The Election and War: Journalism’s Omissions
THE MEDIA CANNOT MISS that we’ve reached a telling juncture in the calendar, one with multiple points of significance. First: we’re at just twenty-six days until the US Presidential Election.
Then: it’s also of course a whole year since the outbreak of the Israeli-Hamas War, following Hamas’s unforeseen incursion into Israel, both death-dealing and hostage-taking — along with another escalating front developing with Hezbollah forces to the north in Lebanon, and a wider threat of a possible outright war between Israel and Iran. Plus, it is two and a half years since the Ukrainian-Russian war broke out, with Russia’s land-grabbing invasion. And meanwhile, it’s one and a half years since the Sudan civil war began, creating besides innumerable fatal casualties … the biggest displacement in the world of human beings sent fleeing from their homes.
What are the media making of the connections between these opposite poles of the news landscape — a crucial choice in leadership at home, and disastrous conflicts overseas.
Well that calendar-point, at less than four weeks until E-Day, has brought out the traditional (but to me rather incomprehensible, almost futile) decision by news organizations to endorse a candidate. It’s mostly just print publications that do this, but do they really believe it’s part of their function? Obviously they do. But whatever historical justification there may have been for such fanfaring of their partisan choice, it seems so irrelevant in today’s vast and crowded media cosmos. Frankly, to my mind it’s little more than an exercise in bloated self-importance.
Most immediately, I’ve seen the endorsement from my hometown’s serious newspaper The New York Times (that may be the best way to label it, in comparison to the Murdoch-owned New York Post, the Daily News and so on) and it chose — wholly unsurprisingly — to support Kamala Harris. The paper’s essential reasoning is also no surprise, and it’s crisply expressed. It’s “The Only Patriotic Choice for President” said the paper’s Editorial Board in its headline, and its opening words were “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit.”
Oddly enough, though, the word “War” appears simply nowhere in this two-thousand-word editorial. In a section that opens with the word Globally … the paper aptly enough points out, though it’s cased in very generalized terms, that among Trump’s many disqualifying faults is that he’s lavished praise on autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban and Kim Jong-Un … and he also threatens to blow apart our alliances with democracies.
But you’d think — I would certainly think — that any analyst in print or electronic media would make the space and time to be more specific. They could point out that on the Middle East, Trump would doubtless (and despite some evasiveness during the campaign) revert to his stock position of totally coddling Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. We only have to look at Israel’s own media — say Haaretz newspaper or the Jerusalem Post (right) — to see how stubbornly Netanyahu is back-pedaling any previous movement toward ceasefire-talks, as he waits in obvious hope for Donald Trump to be in charge again. With the Ukraine war we know with equally certainty that the ex-President’s hyperbolic promise to end that war even before his second inauguration if he were to win, would in fact be brought about by his simply siding with Putin.
And about Sudan’s catastrophic war? Well, no surprise here. There’s no evidence that Trump cares a jot or a tittle about Sudan. Scour as thoroughly as you can through all of Trump’s many and meandering statements during the campaign … but you will find nothing about that desperate war-torn country. But there are many people, Africans especially, with strong memories of Trump in office when he dismissed African countries with an obscenity. It’s a phrase that’s hard to use in, can I say, polite media outlets (like this one) — and it’s a phrase which the Associated Press has always had to paraphrase with the words,
“Trump used vulgar language to compare African nations to a filthy toilet.”
By contrast, hopefully, it would be salutary to know that any future Harris Administration will be committed to resolving the Sudanese conflict. But disappointingly it does not figure large in the Harris platform. There are signs, though, that the candidate is in favor of an existing plan from the Senate — a bipartisan plan, extraordinarily enough in these polarized times. Once again, this set of Senate proposals is something about which you’ll have to look hard to find any substantial media reporting.
The Senators’ plan requires the State Department to marshal a joint strategy with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Treasury and the Defense Departments, to protect civilians from the violence. Sanctions again the combatant forces would be involved, and a ramping up of humanitarian aid to ensure it’s properly delivered to vulnerable populations. It would also employ satellite imaging and open-source data to raise alerts whenever mass atrocities appeared to be imminent. There would in particular be specific measures to protect women and girls from sexual violence.
So there’s some hope, at least. that a Harris-run White House might actually implement this plan.
I SUPPOSE IT’S CLEAR THAT THE MEDIA BEAT is not in the business of endorsing either Presidential candidate, but it would be disingenuous — actually just plain wrong — to say I’m being even-handed. The evidence I report on is too starkly imbalanced for that to be possible. But unlike some journalists, I wouldn’t dream of telling any audience how they should cast their vote. In over fifty years of journalism … I have never, ever written an “Editorial”.
But I would like to say something about what I do write, for The Media Beat in particular, now that we’ve reached this salient point in the calendar. It happens also this week to be twenty years since the column began, as a weekly feature in the-then very new daily paper, AM New York. That title has since been merged with the Metro paper as AMNewYork Metro, and its ownership has changed over time from Tribune Newspapers to Schneps Media. I parted from the original company quite early on, making the column independent and online, as well as starting the radio version on Robin Hood Radio, WHDD.
There’s no coincidence in the timing. Back when The Media Beat started, its main subject matter was a general election then – George W Bush was fending off a challenge from John Kerry, successfully as it turned out, giving W a second term.
The erratic course of TV debates over the past few months has inevitably prompted me to harken, in recent TMB editions, to way back in history, as far as the very first such televised debates in 1960. My inaugural 2004 article also recalled how 1960’s John Kennedy vs Richard Nixon contest was hailed as “the country’s first television campaign;” I took the opportunity then to assert that 2004 was turning out to be the first internet campaign. It goes without saying that five elections further on now, the internet is even more dominant a force in electoral politics.
My twenty-year anniversary is also marked by a change of venue. The Media Beat now appears (here) at a newly-built, freshly designed website. TheMediaBeat.com will fully draw together the column and the radio broadcast (plus of course the perennially available weekly podcast). There’s also a chance to see content about, and sometimes drawn from, my newly published memoir, A QUESTION OF PATERNITY: Life as an Unaffiliated Reporter.
The new domain name in TheMediaBeat.com — as opposed to the former version TheMediaBeat.US — also reflects a recently gradual but now definite change in geography. I’m going, from now on, to be as much based in Ireland as in the US. Of course The Media Beat has always had an international outlook — but now we’re formally swapping a merely national-sounding web-address for a broader, internationally-registering version. I hope you’ll be frequent visitors to the new wholly global venue.
