Blame Mainstream Media for the Demonstrations on College Campuses
October 7, 2023 was a Saturday. I remember getting up after my wife and her telling me that Hamas had invaded Israel. My first reaction was to recall a truism of my life: “Middle East peace is an oxymoron.”
All my life, there has never been peace in the Middle East, only the temporary cessation of violence. Education – a lot coming in the months after 10/7/23 -showed me that there has been no long-lasting peace for the last 5,000 years. As a futurist, I have long thought that organized religion and politicians are two groups that hold back the future. In the case of the Middle East, three major pre-science religions have the area of Israel as part of their origination stories. It’s ours! No, it’s ours! No, our savior was born there; it is ours!
So after this reaction, I settled into watching the news coverage as it slowly unfolded through the weekend. The horror of the first information about the slaughter in the kibbutz, the joyous shrieks of the Hamas terrorists as they shot Jews – and filmed it to share with the world. Pure, unadulterated horror. All my feelings about religious terrorists were categorically confirmed.
Then the music festival and the carnage, rape and killing of young people celebrating peace with love and music. The reporting of the beheading of children in front of their parents. The beheading of parents in front of their children. The reports of infant bodies either burned to a crisp or riddled with bullets from AK-47 automatic guns.
By Sunday, the thought, “How could this have happened in Israel” started to have equal sway to my horror at what had happened.
[ As a Boomer, I was a teenager when the 1967 War happened. A bit older, I read and watched the 1973 War unfold. This means that I had a life experience of two things: the above-referenced oxymoron that there is such a thing as peace in the Middle East and that the Arab states ganged up on Israel….and were defeated. Since the 1960s, Israel had been the “David,” and the several Arab countries were “Goliath”. This is substantially the difference between the older Americans who remember how small Israel, under attack from all sides, kept winning, and the college students of today that only see a vibrant, powerful, dominant and fully armed democratic Israel as the “Goliath” to the “David” of Gaza.
Boomers, and probably many GenXers, remember tiny, democratic Israel as the fierce underdog. Most Millennials and seemingly large numbers of GenZ have only seen a dominant democracy triumph over a much poorer group of theocratic Muslim states.
As more and more waves of horror and butchery came into our living rooms Sunday and Monday I was overwhelmed by the sheer depravity of Hamas gleefully killing Jews. At the same time, I wondered why Israel was so unprepared for an attack by hang gliders, cars and trucks. [ My opinion: Netanyahu was living his “Wag the Dog” fantasy to create an attack that would allow him to stay in office]
As we all know, the cable news networks and the network news programs have their “second team” on during the weekend [ except for the Sunday morning news programs like Meet the Press], so I started to look forward to hearing what the first team news anchors would cover the Hamas attack.
Rachel Maddow is one of the most insightful and intelligent cable news hosts today. She is now on one night a week, Monday. After three days of coverage of the horrors of the slaughter and the growing question as to why and how Israel could be so undefended, I tuned in to get Rachel’s take on Monday, October 9.
As she usually does, she took 10-15 minutes to provide contextual information of the entire story. She then described how horrifying the footage was from the Hamas invaders including the beheading and burning of infants and young children. She said that because Hamas wanted the world to see all the videos – as they had posted most on social media – MSNBC decided not to air the footage. She then went on to say that she had shown some of the footage to an assistant producer or staffer and that it might have scarred her for life or something close to those words.
At the end of Rachel Maddow’s program, I turned to my wife and said that it would be interesting to see if MSNBC would also censor the expected footage of Israel’s destruction of Hamas in Gaza that would inevitably happen. If they did, then this censorship of images of the Hamas’s slaughter of Jews would be completely hypocritical.
[I am not trying to criticize Maddow. Quite the contrary. Maddow now is the dominant, most well-known host on MSNBC and she sets the tone for the network. Maddow leads. Since she is so deeply – and correctly – respected in the cable network news world, I concluded that both MSNBC and CNN would align with her position.].
Well, it turned out that Maddow, MSNBC, CNN and the three major broadcast news organizations all both refused to air the footage of beheaded, burned, tortured and raped Jews from October 7 and have, since Israel invaded Gaza on October 27 freely aired dead and injured children being pulled from the rubble of bombed buildings. Images of distraught remaining children and adults who lost all their family members were shown over and over again.
For months, even up to today, all the above-mentioned networks and news programs have been airing footage of carnage, death, and bloodied Palestinians. But they chose not to air the Hamas torture footage. Hypocritical, you bet!
But not surprising at all. TV news lives for conflict and controversy. Anyone who has ever worked in the news business, particularly at the station level, has heard the phrase “ if it bleeds, it leads,” meaning that a newscast will start with the bloodiest story first. I once quoted the great Tom Freston in a column about the media:
The media, obviously, is following what's economically interesting to them, which is gossip, celebrities and conflict." Tom Freston
So all the major news organizations decided that the ratings they would get from daily, hourly showing of dead and dying Palestinians would be much better for TV audience ratings. So they did. FOX, News Nation, MSNBC [partially on Morning Joe], CNN and ABC, but not NBC or CBS programmed an interview with the son of one of the founders of Hamas. Please watch if you haven’t seen this interview.
Relative to the Freston quote, MSNBC, CNN and the network news organizations all felt that covering actual bombing and destruction would be a much better economic outcome for them, so they did. If you disagree with that statement, please send me evidence to the contrary.
The old adage is that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. What would that make a 30-second video, 30 thousand words? So at least 30,000 words of dead and injured Palestinians every hour at a minimum. Times that by 24 hours a day and you get 720,000 words a day. Times that by the number of networks, let’s say five; MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS and that is 3,600,000 words per day. Times that by at least five months – 150 days- and you get….540,000,000 word equivalents of coverage of deaths of Palestinians and……0 word equivalents of tortured, mutilated and raped Israelis.
This arithmetic does not count the daily front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and all the other newspapers that had almost daily pictures of rubble and death in Gaza. Blood and conflict sell newspapers too!
This is what pro-Hamas demonstrators have seen since October 7. Would there be as many of them saying “free Palestine” or “Revolution!” [ give me a break!] If there had been half a billion-word equivalents showing decapitated babies or the burnt-to-a-crisp survivors of the Holocaust, or the sexually mutilated women who had their heads blown off.
I don’t think so.
Again, this column is about the primary cause of all the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. It is not about whether these demonstrations are valid or not. I personally think that Israel is not served by Netanyahu who I think did have a “Wag the Dog” strategy to have Israel attacked – how else could October 7 have happened – and is not serving the long-term interests of Israel. Only his interests to remain in office [Just like Trump who seems to be running for President to avoid jail].
As someone who demonstrated in the late 1960s in the streets, on campus, and at the Pentagon, I look at these media-manipulated protests on campuses and almost laugh out loud when these upper-middle-class students scream “revolution!!!” from their REI tents, totally misinformed of Hamas and the history of the Middle East. They have been served poorly by the hypocritical mainstream media’s desire to cover only one side of the violence of this most unfortunate war.