I’m proud to be the author of this brief opinion piece about Pakistan, Al Qaeda, Benazir Bhutto and USA television news at the Huffington Post:
Inanity Still Rules the Airwaves
If the Huff Post hadn’t accepted it, I would have posted this here. I hope you don’t mind me going where more readers will read it.
Here’s an amazing fact: according to every USA television news show I watched yesterday, including ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News and yes, even my favorite, Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, there is nothing much going on in the Gaza Strip at all. No story. No coverage.
I caught a few moments of video footage from Gaza, finally, on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, where they used the video as an opportunity to deliver some dumb cliches about Hamas as an irrational “death cult” that supports the use of pregnant women as suicide bombers. I guess the “right to life” angle is what got the story some TV time on Fox, which is more than it’s getting anywhere else.
I don’t even have a theory as to why this big story is being ignored on TV (thankfully, my local newspaper the New York Times is doing a better job). I don’t see that this disinterest serves any political agenda. Maybe the only explanation is an existential one. When real news happens — events that are shocking and upsetting, like a military takeover by a fundamentalist political organization in a massively overpopulated and depressed region of a horribly war-town part of the world — our journalistic community is stunned into silence. I’m guessing they’ll start reporting this news by Wednesday of next week or so, at which point they can begin using the safe past tense instead of the scary present tense.
I don’t praise the Bush/Cheney administration often in these pages, but I am glad to hear of a meeting that signals a positive new change in USA foreign policy. For the first time in decades, there has been a high-level meeting of US ambassadors and Iranian ambassadors over the future of Iraq.
Some may question why I want my country to begin an open dialogue with a hostile nation that is escalating the world’s nuclear arms race as well as spreading deeply offensive lies about the history of Germany’s genocidal campaign against Jews during World War II. Well, no matter how offensive another nation, organization or person is, I believe the best policy is to keep an open dialogue with that nation, organization or person. Talking doesn’t hurt. And even if the lies flow on all sides, some truths might sneak out as well.
I watched coverage of today’s talks on both CNN (which welcomed the development) and Fox News (which presented one commentator saying that we should not honor Iran with a high-level meeting since they are clearly working to destabilize Iraq). Another commentator correctly pointed out that it is the USA-led coalition in Iraq that Iran is trying to destabilize, not “Iraq” itself — their goal in Iraq is clearly to support a Shiite-dominated government that offers fewer concessions to the Sunni majority than the coalition government offers. It’s a fact that they are arming our enemies. But we should not make the mistake of believing Iran is motivated by a love of “chaos” or violence. Iran’s policy is entirely pragmatic and, for their interests, sensible. Iran is a Shiite nation, and they back Iraq’s Shiite majority for obvious reasons.
Let the talks begin. I hope there is a follow-up session soon, and I’ll be sure to cover it here when there is.
I try to keep it fresh here at the Orchard, but sometimes I have to dredge up a story of my own from a few weeks earlier, just because it is my self-appointed role to ask the more established members of our journalistic community to do a better job at reporting the news, and everybody — EVERYBODY — seems to be missing the obvious subtext of the weird showdown taking place in Washington DC right now between the executive and legislative branches over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
So, Take Two. As I said before. To repeat myself. THE ALBERTO GONZALES AFFAIR IS NOT JUST ANOTHER SCANDAL, and THIS IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL. Disgraced government officials come and go, and it’s not shattering news when a key member of any US president’s cabinet gets into trouble. But it is shattering news when:
1) that US president is facing intensive investigations of his conduct in office and is stonewalling key pieces of information relevant to these investigations.
2) the disgraced government official is the Attorney General, with vast power to influence (or impede) the progress of criminal and civil investigations involving the White House.
3) this disgraced government official refuses to resign against an absolute barrage of damning testimony and evidence against him, including (now) a highly unusual congressional vote of “no confidence” against him.
One plus one plus one equals three. And it is as clear as glass that the reason Alberto Gonzales is refusing (against all rational advice from both Republicans and Democrats) to resign is that the Bush administration is terrified of what a less sympathetic Attorney General could investigate.
I said it before, and I cannot be the only American doing the math here. Why do the major news outlets not explain this equation to the American people? I truly don’t understand.
I could not possibly care less about the fact that Prince Harry is not going to join his country’s combat troops in Iraq. The fact that this is getting serious news treatment on all the evening news shows really proves the banality of our public dialogue these days.
We do not like in a land of fairy tale castles, and Prince Harry means nothing to me. There’s a war going on, and global warming, and other real stories to talk about. Journalists: in 2007 there is no such thing as a “slow news day”, so please cut the crap.
As for Prince Harry himself, he can sit on his thumb and spin for all I care.
