Wishful Thinking
MJ Rosenberg trashes the British media's claims about Obama's Middle East policy:
The Palestinian Authority, in a brilliant display of public relations, ran Hebrew-language ads this week, in Israel’s four major newspapers, endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative (formerly known as the Saudi plan) and calling on Israelis to support it, too. The Palestinian Authority is also urging President-elect Barack Obama to put his prestige behind the initiative as a critical first step to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The British media claims that President-elect Obama has endorsed it, but these reports are false. The British media has always been rather dodgy when it comes to issues relating to the United States.
I wish it were true. And I hope Obama does endorse the initiative early in his term. But he hasn’t yet.
It is common to hear people (especially, I must admit, people on the left) lament how much less Americans know about people from other lands than they know about us, and how much better the foreign media is at reporting on "taboo" subjects (Israel/Palestine, Iraq civilian casualties, etc.) than our media. There are pebbles and even cobbles of truth in this. But it also true that the foreign media's reporting on US politics is atrocious. Could it be anything but? The system is so complex, the players so numerous, the rules so arcane. Think of Americans trying to grasp cricket and Britons trying to grasp baseball. Yes, yes, true enough. But the journalistic standards of the British media are execrably low, and for their stories about American politics, virtually nonexistent.
The Palestinian Authority, in a brilliant display of public relations, ran Hebrew-language ads this week, in Israel’s four major newspapers, endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative (formerly known as the Saudi plan) and calling on Israelis to support it, too. The Palestinian Authority is also urging President-elect Barack Obama to put his prestige behind the initiative as a critical first step to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The British media claims that President-elect Obama has endorsed it, but these reports are false. The British media has always been rather dodgy when it comes to issues relating to the United States.
I wish it were true. And I hope Obama does endorse the initiative early in his term. But he hasn’t yet.
It is common to hear people (especially, I must admit, people on the left) lament how much less Americans know about people from other lands than they know about us, and how much better the foreign media is at reporting on "taboo" subjects (Israel/Palestine, Iraq civilian casualties, etc.) than our media. There are pebbles and even cobbles of truth in this. But it also true that the foreign media's reporting on US politics is atrocious. Could it be anything but? The system is so complex, the players so numerous, the rules so arcane. Think of Americans trying to grasp cricket and Britons trying to grasp baseball. Yes, yes, true enough. But the journalistic standards of the British media are execrably low, and for their stories about American politics, virtually nonexistent.
posted by hellisotherpeople at 4:27 PM
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