WarSclerotic

Imagine if today’s ‘balanced’ media was around during WW2

If the military measures taken by Israel to protect itself are “war crimes” as defined by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, then that means that the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union resorted to war crimes to a much larger extent in order to defeat Nazi Germany.

Several factors saved the Allies from the charge of war crimes and prevented their prosecution in court or at least the establishment of commissions of inquiry in respect of the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, during the bombing of military targets and cities in Germany and the Axis (based on estimates of World War II historians, the bombings on German cities carried out by the air forces of the United States and Britain killed two million civilians). A major factor is the fact that World War II was reported, reviewed and retold by the written press, carefully linked to factual reports and descriptions of reality. There was no TV, and newspapers in the US and the UK published news headlines and detailed reports on the course of the fighting. Photographs that accompanied the articles showed total destruction of towns and villages caused by the progress of Allied liberation of Europe. Blogs, Facebook and social networks were then as fictional as spacecrafts and heart transplants. Live reports from the battle zone could only be seen in the journals screened in cinemas before the start of movies.

Print and broadcast media in the US and Britain that were active during World War II did not enjoy the power and influence they have today. But a major factor that, in our day, determines and dictates reports from areas of tension and armed conflict, and that did not exist in the written press during World War II is the principle of balance, which, in recent years, has become the sacred and unassailable tenant of media in the US and Western Europe. In any report, important or marginal, on political scandals, election campaigns, demonstrations or trials of public interest, the views and explanations of both the parties involved are provided. The careful and extremist preservation of the principle of balance that characterizes American media often ridicules reports, undermines the significance of reported events and paints the involved parties as non-credible.

What luck, what a miracle that the sacred principle of balance did not exist during World War II. Let us imagine that in 1943 a Jewish organization in America had received a report that claims that the Nazis run a concentration camp at a place called Oświęcim in Poland and murder thousands of Jews there. In response to the claims by the Jewish organization and in the name of balance, at a meeting of the New York Times or the morning briefing of the production team at CBS‘s evening news program, the decision is made to send a reporter to Berlin to check the veracity of this serious contention. Dan Rather would have gone to Berlin and interviewed Heinrich Himmler or Goering and heard from them a vigorous denial of the claim of Jews being murdered at Auschwitz. The Nazis would have even organized for Rather to visit a concentration camp and showed him the barracks they had prepared with elderly Jews sitting and eating a hearty dinner. Of course, the interview with Goering or Himmler would have been published together with a picture of the barracks to balance the claim of the Jewish organization for the murder of Jews. According to the currently accepted practices it can be assumed that the Nazi version would have been more palatable.

Valued veteran interviewer Charlie Rose boasted a great scoop with his exclusive interview with Khaled Meshal that was aired last week. When the Allied soldiers fought against the Nazis, it was inconceivable for a Western journalist to interview the enemy or for an American or British newspaper to give a stage to a Nazi general. The absence of the sacred principle of balance helped the victory over the Nazis.

Harold Macmillan, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1957-1963 once said that if in the 1940s the BBC had the power that it has nowadays, the world would speak German.

Shlomo Shamir, for 40 years the Haaretz correspondent in New York, is an expert on the US Jewish community and its organizations.

This entry was posted on August 10, 2014 at 8:22 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.