Years back, when I was writing a military column for Universal Press Syndicate, I heard of a book on women in the armed services called The Kinder, Gentler Military (the title as it turned out was ironic) by Stephanie Gutmann. I expected a feminist tirade. However my friend Catherine Aspy spoke well of it. Kate had graduated from Harvard in 1992 and, setting a historic record for wild improbability, enlisted in the U.S. Army. She knew the military. She had seen what Gutmann was writing about, and liked the book. So I read it.
To my surprise, Gutmann knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t political, just reportorial, and described perfectly the fraud and double standards used to make women look successful in the army. Much of it would be hard to credit, except that I had seen it from outside as Kate had from the inside. In the course of events I met Steph a couple of times, chatted on the phone, and lost contact with her. The book got few and bad reviews because it was not what the media wanted to hear. It was a fine book. (Amazon has it.)
A couple of months ago, I ran across a blurb about another book that she recently wrote, The Other War, described as arguing that Israel takes an unfair beating in the press, which is skillfully manipulated by the Palestinians. I ordered the book.
The subject interested me for various reasons, one being an odd contradiction I had noticed. I get considerable mail from the anti-Jewish back-channels on the Internet telling me that the Jews control the American media. Often these are accompanied by lists, usually accurate enough, of important positions in the media held by Jews. My correspondents then assert that because of this control we hear only good things about Israel.
Well and good – except that for perhaps fifteen years I had never heard anything good about Israel from the media. The Israelis were always deliberately shooting little Palestinian children, bulldozing houses from sheer vindictiveness, reducing Palestinians to poverty, murdering Palestinian leaders, torturing all within reach, and intimidating the press. The Palestinians were noble freedom fighters, just like Davy Crockett, or hapless victims.
Hmmm, I wondered. If Jews control the press and only tell us good things about Israel, how come I never hear anything from the press about Israel except bad things?
I was also interested because I’d had considerable if scattered experience in Israel, and indeed cut my journalistic baby-teeth there. In 1973 I went to Israel as a greenhorn war correspondent for the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Free-Lance Star. I was pig-ignorant of the news racket, looked like Mehitabel the Cat’s degenerate brother, and must have astonished the Israelis, but my credentials checked out and the info people were pretty decent. I got to the Golan, the Sinai, and so on. I was there for the doings of the early 80’s.
Anyway, Stephanie’s book arrived. In it she makes a (well documented, example-filled) case that the mainstream media are relentlessly hostile to Israel. Yes, I know. This is so contrary to what we are told daily that to doubt it feels a bit like doubting gravitation. And don’t important papers and networks all agree? When you are told something often enough you begin to believe that you know it. And since I hadn’t been to Israel in twenty-five years, I couldn’t speak from recent personal experience.
But something stank. The news from the region was too pat, too homogeneous. Her description of the behavior of the press in Israel, with which she is intimately familiar, was exactly what I had seen in countless other places – ignorant, herd-like, egomaniacal, adversarial; unremittingly partisan, moralizing, all snottily in agreement, with much clawing over each other to make a name. Of this I knew a great deal.