Jeffrey Goldberg:

We’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

For the record, the quote above and my related comments are not some weird justification of violent acts or meant to stir some sense of unfeeling about tragic exchanges in the Middle East. The focus here is how things are covered and what leads to that coverage. The fact
is that there is a massive double standard and if we covered our own massive wars like we cover Israel’s comparatively tiny ones, folks would have a much different reaction to them.

Friedman:

“In the week that Israel has been slicing through Gaza, Islamist suicide bombers have killed almost 100 Iraqis — first, a group of tribal sheikhs in Yusufiya, who were working on reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and, second, mostly women and children gathered at a Shiite shrine. These unprovoked mass murders have not stirred a single protest in Europe or the Middle East.”

Anyone else starting to get worried that this economic situation could be worse than we fear (even though we fear like a sonofabitch)?

I mean, it’s everywhere.

A longtime newsman steps down and reflects on his career and the state of the industry he departs. Howard Weaver provides some really interesting takes. He’s a guy I’ve come to know from a series of email exchanges and from us perusing each others’ blogs. Just one of those weird web acquaintances that we’ve all come to take for granted. Too much so.

Howard, if you’re reading, the timing of your retirement couldn’t be worse for me. I was just about to ask you for a job as a columnist. It occurred to me that I knew this big time dude in big time journalism, so what the heck?

Hey, remember all those news images we saw of children and women killed or injured and in the hospital during the initial phases of shock and awe?

Yeah, me neither.

Is it a fair way to cover war? Maybe it is. It’s certainly the way we cover Israel. But it’s not the way we cover it when we’re doing the bombing. Somehow a battle (and we won’t even get into who started that battle and whose tactics really lead to the civilian toll) that has resulted in a few hundred deaths looks a whole lot more brutal and bloody on TV than the one that led to a few hundred thousand deaths (minimum). Worth considering.