This is hyperbolic. The media's treatment of the conflict in Israel and Lebanon was very fair. Good Lord. The doomsday narcissists just can't let anyone feel at ease, every day has to be a constant reminder of lurking evil and inevitable death and destruction. Talk about the death drive.
Kohut/Kernberg | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 6:59 pm | #

As Israel Goes, So Goes The World

And the Arabs know it, which is why I would have made this on #1, not fifth.

"Fifth, the mainstream media's vilification, demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel, based on outright fabrications and malevolent distortions, is imperilling the very existence of the country that is the front line of defence of the free world."
ytba | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 7:07 pm | #

Sorry, I disagree. I trust the evidence of my own eyes about what the real situation is. I think Phillips is much closer to the truth than you are, K/K. But whatever you or I think, events will play out and we shall see, won't we?
Dr. Sanity | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 7:07 pm | #

K/K, I agree. I think Phillips' analysis is inflammatory. We can be vigilant and skeptical of the media without becoming unhinged. This kind of rhetoric just makes things worse. It goes a long way toward keeping Americans divided at a critical time when we need to work together.
Athenawise | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 7:54 pm | #

Melanie Phillips knows whereof she speaks. The Islamofascists in whatever sect they embrace use a very willing media to manipulate the message. The psy-ops behind the ME events presentations whips the Muslims into blind, hateful frenzy. Whatever is motivating the dupes in the Western media to play along with these twisted messages is anyone's guess. Stupidity? Their own political agenda? Naivete? Lack of critical judgment and knowledge of history and culture?

The consequences of the media's lack of ethics and judgment are chilling to consider.
onlineanalyst | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 7:54 pm | #

The media wil come around- as soon as their interests are threatened- and they have been made to pay a price.
sigmund, carl and alfred | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 7:54 pm | #

Let's look at the big picture: there is a refining and purifying process taking place worldwide. I'm Jewish by blood, and Christian by heart, and I've always been - but particularly now - dismayed and discouraged by the anti-semitism, faithlessness, and sometimes malignant pacifism within the Jewish community. We still see huge numbers of ultra-lib Jews who are ambiguous about the Terror War and Islmofascism, and who think they are - at bottom - responsible for being hated. They're still voting Democrat. Israel (in the nation-state and in the macro-community sense) has a distance to go before it has a real sense of itself as a warrior nation in righteousness, the David of democracy and true liberalism pitted against the Goliath of totalitarianism and barbarous power-worship.

We in the U.S. have to travel the same road toward rediscovery of our true national character and soul.
M.Capulus | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 8:20 pm | #

Hmmm. The mainstream media's stranglehold on the view of the world is broken. They may be broadcasting distortions, but now there is an alternative point of view, and independent avenues for information.

(In fact, with the blogosphere, you get nearly every point of view, as well as nearly every distortion along with many many facets of the truth).

I think it's letting the people off the hook too easily to blame our infatuation with distortion entirely on the MSM. We've taken freedom of speech to it's logical limit (on the internet). Now it's up to each individual citizen to sift what appears to be garbage (appeals to emotion, ect) from what appears to be truth, to concatonate a worldview based on trustworthiness and self-consistency.

To forfeit this responsibility is to state that we can't handle this freedom, which to me is a more scary proposition.
Aaron | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 8:41 pm | #

Aaron,

You can not assume that the rest of the world digests MSM news as you do. You have to catch the lead ins on BBC World and the newspaper headlines attached to AP and Reuters stories by local papers around the world. You have to see which stories are buried on page 8. I doubt that much of the world gets to page 8 of The Times.
expat | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 9:29 pm | #

K/K and Athenawise since you both seem to think that Melanie Phillips' analysis is inflammatory, I will bring to your attention two recently reported events: The Israeli “missile attack” on the Red Cross ambulance in Lebanon and on the Reuters armored car in Gaza.
In these cases the pictures have not been retouched or altered. However, both events are obvious fabrications as the published pictures of the damaged vehicles show that the shape of the damaged areas could not be the result of missiles. These pictures also show so much rust on the damaged areas that it is obvious that the damage was not recent. Probably both vehicles were taken from a scrap yard for the pictures.
Most Western media today has the same credibility as Pravda had during the hey days of Soviet propaganda.
Luc | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:36 pm | #

