It's like watching two different wars
Julian Borger
The Guardian

August 2, 2006 01:18 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html 

The US and European media have always covered the Middle East from different
perspectives, but flying back to Washington from a stay in London at the height
of the Lebanese conflict made it clear to me how wide the gulf has become.
Britons and Americans are watching two different wars. 

The overwhelming emphasis of television and press coverage in the UK was the
civilian casualties in Lebanon. Day after day, those were the "splash" stories.
The smaller number of civilian casualties from Hizbullah rockets in northern
Israel was also covered but rarely made the top headlines or front pages. 

Back in DC, watching Lebanon through American camera lenses, the centre of the
action seemed to be Haifa. CNN, for example, sent two of its top anchors, Miles
O'Brien and Wolf Blitzer, to the Israeli port city. Much of the morning news was
devoted to showing O'Brien scurrying in and out of shelters when the air raid
sirens sounded. Another correspondent was sent on patrol with a Haifa ambulance
crew to look for casualties. On the morning I was watching, the crew only came
across a man who had a fatal heart attack as a result of the rockets. The
paramedics' attempts to save him were shown. 

This emphasis on Israeli casualties relative to Lebanese was taken to its
breathtaking extreme by Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist on the
Washington Post, who described the Hizbullah rocket attacks as "perhaps the most
blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz." 

From Haifa, the television news typically shifts to the border and to
correspondents covering the Israeli army (CNN has another of its leading men,
John Roberts, stationed there), who have supplied most of the news on the
fighting in south Lebanon. 

There have been reports out of Lebanon itself, but they have usually come
further down the running order, and reports on civilian casualties there are
almost always contextualised, emphasising the Hizbullah tactic of launching
rockets from populated areas; in British reporting, that context has often been
either missing or weighed separately in analytical pieces. 

British journalism generally celebrates eyewitness accounts with a consistency
in emotional tone that discourages cool asides to discuss mitigating
circumstances; US television reporting out of Lebanon, by contrast, has
occasionally been in danger of becoming all context, focusing on Hizbullah
tactics to the exclusion of the humanitarian tragedy. Fox News, in particular,
has sought to bolster Israeli public relations. An anchor at one point asked
Ehud Barak what he would like the world to know about Hizbullah and Hamas. 

Qana has changed the tone, at least for the time being. The account of families
huddled together in a building in a doomed bid to keep their children safe and
the sight of the small bodies being carried out of the rubble has had the
emotional force to break through the usual rules of the game, and has mostly
been given comprehensive coverage. But one Fox anchor still expressed concern
that any pause in the Israeli offensive would allow Hizbullah to regroup. 

There is a circular relationship between media coverage of the Middle East and
public opinion. Correspondents and editors are often fearful of the avalanches
of hate mail that can descend in a heartbeat on matters Middle Eastern, and
their reports consequently serve to deepen entrenched points of view. 

The difference between British and US polls on the current conflict are
striking. Just over a fifth of Britons polled pre-Qana, compared with nearly
half of the Americans questioned at about the same time, said they thought the
Israeli use of force was proportionate; and another 9% of American respondents
thought the Israelis were not being tough enough. 

Some of that extraordinary divide must be attributable to the very different
realities on British and American television screens. 

Meanwhile, more Iraqi civilians are dying every day than Lebanese, but the
horror of that war barely appears on television screens in either country any
more. Lebanon is newer and much safer to cover. Anyway, Iraq fatigue set in long
ago.