August Kleinzahler writes in the London Review of Books about the coverage in the U.S. of the war in Lebanon. Here is what he says about the New York Times:

There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of the important news is to be found in the Times, usually below the fold. It says, among other things, that 58 per cent of Americans want the US to mind its own business in the Lebanon conflict. I’ll give you an unofficial poll that you can take to the bank and cash: if you walk into most any ginmill in the US outside New York, LA, San Francisco, Austin etc, and not a few ginmills inside them, and the subject of the Lebanon war comes up, some sage in the corner with a baseball cap and a Bud will volunteer: ‘I hope the cocksuckers all kill each other.’

On the front page of another issue of the Times was the stock tragic Arab refugee shot of a distraught Lebanese woman in an abaya holding a terrified child. I tell you what the Times is not going to run. They’re not going to run a big colour photo above the fold on the front page of a pretty, light-skinned young Lebanese woman in Prada shoes, Diesel jeans and a Dolce & Gabbana blouse with an arm blown off or half her face missing.

The media have been selling this war like a sporting event: ‘Hizbullah fire 105 rockets into Haifa and northern Israel, killing four and wounding 18, while the Israelis struck Sidon and Tyre, launching 48 bombing sorties against suspected Hizbullah positions with “some reports of civilian casualties”.’ The audience becomes addicted to narratives, digestible narratives. No news organisation is going to meet its quarterly market projections by shoving political and moral quandaries down the throats of its audience.

I thought that the biographical note was also interesting:
“August Kleinzahler, a poet, wrote about the Bush presidential candidacy for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiel in 2000, but was terminated because of ‘obsessive negativity’ on the subject.”

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