They called the Gulf War the first war fought on TV, but they never dreamed that war would be fought through TV. Conflicts are no longer won or lost on the battlefield; this war is for control of your mind. And if you think my X-Files verbiage is out of place, then you haven't heard some of the conspiracy theories that are out there.
Turn the clock back about eight months: there we were, all glued to our sets, soaking up as many news broadcasts as we could. Men like Peter Jennings were our best friends in those darkest hours. We trusted the media implicitly, and it responded in a way that was dignified, honorable and worthy of our trust.
Now, however, things are not so simple. There are no obvious bad guys, no "us" and "them." We've got to muck through the opinions of a hundred different special interest groups who can do nothing but blame all the others, and we've become so divided that we're not even sure if Bush and Powell are on the same page anymore.
I saw a news program a week or so ago about media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. They interviewed Muslim Americans who watched satellite broadcasts of Arab news and Jewish Americans who preferred to watch an Israeli station. The former claimed that the Arab broadcasts were unbiased, whereas the latter preferred not to see its side look bad. Of course, it would not matter if the reasons were reversed. The basic point was that news is more a creation of reality than a representation of it.
What that broadcast didn't point out, of course, is that our own media has become divided in the same way, with competing networks each catering to what different segments of the American public want to hear. Someone once said the way to spot a liar is to find someone who claims to be telling the truth; to apply that to the media, any network claiming to be objective is so blinded by its own bias that its words aren't worth the price of watching its programming on the floor models at Circuit City.
Well, that describes just about every network, a testament to the wisdom of two of my friends who are so tired of hearing about the issue that they've stopped following it altogether. But I'm not content to do that, and as cynical as I want to be, I figure everybody's got to be right some of the time. But how is anyone supposed to tell what's right?
That would be an exercise in futility. What we can do, however, is focus on what's wrong. Arafat and Sharon endlessly accuse each other of wanting genocide over peace, and all arguments for one side or the other proceed from one of those inherently unproductive standpoints. The Palestinian Authority thrives on any rumor it can get a hold of, and concludes without evidence that Sharon plotted every supposed war crime and massacre, while the Israeli government's peace efforts consist of trying to prove Arafat's active support of terrorism. If you ask me, Sharon is stalling so he can knock out more terrorist installations with U.S. support, and Arafat is stalling so he can win more sympathy with each incursion. Both are clearly getting nowhere in a big hurry. Worst of all, the White House has denounced the United Nations itself as being incapable of fairly and objectively sorting out which of these claims are true.
Our allies in Europe can't be counted on at all in this matter, since their sensationalistic presses go wild every time an accidental civilian casualty occurs, and are equally distracted by conspiracy theories about the Bushes being involved in the Middle East for the sole purpose of getting Saddam's oil. Meanwhile, the supposedly moderate Arab world actually believes it when its newscasters say that synagogue bombings in France are part of a Zionist plot to distract us all from the incursions in the West Bank. By the way, these people still don't believe that the Sept. 11 terrorists were Arabs.
Why? To admit so would be an insufferable dishonor. But someone has to stop the cycle of saving face. Someone has to stop both sides from responding to criticism by repeating the same dogged emotional rants about the atrocities committed by the other side. Somebody's got to step in and figure out who did what and put an end to the accusations. President Bush has tried admirably to retain the respect of all parties, but it may be a job too big for him or for anyone else. The world needs a hero, like Batman. Or maybe just a skilled and experienced diplomat with enough international respect and authority to play the role of an unbiased mediator. Could it be Clinton?
Whoever it is, he or she has to get the straight story, cut out the erroneous accusations and do it fast. Otherwise, this media war will go straight into a tailspin. Already, college campuses across our nation have seen this issue turn ugly, spawning vandalism, violence, racist and anti-Semitic slurs and brutal misrepresentation of facts, as occurred in a column ("Endorsing ethnic cleansing in the guise of political debate," May 6, 2002) earlier this week in the Daily Princetonian that called pushing a people from one land to another "ethnic cleansing."
Yet the media has been reluctant to show how badly it has backfired for us, and instead has portrayed us as the harmless but misguided youths who missed out on the Vietnam era. For one thing, all evidence has shown that with an issue of this magnitude, no one is harmless. For another, who do they think is responsible for us being misguided? The ivory tower clich needs to be hacked down to the ground; we're just trying to get a straight story from the media, like everyone else.
But we are young and impressionable, as are a tremendous number of Israelis and Arabs. The United States isn't used to that, since we Western nations are on average old enough to be thrice divorced and living in a van down by the river. If things can get ugly on a college campus, imagine a land with the same average age, far less education, far more poverty and the same controversy on their doorstep every day. They're ready to believe just about anything, so I hope to God that someone goes in there and gets the right answers before they keep acting on all the wrong ones.
