PressEthic

On yesterday's episode of the Brian Lehrer Show, Brian Lehrer interviewed Rashid Khalidi, the Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the head of Columbia's Middle East Institute about his new book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Among other things, the two discussed United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's recent statement about the importance of the Palestinian question in a global context, made this week at a meeting of the Alliance of Civilizations in Istanbul. "We may wish to think of the Arab -Israeli conflict as just one regional conflict among many," Annan said. "But, as I told the General Assembly in September, it is not. No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield."

In response, Lehrer asked Khalidi whether the issue bears that much importance among those not directly involved. Khalidi agrees, and adds that news of Palestinian suffering is broadcasted extensively in other parts of the world, where the public supports that type of coverage. "Gaza plays," he says. "It's always on TV screens everywhere in the Arab world. Palestine has a valence, has an importance, over the Arab world, over the Islamic world, I would say over much of the world." Khalidi then argues that the American press coverage is heavily edited, even censored.

Khalidi: It’s public opinion that wants to see these pictures and that we’re prevented from seeing by the most rigid censorship since, I don’t know, Stalin, in this country. We just don’t see the pictures so we don’t know the reality is there and anybody who puts them up is decried , in the most horrible ways.

Lehrer: You don’t really want to compare our, our media bosses to Stalin, do you?

Khalidi: No, they’re much more sophisticated than Stalin ever was. Stalin would have people shot. It’s much more complex, and, and subtle. But the pictures don’t get up. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Everywhere else in the world you see, in graphic detail, what is happening daily in Gaza.

The idea that coverage from the Middle East about the Middle East varies from what we see and here in the United States has been discussed extensively, including on this blog. Most people maintain that the news here reflects American interests. Khalidi argues that only those "who drank the neocon Kool-Aid" were fooled into believing, "Palestine is not important." In an age when isolationism is the furthest thing from reality, and the Bush administration has renounced Clinton's involvement in the issue, it seems the press's focus should be redirected.