ISRAEL HAYOM
by Richard Baehr
August 20, 2014

Two of the biggest news stories of the summer — the war between Israel and Hamas, ‎and now the shooting death of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri and the ‎chaotic aftermath (protests, police in full battle mode, looting, riots and mob ‎violence by many from outside the area ) — have revealed a few truths about how ‎the American media quickly fix on a story line, and are loath to shift from it. With ‎four 24-hour all-news cable channels (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and CNN Headline ‎News), not to mention Al Jazeera America (which purchased the network from Al ‎Gore and his partners, and apparently stiffed them on payment), these kinds of long run stories are the ‎closest thing to manna from the skies for the news stations, other than maybe ‎hurricanes and tornadoes.

In the case of the Israel-Hamas confrontation, there was precedent for how the ‎battle lines were to be laid out by the media. Israel had gone through this drill in ‎the 2006 summer war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and again in the ‎conflicts with Hamas in Gaza in 2009 and 2012. Israel was the big dog, with a ‎powerful military. And it suffered less than its enemy in each confrontation. Since ‎the country sustained few civilian casualties in the latest fighting (three dead, plus the three ‎murdered teens who had been kidnapped), and the Iron Dome system destroyed ‎many of the rockets fired at Israel’s population centers, Israel’s principal casualties ‎were soldiers, who were buried quickly and never seen on television. Hamas ‎fighters were rarely seen, and their leaders only appeared outside the country. But ‎there were plenty of dead, wounded and bedraggled Gazan civilians all over the ‎screen and in all major newspaper photographs.

The newspaper industry is in a state of near collapse in America, as both ‎advertising and circulation numbers disintegrate, with advertising revenue ‎migrating rapidly to websites and mobile devices. Younger Americans, for the ‎most part, seem to prefer to tweet and post photos on Facebook, rather than read ‎newspapers, and those who are conscious of the news, often get their minimal ‎daily dose from comedians (in reality, left-wing cynics) like Jon Stewart, who ‎played the part of Hamas cheerleader during the current fighting.

There are few papers that continue to staff foreign bureaus, and those papers ‎which continue to have correspondents and cameramen overseas, have increased ‎their influence, no paper more so than The New York Times. The cable news ‎stations and National Public Radio often seem to parrot during the day what they ‎read in the morning in that day’s New York Times, which effectively sets the ‎agenda (or as the paper self-promotes itself: “where the conversation begins.”) ‎When it comes to Israel, The Times has been hostile for years, and the paper is ‎now almost indistinguishable from Britain’s left-wing mainstay, The Guardian, a ‎longtime leader in fomenting anti-Israel propaganda, and now one whose ‎columnists recommend more Jew killing.….

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9677