezbollah use of the collapsed building and environs for rocket-firing and munition stores. Indeed, the Geneva Conventions state that it is Hezbollah committing war crimes and that Israel is not.

Both Protocol I and Article 28 of the Geneva Convention (IV) make clear that "the deliberate intermingling of civilians and combatants, designed to create a situation in which any attack against combatants would necessarily entail an excessive number of casualties is a flagrant breach of the Law of International Armed Conflict," according to international law scholar Yoram Dinstein (see his The Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of International Armed Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 129 - 130).| In short, Hezbollah is in violation of the laws of war when it places missiles and rockets in villages and homes in order to shield them from Israeli attack.

Article 51(7) of Protocol I states: "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations." And the Geneva Convention (IV) holds that "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points of areas immune from military operations." (Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 1949, Laws of Armed Conflicts, 495, 511.) Moreover, the Rome Statute is clear that "utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations is recognized as a war crime by Article 8 (2) (b) (xxiii)". (Dinstein, p. 130)

I’ll bet this isn’t what you’ve seen in your newspaper or on your screen.

The United Nations is given credence in media reports as a force for peace, when its record is one of continuous, repeated, one-sided attacks upon Israel, and consequent ineptitude in and acquiescence to Hezbollah’s entrenchment in southern Lebanon. Here’s the U.N. record of blame-Israel.

If war is too important to be left to just the generals, journalism is too important to be left to just the editors of the New York Times or CNN.