The Following is excerpted from Foundation for Defense of Democracy newsletter, with a link to a Harvard report by Marvin Kalb.
THE MEDIA AS WEAPON: Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb has authored a new report on coverage of the Israeli-Hizbullah War of 2006. Among other things, Kalb writes that:
- democratic societies living by the ideals of a free and unfettered press will always be at a disadvantage to dictatorships and oppressive ideologies, adept at manipulating the media.
- Hizbullah controlled the journalists covering Lebanon with an iron fist. Media tours of Hizbullah-controlled areas were tightly managed, with foreign reporters sternly warned against wandering off and talking to local residents unsupervised.
- Hizbullah also forbade any photographs of its fighters. Cameramen were warned never to show men with guns or ammunition. The only armed personnel seen during this war were IDF soldiers; Hizbullah remained throughout a phantom army.
- Another scene almost never shown was the hundreds of Hizbullah firing positions and missile launch sites within residential areas and private homes, the cause of many civilian deaths and a violation of international law.
- Footage coming out of Lebanon dealt almost exclusively with the results of the IDF bombing. Few news organizations made an effort to balance these pictures with those of the damage from Hizbullah’s indiscriminate bombing of Israeli civilians.
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