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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (223391)	3/9/2007 2:23:24 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Do you think the media itself is causing us to lose the war? In considerable part, yes. This war is not just fought on the ground. It is fought on the airwaves and the internet too. It is important to realize that there is an information component to the war. One that the good guys have been losing, imo. In any democracy, the will to fight and to keep up a fight will be dependent on the information they are given. If the media paints a picture that is falsely negative, it can cause the democracy to give up and lose without need. The prime historical example of this is the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. In media terms, there is no doubt what the Tet Offensive was: a huge surprise North Vietnamese victory with horrendous American losses that causes support in America for the Vietnam War to plummet. In military terms, there is also no doubt what the Tet Offensive was: a North Vietnamese attack that was repelled with huge losses for the North Vietnamese, a terrible defeat for the North Vietnamese and a victory for the Americans and South Vietnamese. Even news reporters admit today that Tet was mis-reported. You see the effect mis-reporting can have? Who knows what would have happened if Tet had been properly reported, but I know that many, many military people thought then and thought today that the war could have been won if public support for it could have been maintained. In Iraq, the media evidence as you say, points to "failure". What I would say is that it points to bombs going off. Whether that = "failure" or "continued warfare" is a matter of interpretation, yes? The media interpret it one way. The military, almost to man, interpret in the other way. As even NBC's Brian Williams (no righty he!) said on the airwaves the other night, the soliders are proud of what they are doing, think they can win, and insist the Iraqis don't want an American pullout, since it will lead to a full scale civil war and a bloodbath. Wouldn't you say it matters quite a lot to the American public as a whole which way it gets reported? Wouldn't you say it matters quite a lot to the insurgents too? I mean, if all they need to do to get "American failure" reported on world-wide cable is to send suicide bombers into Baghdad, heck, that's a helluva lot easier than fighting for large swatches of ground in Al Anbar! Trust me, the insurgents do watch what is reported on CNN and Al Jazeera. They know they very narrow support inside Iraq, so their primary hope is getting the Americans to withdraw. The news media is making their job much easier than it might otherwise have been. To me, there seems some kind of strange disconnect in your mind between an event itself and the subsequent media representation and/or criticism of it. "Strange disconnect" is one word for it. "Pervasive bias" is another. This also goes for the case of Israel, which I obviously care deeply about. The reality is that Israel is trying to defend itself from an enemy committed to its destruction, while protecting its own citizens and killing as few civilians on the other side as it can. That enemy, however, having no value for human life (this is not a slur, btw, they say so themselves by the way they glorify 'martyrdom'), is doing everything in its power to maximize civilian casualties on BOTH sides, by burying its military installations in dense civilian neighborhoods, preventing civilians from leaving areas of fighting, and herding tame reporters into areas to get propaganda shots of dead children, staged if necessary. As I have said many times, I believe the Israeli/Arab conflict must be the first in history where one side counts on the fact that the other side values the lives of enemy women and children more than that enemy values the lives of their own women and children. And why does Hizbullah want to maximize Lebanese civilian casualties? What is the advantage to them? A: It is hugely useful for propaganda. It is an enormous weapon in the media war. Hizbullah is keenly aware that the media war exists. That's one reason they have their own TV station that is on cable worldwide. If the media picture that is widely believed is that Israel's enemy is nobly "resisting" something or other (what, I don't know, Israel isn't occupying Lebanon) while war-mongering Israel is just blasting all those innocent Lebanese over the border for no reason, this is obviously a huge diplomatic blow for Israel and any other country allied with her. Esp. as Israel is held to standards of conduct that are demanded of no one else, cetainly not of Hizbullah. This is certainly the picture that Reuters and the BBC have painted. Consistently, even to point of trumpeting fictional propaganda from the rooftops. Remember the non-existant "massacre in Jenin"? Don't you think most of the world believes Israel has committed massacres in the West Bank? Of course they do. It's what has been reported to them.