This week's ambush of an Israeli bus in the West Bank that killed 7 Jewish settlers officially ended a 3 week period of what the American news media have called a "relative calm" in Middle East violence. In other words, the average American citizen who doesn't keep up with the Middle East as I do, would naturally assume that there have been no killings during this 3 week period. This assumption would be correct if the terms "relative calm" was to define any other conflict. The distinction in the Middle East is that this is not just any other conflict. This is not just a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians but a conflict between Israel and the news media. Whatever the case may be, there's no doubt that journalists generally understand critical words about Israel to be hazardous to careers. And not only do the journalists feel the threat, but the News Outlets themselves have gotten the message.
There was a time when we could at least depend on CNN to give us a balanced account of the happenings in the Middle East but, if you've noticed lately, CNN seems to report only the news that is favorable to the public image of the Israelis. This all began about 3 weeks ago when the Israelis threatened to pull the plug on CNN unless they immediately tilt all the news in favor of Israeli victims of terrorist attacks and stop all interviews with Palestinian victims. CNN immediately sent over their senior vice president to Israel to resolve the problem while correspondent Wolf Blitzer spent one week in Jerusalem airing nothing but Israeli victims. Since then, CNN bends over backwards to insure only news of Israeli victims makes the airwaves.
There was a time when we could at least depend on CNN to give us a balanced account of the happenings in the Middle East but, if you've noticed lately, CNN seems to report only the news that is favorable to the public image of the Israelis. This all began about 3 weeks ago when the Israelis threatened to pull the plug on CNN unless they immediately tilt all the news in favor of Israeli victims of terrorist attacks and stop all interviews with Palestinian victims. CNN immediately sent over their senior vice president to Israel to resolve the problem while correspondent Wolf Blitzer spent one week in Jerusalem airing nothing but Israeli victims. Since then, CNN bends over backwards to insure only news of Israeli victims makes the airwaves.