We hate to say we told you so, but back when May sweeps were winding down and pundits were saying that BushCo was Teflon and the Middle East was calming down, we told you to stay tuned, that the big reality series this summer was going to be the Bush Administration and the Middle East. We told you to watch for a midsummer lollapalooza. We would rather not have been right.
Given just how right we were, it's difficult to comment on the frivolity on the tube, no matter how enjoyable. Like Leonid the Magnificent (the most extravagant drag queen since Liberace, direct from Siberia, where it is "less open than here in USA") on America's Got Talent (we have never seen so many pink feathers outside a flamingo ranch). Or the superb queer storyline about familial and personal conflict over Luke (played with exceptional nuance and vulnerability by Van Hansis) coming out on As the World Turns. Or the gay turn Big Love has taken — polygamy and queers: look out, Orrin Hatch! Or the focus on Armistead Maupin on the primetime news shows now that the film of his novel The Night Listener is being released.
Frivolity, thy name is Tube, but this week, the whole world is watching the Middle East come apart from a range of angles, all of them bloody.
Sometimes we have to critique the TV news, and this is one of those times. Sometimes, as with the coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the coverage is so brilliant, compelling and heart-breaking, we wish we had Peabody and Emmy Awards to hand out ourselves. Other times, the coverage is confused, garbled, unseeing.
Alas, in the conflict/war between Israel and Hezbollah, the media simply isn't getting it. The reporting just hasn't gone to the heart of the pain and suffering. The presentation is a bit too much like that of "Shock and Awe" in Iraq three years ago: sounds of rockets and shots of smoke in the distance, but not nearly enough reporting from the blood running in the gutters of Beirut and Haifa. This is a little like Bush refusing to show the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq. If we pretend the victims aren't there, will they go away?
There's much to critique, where to begin? Perhaps with the failure of US diplomacy, which should have moved to stop the carnage before it became so entrenched. (At presstime, Israel had begun a ground war with Hezbollah, leading a very reluctant Lebanese government to announce involvement of the Lebanese Army, which for the first two weeks had stayed out of the conflict.)
On July 21, 12 days into the intensive Israeli attack on Hezbollah that had by then decimated the infrastructure of Lebanon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was icy-steely with reporters wondering where American diplomacy was in the conflict (MIA, obviously). In her best Cruella DeVille imitation, Rice declared that she could have shuttled to the Middle East earlier, but she's not sure what she would have been shuttling for .
Well dear, if you don't know what and why, then you really don't deserve to be Sec. of State, do you? Because we remember when your predecessor in the previous Administration, Madeleine Albright, kicked off her pumps, ran down a driveway and blocked the car of then-Palestinian President Yassar Arafat to keep him from leaving peace talks. And Albright did not spend three hours each morning on a treadmill like Miz Rice.
Meanwhile, a few days earlier, Rice's proxy husband, President Bush, had been stuffing his face in Russia (oh Babs, didn't you teach your boys anything?), a nation he apparently can't find on the map, and telling his poodle Tony Blair that removing the [@!$%#*] Syrians was what was needed. The clip was played over and over, and late-night comedians had a field day with it, but as usual, Americans just shrugged and sighed, "That's our Prez."
Bush was also photographed giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel an unwanted back-rub. Funny, he didn't give his poodle one.
Did we mention that at presstime there had been more than 400 people killed, nearly all civilians, and more than 2,000 wounded? In case anyone is paying attention to the actual bloodshed.
Now, we understand Israel is one of the only allies the US has in the Middle East. But up until a few weeks ago, we'd never actually seen pro-Israel reporting on the network news. So we were more than a little surprised to witness the sudden 180 on the tube from pro-Palestinian to pro-Israel. Was there a directive from the People for the New American Century? Or is it what it looks like: Israel is the opener for the new war the Bush Administration is planning with Syria and Iran? Do the networks know something we don't?
For the first few days, all the reporting was done from Israel, none from Lebanon, which seemed to us a bit like the embedded reporting in the early days of Iraq. If the war is happening on that side of the fence, what are the reporters doing on this side of the fence? Don't you have to actually be in the place to report on it?
Remember when Dan Rather reported from the jungles of Vietnam, then from the mountains of Afghanistan, where he was camped out with the Mujahadeen? Now, that's what we think of when we think of war reporting. The other day, we saw some chick on CBS who looked to be about 12 in a flak jacket. We guess it's all part of the Couricization of CBS. Good luck with that.
On the July 21 NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, the network mistakenly went to Lebanon first. After the report from Lebanon, Williams actually apologized for the error, then went to the report from Martin Fletcher in Haifa. Oops.
Meanwhile, that (former) bastion of no-holds-barred reportage, Nightline, has careened between clips shown earlier on their evening newscast and dramatic interviews with people who actually know what they are talking about, like the retired Israeli general on the July 21 segment who basically said a ground war would be insane. Nightline is supposed to push the envelope. On the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it hasn't.
Meanwhile, check out Arab TV, and it's all blood and guts, all the time. If anyone wants to know why the Muslim world hates America and Israel, this would be the reason: to them, it is we who are the savage terrorists. Try to find a single person criticizing Hezbollah on the Arab News Network or al-Jazeera. Try to find the news about the Hezbollah rockets that killed Arab children at play in Nazareth. Try.
Somewhere between Arab TV and American TV lies the reality of this war, which is ghastly and in which fewer than 50 soldiers have been killed. All the suffering, all the dying, is being done by civilians. Go to BBC, go to al-Jazeera, see the suffering close-up. Then try to watch America's Got Talent.
War zone
Here's our report from what we've pieced together from myriad TV sources, American, Arab, Israeli and European (the BBC, the German and Spanish news) since the fighting began: There are currently about a half-million Israelis in northern Israel spending much of their time in bomb shelters. One network showed a wedding being held in one. In Lebanon, between a half and a million people have been displaced, probably permanently, as their homes and neighborhoods have been destroyed. On July 21, the Israeli Defense Forces warned Lebanese within a 20-mile radius of the border to evacuate; that's about 170,000 people. Soon there will be no food or water.
Of those killed on both sides, the primary victims have been women and children. The UN states that more than a third of the dead and injured are children.
Nightline's Martin Bashir did a short segment on Beirut nightlife, because in the city rebuilt after the Lebanese civil war, Beirut had become the Monaco of the Middle East, a hot-spot for jet-setters. Lebanon has no real industry; it relies on tourism. Nightline cameras pan over gorgeous little cafes and nightclubs on a crowded but lovely Spanish-style street.
Then the cameras pan again over a dusty scene of rubble and debris. The same place, today. All of it, destroyed. Imagine the Castro or the Village today, imagine it bombed into rubble tomorrow. Your house, too.
Networks focus on a mass exodus of Americans from Beirut, some 15,000 evacuated on July 20 and 21, a full week after the EU nations and Japan evacuated their people. Katrina taught them nothing.
Forget the wildfires burning throughout the West and the storms crashing through the Midwest. Forget the temperatures that scream global warming across the country. Forget Bush toadying to the NAACP one day and to the Religious Right with his stem cell research veto the next. Forget Iraq and Afghanistan.
This new war will be the only news you see for some time. Let's just hope the media starts to get it right, and in showing the true extent of the carnage, gets the response they got to Katrina.
Finally, the most compelling thing we noticed from all the reportage: If the newscaster doesn't announce which side of the border he or she is on, we can't be sure. Because everyone looks the same to us: terrified, shell-shocked, tear-streaked and bloodied. That's the picture, folks, that's the war. Stay tuned.