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“It’s no accident that the great age of terror coincides precisely with the expansion and globalization of the broadcast media.”
—Ralph Peters, Lt. Col. (retired), U.S. Army, 2004
“In the last few years, cable [news executives have] gotten to like the idea of creating continuing characters—as in a soap opera—because [they] feel it might be easier for the audience to understand than if they did different stories all the time. “
—Eric Burns, media analyst, Fox News, 2004
Jews (later known as Israelis) and Arabs (later known as Palestinians) have been waging war for about a century over a sliver of sandy, rocky land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The battles—over many other issues besides land, of course—have been fought with fists, sticks, knives, slingshots, arrows, rocks, grenades, Kalashnikovs, M 16s, Uzis, MiG and Mirage jets, Apache helicopters, and Kassam rockets. In these concrete, verifiable ground battles, involving what we traditionally think of as armies, the Israelis have won—or could have won if they had decided to.
But then the first Gulf war happened and TV producers discovered world conflict as a riveting form of “reality programming.” Twenty-four/seven news channels bloomed, and newly expanded news holes cried out for a steady feed of “content.” Satellites, digital cameras and the internet made transmission of text and visual content nearly instantaneous. Photos, which can communicate across national borders, became a very valuable global commodity (easily surpassing text), and news outlets around the world grew increasingly dependent on three massive image merchants—the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse—which collectively supply 80 percent of the world news media’s still and television images. Increasingly, wherever we reside in the world, we are “informed” by the same pictures, tied together by the real-time transmission of the same images, and living in the global village that Marshall McLuhan foresaw in the 1960s.
This globalization and unification of communication has had a big impact on war. For those not involved in some material way, war has become global spectacle—the ultimate form of reality show. In practical terms, for combatants, there is a new front that is almost as important as the old one on the ground. If you can dominate world media and enlist world opinion, you can defeat your enemy by letting global levers like trade sanctions, decreased tourism, and UN troops constrain him. This second front did not evolve overnight. The United States has fought what writer Michael Ignatieff calls “virtual wars” for short periods—although we have not realized it. In his book Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, for instance, Ignatieff says that in the Kosovo air war, the West
did not appreciate that Milosevic could afford to lose military assets because he was not fighting with conventional military means. Instead of fighting NATO in the air, he fought NATO on the air waves. By allowing CNN and the BBC to continue broadcasting from inside Serbia, he hoped to destabilize and unsettle Western opinion with nightly stories of civilians carbonized in bombed trains and media workers incinerated by strikes on television stations…. Propaganda has been central to war since the dawn of democracy, but it took an authoritarian populist for the Balkans to understood the awesome potential for influencing the opinion-base of an enemy, by manipulating modern-real-time news to his own advantage.
The United States has fought media-savvy opponents since—Saddam Hussein, the young Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr. But for a case study of a country fighting and shakily surviving media war with a brilliant opponent, one should look at the government of Israel and its battle with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority during the period that has come to be known as “the second intifada”—which started during the summer of 2000 and ran till the death of Arafat in November 2004, when a tenuous peace took hold.
Yasser Arafat was a masterful media manipulator who very effectively used the combat theatre (the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel) as a kind of soundstage. With the knowing and unknowing collusion of a codependent mass media, a highly complex conflict was reduced, as the columnist Douglas Davis put it, “to a monochromatic, single-dimensional comic cutout, whose well-worn script feature[d] a relentlessly brutal, demonically evil Ariel Sharon and a plucky, bumbling, misunderstood Yasser Arafat, the benign father of Palestine, in need of a little TLC (plus $50 million a month) from the West.”
Sweeping instances of media distortion—times when the majority of major media, in concert, got an important subject wrong—fascinate me. In 1989, for instance, I wrote about a “crisis” dubbed “date rape” that the news media said was “sweeping campuses.” In 1999 I wrote about the “Witchhook” phenomenon, the media coverage of the 1991 Tailhook Convention for U.S. Navy and Marine aviators, which was so overblown that it prompted congressional hearings, firings, demotions, and calls for “reform of military culture.” I got interested in the coverage of Israel during the second intifada for the same reason: because there was such a wide schism between reality (and I do believe there is something called “reality,” not just “versions of reality”) and the media creation seen on the world stage.
