Video Made The Terrorist Star

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Noah Pollak.

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It's not clear which of my experiences last week was more educational: Sitting on a hilltop on Israel's northern border, watching Bint Jbiel getting pummeled by artillery, bombs, and missiles — or meeting the Western television reporters who were covering the war and seeing firsthand how they made theater out of bloodshed.

NBC's Ann Curry was on the scene. She was taken to a meadow from which a half-dozen 155mm artillery pieces were pounding away at Hezbollah. Curry approached a resting crew of artillery reservists, put a camera and microphone in the face of one pony-tailed young man, and asked (I quote from memory): "How does it make you feel to be firing artillery into Lebanon that is killing innocent civilians?" Curry, in her other interviews for NBC, has been similarly incredulous at the existence of civilian casualties in war.

Later, Curry interviewed Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Maj. Michael Oren, who in his civilian life is one of the world's most highly respected historians of the Middle East, and author of The New York Times bestseller Six Days of War (disclosure: he's a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, where I work). Oren's analytical offerings were treated with a normal level of interest and courtesy, but upon gingerly broaching his family's story — Oren's son might soon fight in the same Lebanese town he did in 1982 — Curry became totally engrossed. So much so that the next morning NBC arrived at Oren's home in Jerusalem and spent three hours filming his family's story for the "Today" Show. All of this was extraordinarily good PR for Israel and its war effort.

The bizarre combination of Curry's hostility towards the soldiers and her overt sympathy for Oren left me puzzled. What I realized from watching her and other journalists like her, was that contrary to popular belief, most of these journalists are neither "pro" nor "anti" Israel. In fact, they are not exactly journalists at all, at least not in the sense that we have been taught to believe. They do not seem interested in reporting what is traditionally understood as news — that is, information that attempts to convey as complete and realistic an accounting of events as possible.

They can be more accurately described as entertainers, who stimulate their audiences with that which is factual and passing. The most striking thing about the producers and on-air reporters who show up in Israel is how deeply ignorant they are of the conflict and its history. This is not exactly their fault: It is the product of their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. The skills required of them are technical and theatrical, not historic or intellectual, and thus they do not approach their task with much in the way of rigor; they are looking for interesting personal stories and manufactured mini-dramas, whose correlation to reality is only occasionally discernable. It is just more interesting to expose the tortured consciences of IDF artillerymen than to report on their achievements in battle.

There is another problem that makes serious journalism here unlikely. Because it is impossible for television reporters to obtain hard, reliable information from terrorist organizations, journalists are structurally forced to do almost all their interviewing on the Israeli side. But television news thrives on the contentious interview: The reporter barrages the interview subject with tough and impertinent questions, hoping to produce high-quality drama for the audience. Here, for example, are three questions Curry asked during one brief interview of the Israeli government spokeswoman, Miri Eisen, on July 30:

"Some people ask, while Israel is trying to root out Hezbollah, how it is justified in killing large numbers of civilians. Your answer?"

"But what is the — but it [Israel] doesn't target, but civilians were hit. What is to prevent this from happening again?"

"What — why won't Israel agree to an immediate cease-fire, as now is being called for by the pope today, as well as the European Union?"

Curry and her colleagues would probably ask similarly tough questions of Hezbollah officials, if they gave interviews. So the institutionalized result is that Israel must always operate with its feet held to the fire while Hezbollah enjoys a permanent holiday from media scrutiny. This massive imbalance is of course never remarked upon by American journalists — has Curry, in all of her inquisitions of Israelis, ever bothered to note that she never gets to give the other side an equal grilling?

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