Perhaps I can finally put up a post every­one can agree on (yeah, right), and espe­cially on a day like today when I get com­ments like this

Unreal. You sir, will never qual­ify for “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?“ 

Or this one

You and Rumsfeld should enjoy a mar­tini together.
If this arti­cle wasn’t free to read, I’d can­cel my sub­scrip­tion today. Not because of your opin­ion, but because you pos­sess no exper­tise in the field in which you report on. 

Alright, here you go guys: Journalists (like me) suck

So says a new report from the Joan Sorenson Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University though not in such pedes­trian terms.

In a thor­ough analy­sis of media cov­er­age dur­ing the 2006 Israel/​Hezbollah war (which I cov­ered from Cyprus and Beirut for the Military Times news­pa­pers and USA Today), media sage — and no friend to its crit­ics on the right — Marvin Kalb paints a dis­turb­ing pic­ture of media bias, manip­u­la­tion and out­right advo­cacy for the Hezbollah cause.

I remem­ber telling my col­leagues back home that from my per­spec­tive at the US Embassy in Beirut, you couldnt tell there was a war going on at all. Life con­tin­ued as nor­mal on the streets and civil­ians went about their daily busi­ness unen­cum­bered. There was no smoke ris­ing from the hills, no explo­sions, no panic. My obser­va­tions fell on deaf ears, most sus­pect­ing I was a right-​​wing, Israel-​​loving nut.

The exhaus­tive Harvard study calls into ques­tion the rapid asser­tion by Human Rights Watch that the Israeli mil­i­tary com­mit­ted war crimes and the medias reluc­tance to hold Hezbollah to account for its own crim­i­nal behav­ior. The var­i­ous instances of doc­tored pho­tos (such as the above Reuters photo) and exag­ger­ated casu­alty claims are mere sideshows to the out­right fail­ure to adhere to the jour­nal­is­tic mantra of bal­anced cov­er­age with­out edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing opinion.

Because Hezbollah func­tioned as a quasi-​​military force within its pop­u­lace, pro­tect­ing it, feed­ing it, hous­ing it, and in gen­eral car­ing for its needs, the Israelis were quickly accused of hit­ting civil­ian tar­gets with an indis­crim­i­nate cal­lous­ness amount­ing to war crimes.

On August 3, Human Rights Watch specif­i­cally accused Israel of war crimes. Few seemed to note that before the war, on May 27, Nasrallah had actu­allyand pub­liclyem­braced the guer­rilla tac­tic of hid­ing sol­diers among civil­ians. [Hezbollah fight­ers] live in their houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their fac­to­ries, he said, adding, You cant destroy them in the same way you would destroy an army.

By wars end, it was clear that Nasrallah was right. Hezbollah, though severely wounded, remained a fight­ing force in defi­ant objec­tion to all U.N. res­o­lu­tions call­ing for it to be disarmed.

Israel defended its mil­i­tary oper­a­tions by cit­ing two rel­e­vant arti­cles in inter­na­tional law: using civil­ians for mil­i­tary cover was a war crime, and any tar­get with sol­diers hid­ing among civil­ians was con­sid­ered a legit­i­mate mil­i­tary tar­get. Israels for­eign min­is­ter, Tzipi Livni, framed her gov­ern­ments argu­ment in cold lan­guage. When you go to sleep with a mis­sile, she told The New York Times, you might find your­self wak­ing up to another kind of missile.

Israels defense, though, fell on deaf ears, not only among diplo­mats but also reporters, as daily evi­dence mounted of civil­ian deaths. Hezbollah, when­ever pos­si­ble, pointed reporters to civil­ian deaths among Lebanese, a help­ful ges­ture with heavy pro­pa­ganda impli­ca­tions. Early in the war, reporters rou­tinely noted that Hezbollah had started the war, and its casu­al­ties were a log­i­cal con­se­quence of war. But after the first week such ref­er­ences were either dropped or down­played, leav­ing the wide­spread impres­sion that Israel was a loose can­non shoot­ing at any­thing that moved. 

Theres also a dis­turb­ing pas­sage about pos­si­ble com­plic­ity by the United Nations in Hezbollahs many deadly ambushes of Israeli troops.

UNIFIL was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. It con­sisted of roughly 2,000 troops sta­tioned along the Lebanese-​​Israeli bor­der from 1978 until the end of the 2006 war. Its man­date required full impar­tial­ity and objectivity.

