The Israeli military have kept most foreign reporters and photographers out of Gaza, ostensibly for their own safety but also to control what the rest of the world sees of this nasty little war. Denying access to the story is one of the most efficient means of censorship.
The war in Gaza is a complex story, not the simple black-and-white conflict each side pretends it to be. It has many shades of grey, but one thing is clear. People are unnecessarily suffering and dying on both sides and the world deserves a clearer picture of why this is happening.
Unfortunately, the American news media have not been helping the public acquire a better understanding of what is going on in Gaza. Nor, in fact, anywhere else in the world.
You cannot imagine how thin their foreign news coverage has become. Take the three big American broadcast networks, for example. Several years ago, they began to write off Israel as an unnecessary cost. CBS News, which used to keep a fully manned bureau in Tel Aviv, stopped stationing a full-time television correspondent there in 2006, and last month fired most of the remaining staffers, leaving only a skeleton bureau. ABC and NBC have also cut back sharply. CNN does a better job, but much of its output is only seen abroad, on its international service.
The conflicts in the Middle East are difficult to understand if you are not familiar with the area. But they affect the lives of Americans in many ways – from the price of the gas they put in their cars to the threats to their security from Islamist terrorists and the cost of the wars America is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the danger of future conflicts that may be brewing on the Arabian peninsula and in Africa. Americans simply cannot afford to ignore what is happening beyond their shores. And yet, the big three television networks now send correspondents only occasionally to Iraq and rarely to Afghanistan, and they make little or no effort to cover the rest of the world, apart from the small stories they do from their remaining foreign outposts in London.
Few American newspapers even have foreign correspondent these days. Most now rely on news agencies for the little international news they publish, and that means there are fewer boots on the ground, fewer experienced correspondents gathering news around the world.
Even the New York Times, the newspaper many Americans still consider the best in the world, is under great pressure to cut its staffing, printing and distribution costs. Inevitably, it now has more lifestyle and fluff content and less reporting from its foreign correspondents then it did a decade ago – despite that fact that the world is less predictable and more dangerous than it was prior to 9/11. There is even speculation that the Times might be facing bankruptcy unless it slashes its costs and that it might be forced to stop printing its daily edition and resort to delivering its content only on the web and its syndication service. By one estimate, that would force it to lay off 80 percent of its staff, since the print edition brings in most of the paper’s revenue. The loss in the quality and breadth of its newsgathering would be considerable.
A public that is ill informed about world events is easy to manipulate. So the Israeli censors, Bush administration spin doctors, Arab propagandists and indeed everyone who has an interest in slanting the news out of the Middle East can have a field day. Americans are not only blind in Gaza. They are sightless in most of the dangerous parts of the world, and as a result will be unprepared when the next big bad news hits them.
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