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If we lived in North Korea, we wouldn’t have to agonize over coverage of news, because there is only one account of events, and there is no dissent. It’s easy and uncomplicated there.
In our country, we see and hear multiple versions of world events, and witness raging arguments over who’s right and wrong in any given conflict. With our morning coffee, we see photos, often disturbing, that are selected to help tell the story. A free press complicates our lives in a good way, I believe.
I read all the stories of the Gaza conflict along with everyone else, and I saw the photos of dead and dying children, houses reduced to rubble and grieving families. I also saw pictures of funerals for Israeli soldiers, and mothers and fathers holding up one another against the weight of devastating loss.
The coverage was not even. There were certainly more photos of the suffering in Gaza — for reasons that do not necessarily point to an anti-Israel bias. First, there was in fact more death and destruction in Gaza. This wasn’t a balanced fight, and that’s a good thing. Israel has a formidable army because it needs to defend itself and its existence every day. Hamas, which is publicly committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, brought on the suffering in Gaza by refusing a ceasefire, by digging dozens of tunnels into Israel and by using its own children and civilians as shields for rockets and terrorist leaders.
Then Hamas invited reporters into the hospitals and into the crumbled homes where reporters did what reporters do: They told the story. And the story is heartbreaking. The imbalance in the coverage is a failure of journalism rather than an unspoken bias.
The problem with newspaper coverage is that to keep readers, the story has to jump off the page. Editors meet to decide which photos to put on the front page and which to bury inside. They discuss which details to lead with and which to use on an inside page. In this recent conflict, from a newspaper point of view, the most powerful photos were of the losses in Gaza. I don’t believe this is an anti-Israel prejudice; I believe it is the Achilles’ heel of journalism: If it bleeds, it leads.
In our country, we see and hear multiple versions of world events, and witness raging arguments over who’s right and wrong in any given conflict. With our morning coffee, we see photos, often disturbing, that are selected to help tell the story. A free press complicates our lives in a good way, I believe.
I read all the stories of the Gaza conflict along with everyone else, and I saw the photos of dead and dying children, houses reduced to rubble and grieving families. I also saw pictures of funerals for Israeli soldiers, and mothers and fathers holding up one another against the weight of devastating loss.
The coverage was not even. There were certainly more photos of the suffering in Gaza — for reasons that do not necessarily point to an anti-Israel bias. First, there was in fact more death and destruction in Gaza. This wasn’t a balanced fight, and that’s a good thing. Israel has a formidable army because it needs to defend itself and its existence every day. Hamas, which is publicly committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, brought on the suffering in Gaza by refusing a ceasefire, by digging dozens of tunnels into Israel and by using its own children and civilians as shields for rockets and terrorist leaders.
Then Hamas invited reporters into the hospitals and into the crumbled homes where reporters did what reporters do: They told the story. And the story is heartbreaking. The imbalance in the coverage is a failure of journalism rather than an unspoken bias.
The problem with newspaper coverage is that to keep readers, the story has to jump off the page. Editors meet to decide which photos to put on the front page and which to bury inside. They discuss which details to lead with and which to use on an inside page. In this recent conflict, from a newspaper point of view, the most powerful photos were of the losses in Gaza. I don’t believe this is an anti-Israel prejudice; I believe it is the Achilles’ heel of journalism: If it bleeds, it leads.
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