During the war, it pub­lished infor­ma­tion on its offi­cial web­site about Israeli troop move­ments, infor­ma­tion that in mil­i­tary cir­cles might well be regarded as action­able intelligence.

Take, for instance, its post­ing of July 25, 2006:

Yesterday and dur­ing last night, the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) moved sig­nif­i­cant rein­force­ments, includ­ing a num­ber of tanks, armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers, bull­doz­ers and infantry, to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese ter­ri­tory. The IDF advanced from that area north towards Bint Jubayl and south towards Yarun.

Or, its post­ing of July 24, which dis­closed that IDF forces sta­tioned between Marun Al Ras and Bint Jubayl were sig­nif­i­cantly rein­forced dur­ing the night and this morn­ing with a num­ber of tanks and armored per­son­nel carriers.

It was part of UNIFILs respon­si­bil­ity to report vio­la­tions of the cease­fire, includ­ing troop move­ments, to the U.N., but pre­sum­ably this infor­ma­tion was to be con­veyed through con­fi­den­tial chan­nels, not on the Internet, where the infor­ma­tion in wartime could be as valu­able as hard, mil­i­tary intel­li­gence sud­denly exposed to the light.

These post­ings, sim­i­lar to oth­ers dur­ing the war, coin­cided with heavy fight­ing in the region. Israeli units came under severe Hezbollah attack.

It is impos­si­ble for out­siders to know whether Hezbollah used the infor­ma­tion pro­vided by UNIFIL, which was avail­able to any­one with a lap­top, or whether Hezbollah depended pri­mar­ily upon infor­ma­tion pro­vided by loyal local sup­port­ers. However, no UNIFIL post­ing dur­ing the war con­tained any spe­cific infor­ma­tion relat­ing to Hezbollahs mil­i­tary move­ments, per­haps because they were not vis­i­ble to UNIFIL or per­haps because UNIFIL did not choose to see the movements. 

Frida Ghitis at World Politics Watch has an out­stand­ing write up on the report. She points out the increas­ing role media cov­er­age plays in a non-​​state strat­egy of asym­met­ric warfare.

Before long, Hezbollah had achieved a defin­i­tive pro­pa­ganda vic­tory. The media had not only acqui­esced to tell Hezbollah’s ver­sion of the war, they had started con­tribut­ing to the cre­ation of the nar­ra­tive, with at least one Reuters pho­tog­ra­pher alter­ing pho­tographs to make Israeli attacks look more dam­ag­ing. And many reporters sim­ply failed to offer much con­text. The study quotes the New York Times’ Stephen Erlanger com­ment­ing on a satel­lite pic­ture pub­lished by his paper. The pic­ture showed a south­ern sub­urb of Beirut, which was largely destroyed. Erlanger said it “both­ered me a great deal,” because the image with no con­text failed to show that this was a small part of a Beirut, and the rest of the city was largely undam­aged by the war.

The Harvard paper shows the need for jour­nal­ists to brace them­selves and remain vig­i­lant when they cover con­flicts between open soci­eties on one side, and media-​​controlling mili­tias on the other. These con­flicts, which we will undoubt­edly con­tinue to see, demand that jour­nal­ists make a greater effort to pro­vide con­text and to keep from become will­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors with one side. Islamic mil­i­tant groups, such as al-​​Qaida and oth­ers, have openly described their strat­egy of manip­u­lat­ing the media and win­ning on the “infor­ma­tion bat­tle­field.” Hezbollah, too, had a well crafted, and ulti­mately suc­cess­ful media plan. 

I cant help but rec­og­nize the tim­ing of this report, which comes as Congress votes to cede the bat­tle of Iraq to Islamic extrem­ists based on cov­er­age of daily car­nage and con­tin­ued U.S. mil­i­tary deaths. As Kalb sums up:

In an open soci­ety, ground rules may be announced, but they are not likely to be observed or enforced. During the 2006 sum­mer­time war in the Middle East, it was Israel ver­sus Hezbollah, led by the charis­matic Hassan Nasrallah, and because Israel did not win the war, it is judged to have lost. In Iraq, in the not too dis­tant future, it may well be the United States ver­sus the Mahdi Army, led by the equally charis­matic Sheik Moqtada al-​​Sadr. The chal­lenge for respon­si­ble jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing asym­met­ri­cal war­fare, espe­cially in this age of the Internet, is new, awe­some and frightening. 

– Christian