Random Notes On An Interrupted War

Posted on: August 16th, 2006

Continued from last week, some random observations of what others have been saying about the warfare in Lebanon, beginning with a series of fiercely anti-Olmert columns by Ari Shavit in Haaretz, Israel’s preeminent left-wing daily.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Posted on: August 9th, 2006

What’s been most striking about the media coverage of the war between Israel and Hizbullah is the sheer familiarity of it all. It took many of the usual suspects about a week or so to get their preset narrative – both sides are blameworthy, Israel’s response is disproportional, an immediate cease-fire is the only answer, and can’t we all just get along? – up and running, but that’s exactly what happened as soon as Lebanese civilian casualties began to mount and inconveniences like background and context could be shunted off beyond camera range.

That Old-Time Clintonian ‘Engagement’

Posted on: July 26th, 2006

Media coverage of the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah has gone largely as expected – CNN, The New York Times and other liberal outlets see events largely through a prism of Lebanese civilian casualties, while Fox News, the New York Sun and other conservative organs present a broader picture of Hizbullah provocations and the suffering of civilians on both sides.

Golden Oldie

Posted on: July 19th, 2006

Next week the Monitor will examine aspects of the media coverage of Israel’s war on Hizbullah. This week, we take a stroll down memory lane, revisiting an early Monitor column from October 1998 (yes, the Monitor’s been around for nearly eight years now). The piece was titled “The Times Reverts To Old Hab-its,” and its conclusions should be kept in mind as one reads the paper’s editorials on the current fighting:

Uncle Walter’s Good Fortune

Posted on: July 5th, 2006

Several readers responded to last week’s Monitor on the departure of Dan Rather from CBS News by making reference to Rather’s predecessor, the legendary Walter Cronkite, as some sort of paragon of journalistic objectivity. The Monitor begs to differ.

Dan Departs

Posted on: June 28th, 2006

Dan Rather is finally out at CBS News, nearly two years after his shoddy and discredited reporting – in the midst of a very tight presidential campaign – on President Bush’s National Guard service, and more than a decade after his CBS Evening News settled into last place among the network newscasts, where it’s remained ever since.

Not Your Typical Summer Reading List

Posted on: June 21st, 2006

Not exactly light beach reads, the following books on American presidents deal with Mideast issues in an extended and intelligent manner. These are not necessarily the best all-around biographies or studies of the individual presidents listed (though some rank right up there), but the strongest in terms of exploring presidential attitudes and policies toward Israel.

Berg Of Arabia

Posted on: June 14th, 2006

When Nick Berg, an American entrepreneur who traveled to Iraq in search of business, was savagely murdered two years ago by Islamic militants, his father seemed angrier at George Bush than at the hellish creatures who slowly and painstakingly sawed off his poor son’s head.

Kissinger In His Own Words

Posted on: May 31st, 2006

Since returning to private life some three decades ago, Henry Kissinger has doggedly attempted to restore some luster to a rather badly tarnished image. Lionized by the press in the mid-1970’s as “Super K,” the unprecedentedly powerful secretary of state and mighty architect of American foreign policy during the Nixon-Ford era, Kissinger saw his stock fall rapidly in the 1980’s and 90’s as conservatives criticized him for what they saw as his defeatist policy of détente with the Soviet Union and liberals lambasted him for what they viewed as his amoral, Machiavellian sacrifice of American ideals on the altar of pragmatism and realpolitik.

He Changed The Paper That Changed His Name

Posted on: May 17th, 2006

When reporter Abraham Michael Rosenthal’s byline began appearing in The New York Times back in the 1940’s, the sensitivities of the paper’s owners – German Jews of the fully assimilated “Our Crowd” variety – dictated that he use the initials A.M. in place of his glaringly ethnic first name.

McCain: Kerry Revisited?

Posted on: May 10th, 2006

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the early front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, had a potential John Connally/Mike Dukakis/John Kerry moment earlier this month, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

Coffin’s Mideast Conformity

Posted on: April 26th, 2006

William Sloane Coffin Jr., the left-wing Presbyterian minister who gained notoriety in the 1960’s for his militant antiwar stance and his association and identification with radicals of every stripe while serving as chaplain at Yale University, died April 12 at age 81. The coverage in the mainstream media was almost uniformly laudatory – as it invariably is for those who establish themselves as outspoken critics of the United States.

The Monitor’s Reading List

Posted on: April 19th, 2006

In response to occasional reader inquiries, the Monitor has put together the following list of some worthwhile books on the media, arranged in no particular order. (Though many of the titles are out of print or otherwise hard to come by, most should be available at any decent-sized public library. And thanks to the Internet, even books long out of print are available at surprisingly affordable prices from sites like Amazon and Alibris.)

The Times’s Strange Potshot

Posted on: April 5th, 2006

It’s not exactly news that The New York Times editorial page detested Ronald Reagan. But who would have thought that seventeen years after the end of his presidency and nearly two years after his death the Times would still seek to denigrate Reagan’s legacy, on its news pages, in a manner that can only be described as petty and inappropriate?

The Return Of Al Gore?

Posted on: March 29th, 2006

It was a far-fetched scenario as recently as a year ago, but Al Gore is quietly making something of a political comeback. Moderate Democrats who despair that the early frontrunner for their party’s 2008 presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is likely unelectable, can’t help remembering that Gore won half a million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000. Meanwhile, the party’s base voters, appreciably more to the left than the country at large and angry at what they perceive to be Clinton’s drift to the center, are looking for someone other than her to carry the anti-Bush, antiwar banner.

Walt’s Paper Trail

Posted on: March 22nd, 2006

Judging from the shocked reaction among right-wing bloggers to a paper on U.S.-Israel relations written by professors Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and issued this month by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, one would think the paper’s authors were a couple of unknowns with no discernible paper trail.

Scratch A Leftist…

Posted on: March 15th, 2006

Jay Bennish, the Colorado teacher who told his class that the U.S. “is probably the single most violent nation on planet earth” and that President Bush’s State of the Union speech “sound[ed] a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler used to say,” was given a relatively free ride by the national news media.

Obsessed With Jews

Posted on: March 8th, 2006

He’s the columnist who complained that “Hitler died in 1945, but anti-Hitler hysteria is still going strong”; cautioned against “the excessive moral prestige Jews have in the media and the public square”; whined about “Jews deciding the standards, setting the criteria of humanity”; and observed, in chilling if artful prose, that because Jews “set themselves up as the arbiter, there is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a certain ‘kill the umpire’ impulse.”

All The News That’s Fit For Pinch

Posted on: March 1st, 2006

Yes, another piece on The New York Times – and those who don’t understand why the Times warrants constant scrutiny probably have no business reading a media column in the first place.

Web Favorites, Expanded & Updated

Posted on: February 15th, 2006

It’s time again for the Monitor’s latest listing of worthwhile websites and blogs. (As always, there is no particular order to the list; names appearing toward the top are not necessarily more valuable than those closer to the bottom.)