When President Bush called Israeli Prime Ariel Sharon, the man responsible for the slaughter of more than 3,000 at Sabra and Shatila, a "man of peace," it was clearer than ever that the United States refuses to alter its stance of unswerving support for Israel. It was in response to such misguided foreign policy that more than 75,000 Americans converged on Washington, D.C. last Saturday.
Far from viewing such a huge groundswell of opposition to U.S. foreign policy as something worthy of extensive coverage, the mass media in America felt compelled to misrepresent the facts. The press has thus continued to sanitize news coverage of the Middle East and the American response, preferring to toe the official line.
The most influential newspaper in the United States, The New York Times provides the best example. If you happened to buy an early copy of the Sunday edition, you wouldn't have found any coverage at all. But if you're a late-riser, you might have chanced upon a short article - less than 400 words - buried on page 15. Rather than focus on a massive democratic rally as it unfolded, the Times preferred to offer "news analysis" on its front page, printing a headline that read, "Israel Winning Broad Support from U.S. Right."
It isn't that the Times thinks massive democratic protests are unimportant. Only four days earlier, the Times ran a front-page headline that read, "Over 100,000 Rally in Washington in Support of Israel." The article continued for nearly 800 words, effusing that the gathering "bridged social and religious differences." By contrast, the Times wrote that the pro-Palestinian protests were "disparate and disjointed," although the basis for this conclusion went unstated.
The Times also objectively misreported the sizes of the protests. According to the Washington Times, the organizers of the pro-Israel rally themselves "estimated the crowd was between 20,000 and 40,000." Where did the New York Times' widely reported figure of 100,000 come from? Nobody is really sure. The article itself mentions only "tens of thousands," and the figure of 100,000 appears only in the headline. The Times never explains how it arrived at that number, or why there is a discrepancy between the headline and the article itself. We do know one thing: D.C. police said they had to keep more police officers on duty for the pro-Palestinian protests - apparently because more people were present than at the pro-Israel rally.
The Times is not unique. The Washington Times exemplified media manipulation of the facts, saying of the pro-Palestinian protest that, "More than 30,000 protesters who brought a variety of grievances to the District yesterday paid only brief homage to their demands before joining forces with a large group of peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators." Readers were left with the impression that the number of protestors was closer to 30,000 than 75,000. To top things off, a 20,000-large sympathy protest in San Francisco was universally ignored by the east coast press. No such mistakes were made with coverage of the pro-Israel rally on April 15, whose numbers were greatly inflated by the Times and then repeated elsewhere.
The increasingly slanted coverage is the result of developments in the Middle East. Of late, death and destruction have exclusively been inflicted upon the Palestinians. Amnesty International's preliminary findings upon their visit to Jenin contradict absurd IDF claims of only 37 dead, reporting, "what was striking is what was absent. There were very few bodies in the hospital. There were also none who were seriously injured, only the "walking wounded." Thus we have to ask: where are the bodies and where are the seriously injured?" IDF war crimes, combined with a recent respite in suicide bombings, have placed the focus squarely on the illegality of Israel's actions.
In response, the mainstream press has undertaken a massive PR campaign in order to shore up Israel's image in America. Columnist Thomas Friedman confessed last Sunday that, "Lately, whenever Middle East stories come on CNN or MSNBC, I reach for the remote and switch to the Golf Channel. Everyone needs a break from the all too real suffering that surrounds this story." Friedman had no dearth of things to say three weeks ago after a spate of suicide bombings, when he told us that Israel needed to "deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay." Presumably, he is ecstatic about reports emanating from Jenin. And now that the only victims are Palestinians, Friedman tells us to take "a break" from the suffering; apparently we need only pay attention when Israelis are dying. One can only wish the Palestinian victims of IDF atrocities had the luxury to take "a break" from their "all too real suffering" by "changing the channel."
Tragically, Friedman is in lock-step with the mainstream press. The propagandistic press in the U.S. is a grave threat, both to our democracy, the lives of innocent Palestinians and even the world Jewish population. Public opinion polls consistently show that most Americans support the establishment of a Palestinian state - but the mainstream press never informs Americans that U.S. policies have been designed to prevent that end. We hear about our noble role as mediator, when in reality the U.S.-backed Oslo agreement led to an influx of 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza during the 1990's. Worldwide anger with Israeli policies - made possible by U.S. support - has culminated in attacks on synagogues, and the specter of a new wave of anti-Semitism looms large in the minds of Jews worldwide. Biased reporting accomplishes only the subversion of democracy. Under such a system, Bush and the U.S. government need not censor the press in order to conduct their oil-driven and morally bankrupt foreign policy. Self-censorship suffices.
