Reporting of international conflicts often seems one-sided. The benefit of the doubt seems to go to the underdogs--unless they get too violent.
Our print and TV reporters are our agents for getting us the facts about international conflicts. Careful analysis of their presentations suggests that bias for the underdog often colors what we are told.
When it comes to reporting of domestic issues, we are generally able to make allowances for a newspaper's or network's known predilections for a liberal or conservative position, or for or against a party in power. As for international disputes in which we are directly involved, we are usually aware of whether the medium supports or opposes our government's policy. In either case, we can choose from an almost limitless variety of sources of information reflecting expertise and opinion.
But for the multitude of overseas conflicts in which we are at most interested observers, we are at the mercy of a much smaller number of journalists in the field and their editors. Do we get fair and objective accounts of what is happening on those fronts? Is it even possible given the obstacles to complete access to events and the people behind them?
India and China fought a brief border war in 1962 in the Himalayas. We had been peeved for some time with India's neutrality in the Cold War, but Mao's brutal Red China regime was regarded as part of a monolithic Communist bloc bent on the destruction of the West. Without learning much about the merits of the border area in question, we were soon presented with a picture of a plucky little India (then not much more than half a billion population) resisting the Chinese hordes.
Fidel Castro was a media darling as a rebel in the mountains, falling from favor with some when he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist, and with many more when he "hosted" missiles aimed at the U.S. There was a romantic aura to the Sandinistas battling the dictator Somoza which faded as they misruled Nicaragua, and wasn't Robert Mugabe a heroic figure until he got his chance to brutalize his own people? And the Taliban until they harbored our enemies?
What about the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian dispute? There's no shortage of information from that arena, but is it complete and accurate? From 1948 to 1956, Israel got an almost uniformly "good press." It was a brand new democratic state, it had fought off autocratic Arab regimes which tried to strangle it at birth, and it was taking in Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East. Egyptian and Jordanian armies held Gaza and the West Bank, respectively, but the term "occupation" didn't come into vogue until those districts passed into Israeli control. Guerrillas, later known as terrorists or militants, depending on political orientation, had used those areas to raid pre-1967 Israel, whose right to exist had never been accepted by any Arab government or movement.
The 1967 armed conflict, despite its having been precipitated by an Egyptian act of war, the blockade of an international waterway, made the Jewish state the bully of the Middle East in the eyes of much of the media. How many Americans know that two weeks after the Six Day War, the Israeli government offered to return the captured Egyptian and Syrian territories in return for a peace agreement, and that the Arab nations refused to negotiate?
But from that point on, the underdog syndrome colored much of the reporting as violent acts of Palestinians against Israeli civilians became equated with Israeli retaliatory or precautionary measures. Sensing this, the underdogs became skilled at manipulating the media by staging sticks-and- stones attacks on Israeli forces in full view of invited cameras while bus bombings and drive-by shootings took place far from live view. How much press goes to mourning Palestinian families in the squalid surroundings tolerated by the Arab world for 60 years and how much to broken Israeli bodies in modern rehabilitation facilities necessitated by 60 years of attacks?
The Internet may be the antidote to any media bias. Users need to sift through opposing assertions and arguments to get at facts, but at least it's possible that the truth can be found.
