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Journalism should be a search for the truth.
But that’s not the way it is practiced in America any more – with a few exceptions.
Too often, the highest ideal in the American press today is for “fairness” and “balance.”
Is there a difference between “truth” and “balance”? You bet there is.
We all remember Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. His impromptu press conferences were a sight to behold. They offered up some real comic relief during the tense moments of the war in Iraq.
He was the Iraqi flack who contended with a straight face that U.S. forces were committing suicide at the walls of Baghdad, while coalition tanks roared past him. He asserted that no U.S. forces were in Saddam International Airport even after it had been secured by troops. He warned us just last week of a big “unconventional” surprise that never came.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy gets his own American TV show after the dust settles in Iraq. He was hilarious. He belongs on “Saturday Night Live.”
But there’s a serious lesson in his bizarre assertions. Those kind of wild, baseless claims are not unusual in the Middle East. In fact, they are the norm for Arab officials and spokesmen in times of crisis.
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Syrian officials claimed they had shot down most of the Israeli air force, when, in fact, they hadn’t destroyed a single plane. Egyptian strongman Gamal abdel-Nasser told his people of great advances his troops were making in that conflict, even while they were running for their lives.
The Middle East is a region known for exaggeration, wild claims, myth-making and baldfaced lies. It’s part of the landscape, part of the culture, part of the fabric of life.
But in a world where “fairness” and “balance” are the highest ideals, those claims get equal treatment with accurate descriptions and depictions of real-world events. In other words, outrageous, laughable claims are taken seriously.
This is where modern American journalism is making a grave mistake – a potentially fatal error that is turning much of the media into an irrelevancy, a bad joke.
They say the hardest lie to overcome is the biggest one. Hitler and Goebbels knew it. And the modern tyrants and propaganda artists of the Middle East know it.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
I was stunned to find about a year or so ago that the New York Times no longer accepts as historical fact that a Jewish Temple once stood upon the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. News stories now refer to “the Temple Mount, which Israel claims to have been the site of the First and Second Temples.”
Just two weeks ago, I noticed the Associated Press, the largest news-gathering agency in the world, had followed suit.
We have a term in the news business for a standard paragraph of historical background information that you see in stories over and over again. We call it a “nut graph.” Here’s what the new “nut graph” at AP says about the Temple Mount: “Jews believe the mosques sit on the ruins of the first and second Jewish Temples, and revere as their holiest site a nearby wall believed to have surrounded the sanctuaries. Muslims say nothing existed on the hill before the mosques.”
Now it’s very important for you to recognize what’s happening here. This is why it’s so tough to fight the big lie.
Yasser Arafat says the Jewish Temple was never situated in Jerusalem or in any other part of the land of Israel – certainly not the Temple Mount. He’s told the big lie so many times that it begins to resonate. It begins to take on a life of its own.
Then the New York Times, being the “objective source of information” that it is – the newspaper of record – reports that it is merely a claim of Israel that the Temple stood upon the Temple Mount. The AP, seeking first and foremost “fairness” and “balance” over truth and historical reality, begin to question a fact accepted by every archaeologist who has ever researched the issue of the Temple.
The more outrageous the claim made by the Arabs, the more skewed media reporting becomes – the more confused it becomes, the less truthful it becomes.
It’s time for American journalism to return to its roots, its foundations, its principles. It’s time, once again, to start seeking the truth.
