Managing the News

I was saddened ... and Joe Scarborough was ranting on yesterday’s Morning Joe show … saying that the killing of 15 women and children by Israeli artillery was asinine … see: Huffington Post Story. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the U.N., said that attacking sleeping children was shameful … see: The Guardian Video. Even an Israeli military general was attempting to draw a moral equivalence … saying that the U.S. also killed many women and children when it shelled Fallujah during the Iraq war ... and Britain killed many more women and children when it fire-bombed Dresden during World War II.

However, independent of the horror of this tragic war, there are aspects of the news that we here in America are receiving that should be obvious … but we keep conveniently ignoring … and that is much of what we are hearing is a contrived fiction. The news is being shaded and even subverted by both sides of this conflict. But it does seem that Hamas is more aggressive at this game than Israel. I found the following post of the Powerline blog that showed me more of this subterfuge than one sees in most of our media: Powerline Blog Entry.  Here is a key excerpt:

Consider the case of Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati. On Tuesday, he tweeted that the deaths of Palestinian children on a playground caused by rocket fire were the result of a misfired Hamas rocket. “Misfired rocket killed children in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris,” Barbati wrote: 

Significantly, Barbati tweeted this only after he had left Gaza. In the same tweet he wrote, “Out of Gaza far from Hamas retaliation.”

Please read this whole referenced blog entry above to see how closely Hamas manages the news coming out of Gaza. I think we must show a great deal of skepticism when we, including Joe Scarborough and Ban Ki-moon, jump to conclusions about what is actually happening in this current horrific conflict.