Look, for example, at the way this tiny country began seeming to loom over the globe. As the Israeli columnist Amnon Lord put it in 2002, “Anyone following the world press, especially the British and European, would reach the inevitable conclusion that the Israelis are the enemies of humanity.” I do not agree with Amnon Lord about a lot of things, but here he was not exaggerating. In 2002 a survey of the British public commissioned by the Daily Telegraph put Israel in the top five “least democratic countries in the world,” alongside Russia, China, Dubai and Egypt. (It was also judged one of the five “least friendly,” “least beautiful” and “least deserving of international respect”—although, if it is any consolation, the United States was one of the five “least friendly” countries too.) Jewish leaders in Britain were not surprised. A spokesman for an organization of British Jews said, “The results reflect the way the media has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
In 2004 a poll conducted by Germany’s University of Bielefeld found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinians, while 45 percent said “it was no surprise” that people were against Israel, considering its policies. An Israeli scholar asked to comment on these findings said, “When you see an image in the newspaper, a caricature, repeated day in and day out, that Sharon is equal to Hitler, then the image catches in your head.”
In 2005, Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the state of Israel is “a threat to all of us…[because] in its abuse of the human rights of the Palestinians, typified by the shocking image of the wall being built around them, [it] raises the temperature of the Middle East to a boiling point….” He also called Ariel Sharon, who had spent that year risking his political career and his life to get Israeli settlements out of the Gaza Strip, a “war criminal,” guilty of “organizing terrorism…and ethnic cleansing.”
Neil MacDonald of Canada’s ubiquitous, state-funded CBC (Canadian Broadcast Company) network also saw Israel as a “threat to all of us.” One day in 2004, this veteran reporter and broadcast host was talking about prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Gharib prison when he suddenly seemed to veer off topic. Because of “the occupation of Iraq and George Bush’s unprecedented alliance with the right-wing government of Israel has placed Americans overseas in danger,” he said. He then cut to a video clip of Eugene Bird, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, in a Capitol Hill press conference declaring, “We know that the Israeli intelligence was operating in Baghdad after the war was over. The question should be: Were there any foreign interrogators among those that were recommending very, very bad treatment for the prisoners?”
From all the possible press conferences about Abu Gharib that MacDonald could have selected to work into his own broadcast, he chose to amplify the charges of retired diplomat Bird, president of an organization named the Council for the National Interest, which states on its website that it is attempting to “repair the damage being done to our political institutions by the over-zealous tactics of Israel’s lobby.”
That Israel got us into the war in Iraq and secretly pulled the strings once we were there is a popular view. In 2004, filmmaker Michael Moore was giving a lecture in Liverpool, England. “Who’s the beneficiary of this war?” he asked the audience. Hearing cries of “Halliburton” from the audience, he said, “Halliburton…. Has anyone else benefited?”
“Israel!” yelled several people in the crowd.
“The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton,” Moore said, “it’s all part of the same ball of wax, right?”*
Throughout the second intifada, Americans who support Israel recognized that the country, to put it mildly, was not winning the media battle, and they also often asked each other why it was that Israel, a country so full of competent, energetic people, had “let itself” become such a target and had allowed so much misinformation to fill the airwaves. I wondered that myself. After working on this book for nearly four years—about the length of the second intifada itself—I can only say that there are many reasons. Some are particular to Israel as a relatively young country that hasn’t had much time to think about media strategies. Some are particular to Israel as the “Jewish state.” Some are particular to all countries engaged in “asymmetric” warfare—as the United States is in Iraq. Sometimes the conventions and logistics of modern journalism are to blame. In other words, given the distorting effects of journalism in general, any country that finds itself as continually in the spotlight, under the microscope as Israel does, will find itself distorted.
There are at least 350 permanently based foreign news bureaus in the city of Jerusalem covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—easily as many as in New York, London or Moscow. Adding to this relatively huge body of permanently assigned journalists, there are, at any given time, a hundred or so freelance journalists, authors, photographers and documentarians all sifting this ancient, overworked soil looking for scoops. About 900 articles about events in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are published each day in the English-language media alone—75 times more than about any other area of comparable population.
