Gaza, Mogadishu and How our Dumbed Down Media Dooms Our Foreign Policy
Why Democracy, dumbed down by ahistorical news coverage, Makes a Nation’s Foreign Policy Incoherent and Hysterical
By
David Gottfried
Our understanding of the conflict between Hamas and Israel is undermined because the media is big on emotion and very scanty on facts. The media wants good ratings and so it presents news programs that sell, which are, almost invariably, shows that are a real treat for simpletons. I think the American debacle in Mogadishu, at the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993, underscored the way in which dumbed down news programs can make our foreign policy an utter fiasco. Gaza bears many similarities to Mogadishu.
Most peoples’ contemplation of politics has been completely warped by abominations such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. Peoples’ knowledge of a political situation is concentrated on the events of the past 24 hours because the predominant news outlets repeat the same headlines, ad nauseum, during a one-hour news program. In other words, everything aired in the course of an hour could be collapsed into five minutes. Since all attention is on the present, most people are deaf, dumb and blind to what caused the conflict giving rise to the news story or the possible solutions to the conflict.
Since the American brain has been buggered and shrunken by television news --- and also much of the news viewed on computers because most people just look at pictures on the internet; hell, I know plenty of messed-up people who primarily use their computers just for porn – I suppose not too many people in TV land, or idiot box computer land, remember Mogadishu and what transpired at the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993.
Mogadishu and Why Democracy, dumbed down by ahistorical news coverage, Makes a Nation’s Foreign Policy Incoherent and Hysterical
Around the time Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, the media was flooded with reports of widespread and severe hunger in connection with conflicts in Somalia and Ethiopia. The blow-dried and emptied-headed commentators on CNN, MSNBC etc. all did their jobs flawlessly: The emoted. They got properly and admirably hysterical, knowing how to show emotion and act like Lady Diana, not that old fogey Queen Elizabeth. If they were female, they affected motherly love and pity. If they were male, they were of course men of the metrosexual variety and were quite fetching as they veritably oozed with sensitivity like an 8-month-old baby’s diaper oozing urine.
Of course, there was a minimum of practical information. One doesn’t have to worry about conveying facts when one has horrible pictures of starving people to grace the broadcasts. (I would bet good money that those newscasters, whose television faces showed all the concern and sorrow of an adorable debutante in a sappy 1950’s B movie, boasted, during their coffee breaks, about the fantastic pictures of starving people on their news program.) And so their fact-free broadcasts were devoid of information as to what caused the conflict and whether or not parties to the conflict might thwart the work of, or imperil the lives of, people we might send to the region to help the starving people. Instead of discussing anything regarding the cause of the conflict or possible solutions to the conflict, our telegenic political scientists -- who majored in cheer leading and popularity in college and did post graduate work on advanced emoting to win friends and influence principal shitheads in the rat race -- simply channeled the urgency and boorish pizzazz of one of the hags on the View and implored, “We must do something.”
And so we did do something. We sent in United States Military Forces with enough food to give several million people the equivalent of a thanksgiving feast 10 times over. Our heart was in the right place and our generosity was exemplary.
However, we did not know what we were getting into, and our moronic news broadcasts, which were purged of any information regarding the political, religious and tribal conflicts and villains, didn’t prepare us for the maelstrom of extreme madness and violence that defined the region. Our solders, who came there to feed people, were set upon by vicious Islamic monsters who tortured our solders, then tied them to a motor vehicle and dragged them, at a fast pace, through the streets of Mogadishu, purposefully making their broken bodies collide into potholes, garbage, etc.
The aforementioned idiot box newscasters duly showed us the film footage of the mutilation and murder of our good men.
Then the mentally defective and grossly overpaid -- but stunningly well-dressed and good-looking -- newscasters properly pouted their faces, and in their best expression of righteous indignation ala Faye Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest,” said that our intervention in Mogadishu was a failure, that we had to recognize the limits of American Power, and that we had to leave pronto.
And so the United States, a nation that was once was truly great, a nation that in the 30’s and 40’s, got us out of the depression, destroyed the Axis powers and conveyed an aesthetic that was remarkably generous, loving and open-hearted in films such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” degenerated into a sorry state of spastic bimbos. We see pictures of starvation. We intervene. Then we see pictures of our troops under attack. And then we run away. We react. We don’t think anymore.
I am getting a big whiff of Mogadishu in the most recent phase of the Israeli-Gaza conflict.
Hostages have been coming home. A pause in hostilities has been in effect while hostages have been sent home.
The media, always very keen on pleasing one of the biggest segments of their audience, fat, aging people, of the female gender, who are addicts for cheap sentiment, have been giving us lots of film footage about particular families, the adorable toddlers and infants who have been taken hostage, and the smiles and loving hugs of relatives overjoyed at being reunited after hostages have come home. I expect that any day now one of the more matronly commentators will comment upon the quality of a hostage’s bowels movements after he ate a particularly nourishing home cooked meal.
And all this coverage is at the expense of coverage that would remind the tv or internet viewer of some cardinal concepts:
A) Grown-Ups in foreign policy have always said,“Never negotiate with terrorists.”
B) Although Israel has a reputation for toughness and severity, it has been getting alarmingly soft, especially with respect to hostages, e.g., some years back the Israelis released over 1200 Arab terrorists to obtain the release of one Israeli soldier.
C) If we make concessions to get back our hostages, they will simply seize more hostages.
D) Gaza and the West bank might appear rather puny on the map. But behind Gaza and the West bank are hundreds of millions of Muslims, who outnumber Jewry by more than one hundred to one, and concessions made to Arabs in Gaza and the West bank can soon set off an avalanche of concessions which could slay the Jewish State for the second time in two thousand years.