Are you quite sure that Erlanger is of German descent and not Jewish? I don’t have kin named Erlanger, but I do have some named “Langer”.

Ironically, it seems it has been the German press that started the questioning of reporting out of the PA and Lebanon when one of their larger newspapers took a second look at the now forgotten Gaza beach bomb party of earlier this summer.

Maybe the IDF should just randomly launch rockets into his neighborhood and call it even. That should satisfy his need for “proportionality”.

PS ny times could hire Florence Henderson to sing a cute jingle about the need for “it”.

From ynetnews
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3297119,00.html

“Erlanger told the panel he turned down an offer by the IDF Spokesperson Unit to gain access to IDF efforts aimed at enabling humanitarian aid to reach Lebanon, saying he was not interested in the story.”

“The New York Times and the Jews”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4994

and part two:

“The New York Times and the Jews (2)”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5682

It is a puzzlement. The only time I can see a hint of how an alternative may have developed is in an old 1962 Cassell’s just pulled from the shelf. I always mess up accent marks in HTML, so here goes, without them. For the English jejune:

Vide, a jeun, maigre; sec, aride, sterilite.

it looks right to me too, Skook. But find it in a dictionary.

That’s why I’m puzzled: a tiny typo wouldn’t bother (even with my incipient OCD) me. But where did the extra ‘e’ go in all the dictionaries I can easily access?

i had they very same thought this evening,Roger:
how stunning that we would take the one-to-many
broadcast version of events for Reality.

yesterday,on NPR, i was half listening to a reporter from the radio network giving his
news from Baghdad…pretty sure it was Corey Flintoff(sp,one of the NPR regulars,in other words)…

i was listening with my usual skepticism and NPR-filter.
Flintoff,in response to some leading questions from the NPR interviewer “back home,embedded in the studio”, related the views of a Coalition/US General in Baghdad that the recent violence in Baghdad “is being engineered for media impact”.

i was stunned to not only hear
Flintoff report the general’s views on this “insurgent strategy”,but to
hear Flintoff speak as though the general was credible and his views were accurate.

the interviewer “back home” tried cynically, and several times,to move Flintoff off the central point the general had made: attacks are being coordinated and staged to get media air-play,but the actual level of casualties,while an ongoing tragedy, is not overly worrisome.

the point i was stunned by
was the open,if one sided discussion,
that the terror events are AIMED
at the media in the form of a campaign.
(and the 2006 mid-term US elections
would,of course, be the target of such a campaign).
and Flintoff got it.
and he said so.
and then he stuck to his view when challenged.

by contrast,Martha Radditz was doing
talking-head-duty on ABC news tonight,
and the evening ABC “PRESERVING NARRATIVE” SHOW(thks J.Cohen)was in full force: anchor Charles Gibson asking for Iraq updates in mawkish tones,
and Martha obligingly answering in her terribly “concerned” tones with her patented pained expression(and i’m sure she’s seen some real horrors)…but she and Gibson were and are the walking-talking-crawls-on-its-belly-like-a-reptile PRODUCT of the street murderers in Baghdad.

that the media STILL at this late date
doesn’t get how it has been played
OVER AND OVER is mind boggling.

nor do they seem to get how their “sympathy”
increases and prolongs the murderous behaviors.

as Daniel Pipes once said:

“education by murder” seems the only way
many will give up their denial.

but for many in the media,
the conversion rate seems awfully slow.

What has become an unfortunate aspect of the MSM and in particular the New York Times is that the mission of PRESERVING NARRATIVE has taken precedent over reporting the news.

Once the narrative became Lebanese suffering, the issues were selection and captioning of photographs, choice of headlines, placement of articles and assignment of reporters. And what is perhaps the more important aspect of editorial decision making is what gets left out.

It is clear that Israel was targeting military targets: rocketlaunch sites, roads, command and communication centers and concentrations of highly trained, non-uniformed Hezbollah soldiers, interspersed among the civilian population. It was equally clear that Hezbollah was firing missiles containing cluster bombs and aimed randomly at civilian areas with the hope of causing a maximum number of civilian casualties. This is the narrative that comes closest to describing the actual situation of combat.

For some reason, the major networks and papers like the New York Times portrayed the Lebanese as being the target of deliberate attacks on civilians. They also allowed themselves to be used for staged displays of anger and grief which was played in the US, Europe and the Arab world that could only provoke anger and hatred towards Israel from those who were watching.

What they didn’t show was how little of Lebanon was actually targeted. Most of Beirut carried on with life as usual while the upper third of Israel was confined to fallout shelters. The casualty figures listed for Lebanese made no attempt to distinguish between soldiers and civilian deaths, listing all deaths as civilians. The pictures of devestation in towns in South Lebanon that were the centers of fighting got lumped in with all other damage with the implication that it was all caused by Israeli attacks on civilians.

A typical nightly news had from the Lebanon side pictures of hospital patients, distressed relatives and angry Lebanese saying there were no military targets in the vicinity. From the Israeli side there would be pictures that included tanks firing off into Lebanon. Pictures of people in shelters stressed normalcy rather than tragedy and distress.

The clear message of this was Arab victimization at the hands of callous Israelis.

The question is not so much what was the nightly narrative of the war but why the media chose to promote it. I don’t think that you can pass this off on the individual photographers or reporters. The choices made at the editorial level, which stories to run, which pictures to show, what video to air on TV, those decisions are made by editors and while influenced by the reporters on the ground, they reflect the biases of the producers of the news.

So one is left asking what are the biases of the MSM and why?

The narrative of Arab victimization and Israeli oppression fits into the world view of the academic left whose binary view of race, gender and class separates the world into good guys and bad guys according to these categories.

The realpolitic school of foreign affairs wants to abandon Israel for reasons of demographics, oil and avoidance of terrorism and the Arab victimization narrative eases the conscience of many who are still aware of the history of Jewish persecution.

Finally, there are Jews who fear that as Israel becomes the focal point of third world resentments against the west, Jews around the world will become targeted for their support for Israel.

For those of us who remember the desparate situations that led to the creation of the Jewish state and continue to empathize with their plight, the current situation is very troubling. The dishonest filtering of recent events in Lebanon through an anti-Israel narrative does not bode well for the survival of the Jewish state and the plight of Jews around the world.