Huff Post editor Greg Mitchell has more patience than I. Mitchell made the effort to read those US newspapers which my reflexes had led me to pass over. He blogged:
In the usual process, the U.S. government, media here -- and many of the leading liberal bloggers -- are silent or playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and even Haaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts.It's hard enough to figure out what is happening in the Middle East without having to navigate American news media sources as if one were an inhabitant of the former Soviet Union forced to read between the lines of Pravda. Yes, I have lost patience.
Anyone who cares should consult the respected Haaretz site often, if for no other reason than to learn that criticism of Israeli military actions are usually more heated inside that country than in the USA.
The New York Times, for example, as of today (Monday), has not yet editorialized on the air assault. You may recall the lockstep support in the U.S. for Israeli's invasion of southern Lebanon, which included the use of U.S.-made cluster bombs. That invasion turned out to be a genuine fiasco. One Sunday analysis at Haaretz: "A million and a half human beings, most of them downcast and desperate refugees, live in the conditions of a giant jail, fertile ground for another round of bloodletting. The fact that Hamas may have gone too far with its rockets is not the justification of the Israeli policy for the past few decades, for which it justly merits an Iraqi shoe to the face."
There are no more 'real' journalists left in 'mainstream' American media. They have all gotten replaced by high-hair Glamor Boyz that can't even read their prepared scripts without making mistakes. All the print and broadcast media have degenerated to blatant propaganda, and it doesn't take much channel surfing or critical reading, either, to see it's all dictated from a common script.
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