In 2000 a British editor explained that all these reporters are deployed with journalistic seismographs to Israel and the Palestinian territories because “if huge numbers of people die in Africa it is a tragedy but little will change in the world. It does not affect us as the Middle East does where the fate of the world hangs in the balance.” But does the news bring the news media or do the news media by their mere presence create the news—by providing a kind of soundstage on which various actors air their grievances and threaten “the fate of the world”? Does this kind of micro-focus just tend to make people feel that the “fate of the world” really must be at stake?
In any case, can the fate of the planet really depend on the resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over territory? It’s more likely that the fate of the world hangs in the balance in Iran or North Korea. which have nuclear weapons, or in Saudi Arabia, which has oil. There are separation barriers (walls and fences) between countries all over the world. There is a mined fence of nearly 500 miles between Turkey and Syria. A fence runs through disputed Kashmir to separate Pakistan and India. There are miles of fencing and a huge checkpoint erected by the US to keep out Mexicans. There is a fence between Botswana and Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. A fence is currently being constructed between Thailand and Malaysia, and even the EU, which voted at the Hague to chastise Israel for its separation barrier, has announced plans to erect a fence to protect EU-members Poland and Hungary from “the free movement of migrants” from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. So why do editors think “our fates hang in the balance” every time people demonstrate outside Israel’s separation barrier or there is an exchange of fire in a West Bank town?
Aside from the fundamental misconception that “the conflict” is somehow crucial to our lives, I also hope, in this book, to address the misconception that the daily sluice of news (whether it’s from NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, or Fox) can tell you what you need to know about this conflict—or indeed any serious, complex event. Much of the information we absorb daily—often subliminally, as we glance at a television in a bank lobby, for instance—is in photographs. Sometimes pictures can give us a fair approximation of reality—mostly at times of high crisis, like 9/11, when cameras are basically just turned on and allowed to run, without editing, without manipulation and in real-time. Most of the time, however, the great paradox is that all of our new communication technology has only allowed a better facsimile of the truth. The new technologies (digital cameras, satellite transmission, the internet) allow journalists to say more things, with an appearance of credibility, about more formerly remote places—while the things they say may be as preconceived, false, or one-sided as in lower tech days gone by. As journalist James Fallows put it, “with the internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate apparatus for ‘proving,’ dramatizing, and disseminating its particular truth.” This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real truth under all these competing versions of the truth (we are not living in “the Matrix” yet) but that truth is as hard to determine as it has always been.
The best summary I have seen of what new technologies (like the web, the digital camera, and the satellite camera) have done to news gathering came from a recently-retired CBS News producer named Phil Scheffler. In a Winter 2004 issue of the Columbia University journalism school alumni newsletter he wrote:
When I was coming up, reporting meant a reporter and a camera crew going to where news was happening, asking questions, taking notes, shooting pictures, and than coming back or sending back a ‘report.’ Now a lot of coverage is a construction. An editor in New York decides what the story is, sends the word out to bureaus that we need a sound bite from this or that type of person saying this or that, gathers up picture coverage supplied by freelancers or agencies and writes a script that is narrated by a ‘reporter’ who hasn’t been within 500 miles of the story.
The problem is that increasingly producers sitting in carpeted, climate-controlled studios in New York and London are making war their subject. It is inherently exciting and it has become easier to insert reporters into war. The problem is that producers and journalists—dumped on the ground with little prior knowledge—are forced to condense and “package” terribly complex and crucial events. Looking for hot pictures, they are wed, whether they like it or not, or will admit it or not, to the people who can promise hot pictures, which increasingly means they become facilitators for terrorists, whose bombings and such derive most of their power from the amplification of mass media.
In a world in which journalists have been turned, willingly or otherwise, into combatants in the most crucial events of our time, it is more important than ever that news consumers become expert at inspecting, analyzing, and demystifying the news product. We need to know who is at the news-room controls. We need to know who is doing the constructing, what their motives are, and we need to understand the (sometimes very petty) exigencies that influence their work. It is too easy to be goaded into action by images.
Millions of people became convinced that they understand the complex and tragic Israeli/Palestinian conflict because they trust “the Times” or “the BBC” or because, as one New Yorker I met during the second intifada put it, the pictures she saw on CNN “don’t lie.” I wrote this book because apparently people need to be reminded that pictures do lie. Behind every picture there is a long, and complex story and a regiment of people who brought that particular picture (of all possible pictures) to you. The second intifada was explained to the public through a series of images—images that didn’t bring us the truth.