Like onlineanalyst I too wonder what exactly drives the MSM. I try to give them some benefit of doubt but it gets more difficult each week. I believe there are several factors which color their vision:
1. Most of the journalism programs in our universities teach undergrads not to necessarily report news but to make a difference. It's a huge difference.
2. An abysmal lack of knowledge of the history of Western Civilization in general, and of the United States in particular. So they have no idea what makes our form of government and the Constitution so unique.
3. For the biggest percentage of them, there is no underlying religious faith so they really have no concept of Judao-Christian philosophy or its contribution to our way of life and how totally backward and out of touch Islam is at least as it is practiced in most of the world today. Just look at how they brushed over the forced conversions of Centanni and Wiig, not realizing that for many their soul is the most precious thing they own.
Frazzled | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:44 pm | #

There may be corruption in every industry but the media, as a business, has become corrupt by definition. All other enterprises still thrive by making the better mousetrap. The MSM abandoned this idea decades ago when "advocacy journalism" began it's ascent. To journalism the best product is whatever best feeds the agendae of their readers and being truthful & accurate is no longer relevant. Advocacy journalism is in the process of destroying the MSM & the truth and checks & balances of the alternative media- blogs, primarily, are the agents putting it on it's deathbed. It may be 10 or 20 years but I believe news & how we get it will be completely different. The networks, W Post & Times, CNN, etc will have no one to blame but themselves.
Chunky | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 12:07 am | #

The real question is, as always, not debates over the MSM, but what are we going to do about? If civilization dies it is our fault; it is because we let it, it is because we were happier carping and arguing about the problem than finding and implementing a solution.

And there is a solution. If anyone is interested you can find an explanation of it via my blog or by visiting Shrinkwrapped. It may not be the best solution, although I argue that it is, and there may be better ways to implement it than what we are currently using, but either way I think debating that is much better use of energy.
C. Owen Johnson | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 1:15 am | #

Bear in mind that Ms Phillips gets to watch the BBC, as she's English. The Beeb specifically and the European press generally are an order of magnitude futher left than MSM reporting in the US.
ed in texas | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 8:03 am | #

ed's point is well taken - though I think "order of magnitude" is a bit steep. We do not have a far left MSM in this country, we have a MSM which is consistently moderately left. It is the "consistently" part that creates the bias. They simply believe that the sensible center is about a dozen steps left of where it is statistically. Further, they are more influenced by what they perceive is a consensus of informed opinion, as opposed to bloggers, who tend to be more abstractly ideological.

European sources are farther left, and some are even extreme.

I do take issue with MP that this antisemitism is unprecedented. There is unfortunately enormous precedent, which was interrupted for the last few decades.
Assistant Village Idiot | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 9:02 am | #

Dr. Sanity, I beg your indulgence with this long post but I found an excellent 'in a nutshell' article on another blog that nails exactly where this weird mishmash of Leftist, "progressive", and usually lilly delicate peacenik culture of the Media join in common cause with the IslamoMARXIST victimhood business:

Mark Terwilliger said... http://partyofhumanity.blogspot.com/

"...What irks me, and what I think troubles many others on this list, is something else -- something that is operating silently and *behind the scenes* in the whole matter of "diversity." That something else is "political correctness" or PC....

Political correctness is not just a slightly over-enthusiastic embrace of "good manners," or a silly effort at coining new euphemisms. It is far worse than that. At its base, it is not even an attack on "white males." It is far more subtle and dangerous than that.

I take PC to be nothing more or less than a deliberate attempt to establish -- as the basis of ALL human morality -- an unstated and unquestioning adherence to the following (false) logic:

-- Oppression is (always) evil and the lack of oppression is (the only) good.

-- The strong (always) oppress the weak.

... Therefore:

-- The strong are (always) evil and the weak are (always the only) good.

That's the underlying logic of PC in a nutshell. What makes this logic particularly PC (and also false) are the terms in parentheses. PC is an absolutist formulation."

In another essay he elaborates:

"In all moral [PC] questions, what matter most are the relations of power, for these -- and these alone -- allow you to determine who is the "oppressor" (= "bad") and who is the "oppressed" (="good"). By PC definition, the weak cannot "oppress" the strong. Anything that might, at first, look like "oppression" is really just a richly-deserved pay-back for past offences -- not to mention the ongoing "offence" of being "stronger" and therefore more evil.

