I recently read this article by Anshel Pfeffer over at the Jerusalem Post. Anshel compares and contrasts Israel’s approach the media with Hizbullah’s.
Israel’s campaign was remarkably transparent: Journalists achieved unprecedented levels of access to its forces. As a result, every failure and mishap on the battlefield – and relative chaos on the home front – was highlighted. On this point I have only a minor factual argument with Kalb, who writes that Israeli “officials made a clumsy effort to control and contain the coverage, but essentially failed.”
ON THE other side, Hizbullah controlled the journalists covering the situation in Lebanon with an iron fist. Media tours of Hizbullah-controlled areas, where the IDF’s bombing was mainly concentrated, were tightly managed, with foreign reporters being sternly warned against wandering off and talking to local residents unsupervised. Infringement of these rules would be punished by the confiscation of cameras and disbarment from any further visits or access to Hizbullah members.
Then after the usual paranoid delusional ramblings about Israel facing an existential threat yadda yadda yadda, Anshel comes to the following conclusion:
The unavoidable conclusion … is that “in strictly military terms, Israel did not lose to Hizbullah in this war, but it clearly did not win. In the war of information, news and propaganda, the battlefield central to Hizbullah’s strategy, Israel lost this war.”
So apparently, it was all a secret conspiracy by Hizbullah and a gullible media to make Israel look bad. So that’s alright then!
Technorati Tags: Middle East, Israel, the Israeli Response, Lebanon, Hizbullah
Spoiled brats!