Middle East (Media) War: Hits, Runs & Errors

Probably like a lot of you, I've been listening to the radio news while I drive, and watching the TV news -- network and cable -- when I'm at home in order to see what's happening in the Middle East.

I swear there are moments when it feels like it's being covered as a sporting event with two equal sides. Especially on radio news, reduced to the most minimal few seconds of coverage, it's all about this side killed this many and wounded that many, meanwhile the other guys scored with a short-range rocket but they may be waiting to play a bigger rocket and take the opponent by surprise. That kind of cognitive dissonance comes when your total coverage is thirty seconds and every shade of nuance or subtext is stripped bare. {Photo: LA Times}

Watching the TV news with all its graphics ability, you start to realize that -- except for the context changing -- covering the Israel/Hezbollah conflict; the World Cup Soccer games and the 2006 mid-term elections -- they all look similar. Satellite feeds, animation of maps or playing fields or red/blue states, sober anchors, color commentators, multiple reporters in the field.

I'm not sure exactly what this means except that these things are not the same and it's disturbing that they all seem to be blending into a blur of "on scene" and "live" and "breaking news" and "experts." The tools are applied uniformly to very different situations, then the stories flattened to fit the dimensions of our new plasma screens.

The coverage in its day-to-day bullet points also does something else that's quite unfair. It seems to reduce the commitment of Israel to strike back at Hezbollah into some kind of moral equivalency between the two. The Israelis bomb and the terrorists shoot rockets. Tit for tat. Only I don't buy that and I don't like news coverage that makes it look that way. Does that make me pro-Israeli? I don't think so. I think I'm anti-terrorist. The world has enough problems without this kind of insanity.

The real place where the sporting analogy falls apart, though, is in outcome. Most games have a winner and a loser. Not this one.

The photo above is an Israeli worker picking up body parts in the aftermath of one of Iran's Katyusha rockets hitting the Haifa railway platform.

Was Newt Gingrich right to say that the battle against Islamic fanatacism is World War III? I'm sure that will be hotly debated by more experts. But it sure feels like it...

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