I'm a little distracted by work this week, so I'm reviving my periodic feature, "Respond To A Post By Andrew Sullivan."  I caught myself writing him a letter in response to this post:

The BBC is on the case of the orphanage massacre in Sri Lanka. Good for them. But the MSM seems eerily silent. What do you think the coverage would be if the Israeli government killed 61 children in an anti-terror bombing campaign? Front-page A-1. Sri Lanka? Nada. And people wonder why some of us believe much of the media has an anti-Israel bias.

In the midst of writing my cranky letter it occured to me that, as a member of the dreaded mainstream media, I should broadcast my reaction to my dozens of loyal readers.  So, here it is.  The media doesn't have an "anti-Israel" bias.  It has a "cover Israel" bias.  If Hamas or Hezbollah killed 61 Israeli children in an orphanage the result would be wall-to-wall coverage for days casting the attack, correctly, as a major atrocity.  You don't need to run an off-the-wall thought experiment to figure that out; just think back to how the American media covered Hamas' suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians a few years ago.

As for Sri Lanka, it's a painful fact that Americans don't care about places that can't be plausibly linked to vital American interests.  They don't care about places they can't relate to, or about places where there's an expectation (deserved or not) that lots of people will die as a matter of course.  So genocide in Europe causes an outcry (eventually) but genocide in Rwanda earns a shrug—Africa is one of those places where people are just supposed to die horribly.  That's why you can't get anyone to care about the war in Congo that's wrecked central Africa and killed millions of people.  Is insufficient coverage of that bloodbath also an indication that the mainstream media has it in for Israel?

This doesn't even have anything to do with the dreaded MSM's dreaded lack of urgency in covering the war on terror.  When about 200 people died in al Qaeda's attack on Madrid's commuter trains it was a huge story.  It was a huge story when more than fifty people were killed in the London bus and tube bombings.  A month ago more than 200 people died when terrorists attacked Bombay's commuter trains.  Not such a huge story for Americans—and why not?  Part of it is that Iraq is a big story, so attacks on countries that have troops in Iraq matter to Americans.  India may have a problem with Islamic terrorism, but that problem has little to do with America's terrorism problem except at the level of rhetoric and (very) grand strategy.

And an American can walk around Madrid and certainly London and feel somewhat at home in the culture and among the people.  When you see pictures of Madrid or London they obviously look like foreign cities, but in a lot of very important ways they look like American cities, too.  It's hard for most Americans to relate to what life might be like in Bombay, so the destruction of life in Bombay doesn't register.  In a slightly different form it's the same dismissive attitude that allows some people to downplay civilian casualties in Iraq by pointing out that lots of civilians died in Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s.  Hey, dying horribly is just something these folks do—nothing to worry about, really, except as it impacts American interests in the Middle East.

I don't think there's much to be done about this.  People care about things they relate to, and no amount of high-minded devotion to foreign coverage will make Americans care about Sri Lanka.  And what if Americans did care deeply about Sri Lanka?  Would that lead to American involvment in Sri Lanka as extensive as American involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict?  Would the result be peace and prosperity in Sri Lanka, as American involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict has brought peace and prosperity to Israel and its neighbors?

I think Sullivan is thinking in this post about the way the media covered civilian deaths in Israel and civilian deaths in Lebanon.  Civilian deaths in Lebanon got a lot more coverage even though Hezbollah was deliberately targeting Israeli civilians.  But the disparity in sheer numbers is staggering—I think dead Lebanese civilians out-number dead Israeli civilians by ten or twenty times.  If the cease-fire holds neither side will have accomplished much (though Hezbollah will have won a signficant victory in terms of morale and propaganda).  So the dead are the only monument to the war.  The dead are the only true monument to any war.  Sullivan's been eloquent lately, in another context, about the tragedy of starting a war that leads to large-scale suffering—even if the war was justified, and even if the suffering was not part of the plan.  He could, I think, profitably apply that mindset to Israel and Lebanon.

 

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