by Norman Berdichevsky (January 2018)
ore than a generation ago, the passion to be the first to report the news led to the Chicago Tribune’s banner headline of Nov. 3, 1948: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN! GOP Sweep indicated in States. Newsweek, the previous month, had headlined FIFTY P0LITICAL EXPERTS UNANIMOUSLY PREDICT A DEWEY VICTORY (Oct. 11, 1948). President Truman delighted in posing with the paper and beaming a smile from ear to ear. The Tribune had accepted the previous Newsweek’s monthly cover story of an imminent Republican landslide as gospel.
Mohammed Al-Durah had been killed by Israeli fire on September 30, 2000.
The television news media—with its penchant for highlighting blood and mayhem—is infinitely worse than the printed press was in the newspaper age. The time deadline is the most compressed to get out a story.
Unlike the previous generations of newspaper journalists, reporters today do not appear to carefully wade through and weigh the facts and engage in follow-up reporting that may take days or even weeks to clarify events. Without an analysis of the significance of an event, the news becomes an arena in which to compete for attention. The most outlandish, shocking, offensive, bloody or bizarre is often regarded as the most newsworthy.
Declaration by both Houses of Congress that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel in 1995 and that the embassy should be moved there.
The moral weight of the many East European nations that abstained from voting including the Czech Republic whose parliament voted to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and requested the government to take steps to do so. The Czechs, more than anyone else know of the failure of the “great powers” and international organizations to guarantee their sovereignty in the face of threats. It also demonstrated the moral bankruptcy and disunity of the European Union.
Unfortunately, much of the press, which should be more patient and get the news right before commenting does not see a special responsibility to be a counterweight to the visual media. it is not interested in reviewing any qualifying relevant information to its conclusions. The role of the press has traditionally been to bring a more balanced interpretation and explanation of the significance of the news and put it in perspective but all too often it tries to compete with television and compounds the distorted image we frequently get. The worst examples of this involve both the rush to judgment and the penchant of many reporters and news teams to sell a story that uses dramatic visual images in which the man bites dog element can be exploited. Fake and sensationalist news will always have a huge audience.
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