It is NOT that the "weak" cannot pass judgment against the "strong." It is rather that the moral calculus is different. A judgment against "evil" is a good thing. Since the strong are evil, any judgment against them on the part of the "weak" (= "good") cannot be "improper," even if the particular judgment should have no immediately demonstrable basis in fact. Hence the judgments of the "weak" against the "strong" cannot be "discrimination" in the narrow judicial sense.

You see the same thing going on in the issues surrounding the GWoT. There are no moral grounds on which a committed Marxist could ever support the "Islamo-fascists." Indeed, by all rights, Marxists should be standing four-square with the Capitalists against such retrograde agents of Feudalism. And yet, many elements of the left seem inclined to give the Islamo-fascists the benefit of the doubt at the very least, and sometimes voice open support for them. What in the Hell is going on? Once you realize that their moral compass is based on the PC principles of "weak=good, strong=bad," it begins to make sense. The United States, the strongest nation on earth (supposedly) is, by reason of that strength, also the epitome of evil. Some murderous schizophrenic in a bomb-vest is clearly far weaker than the Hyperpower (or nearly any other duly constituted state on earth), so they are always morally superior."

This goes a long way to explaining where the Marxist and Islamofacist gets their moral outrage and sense of righteousness from: they are 'always' THE UNDERDOG, the oppressed, and hence whatever violent means they employ against civilization is justified since they both hope to establish "the millenium" or utopia of complete social order on earth.

Naturally this being the situation the defense against them must simultaneously be philosophical AND military; defeat their ideology and their tactical terrorism.

Apologies again for the long post.
John | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 10:39 am | #

The media wil come around- as soon as their interests are threatened- and they have been made to pay a price.

But what if they're the last to be threatened? What if they're the last to go under the halal slaughter knife?
Headless Unicorn Guy | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 12:19 pm | #

American Thinker article on the role of propaganda "The Ho Chi Minh Trail to Beruit". Worth reading.

http://tinyurl.com/s36v9
suek | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 12:31 pm | #

I find that to be really inflammatory and hyperbolic. All of the talk of a dying civilization is just ridiculous, and characterization of "the mainstream media"(whatever that means) as a fifth column is even worse.
Josh | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 1:36 pm | #

B"H

Melanie Phillips' writing is a breath of fresh air. Her writing is some of the best on the topic, which is good because when you have to read really bad news, it should at least be well written.

And, she's not the only one who sees the Media bias. There are others...
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Arti...le.asp? ID=11643
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/...raud/ambulance/
http://www.floppingaces.net/2006...against-israel/
http://michellemalkin.com/archiv...ives/ 005802.htm
http://www.riehlworldview.com/ ca...propaganda.html
http://newsbusters.org/node/6907
http://factsofisrael.com/blog/ ar...media_bias.html
http://powerlineblog.com/archive...ives/ 011466.php

(And it's not so much that some of these folks are 'pro-Israel' as it is that they are anti-deception. And you know what? That's just fine with me.)

And then, there are the old standbys like BBCWatch, IMRA, AIM, MEMRI, CAMERA, IRIS, Honest Reporting, Palestinian Media Watch, just to name a few; most of which having been started about 6 years ago after it became obvious that the MSM wasn't going to reform itself.

A pretty complete analysis, with examples, can be found here...
http://peace.heebz.com/mediabias.html

There are those who argue that the MSM are being fooled, or making natural mistakes in the heat of the moment, and that it's no big deal.

But that doesn't wash. This has been going of for 6 years now, and there have been numerous cases, like the Jenin non-massacre, from which they could have realized something was wrong and taken steps to correct it. But no.. Nothing has improved. If anything, they have gotten worse.

I'm afraid that the utterly inescapable conclusion is that, by persisting in the bias they had to be aware of for so long, the MSM has long shown conclusively that it sides with barbarism over civilization.
ytba | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 2:00 pm | #

I think it has something to do with that report on lgf about the Arabs paying to control the middle east coverage of APTV. AP is a "non-profit" but that only means the profits get distributed back to their owners, big MSM names like the Washington Post, CBS, and so on. I recall that big newspapers UPI have great financial difficulties. Didn't UPI go bankrupt? Does AP and its owners rely on Arab "sugar daddy" money to stay afloat? How would we ever know?
Solomon2 | Email | Homepage | 09.01.06 - 4:15 pm | #