Ruby Cayenne

The overarching understanding that was further established by intaking these two pieces of media Control Room and “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” is that this current war between Israel and Palestine is the culmination of many decades, if not centuries, of conflicts around the same topic: ownership and possession of land. While that description may be a gross simplification, it is the fear of displacement, or frustration of current displacement, coupled with the desire of possession that fuels hatred and war in this instance. 

You don’t just have a few problems with a group of people if you are okay with blockading them, as with Gaza, or by initiating a gruesome attack, as with the initial attack from the Hamas. This seems more like an underlying display of hatred on both sides. I am not educated enough on the origins of this feud to speak much further on the reasonings behind the war and unfortunately, I do not have the mental capacity to deep dive into that research right now because of personal reasons. 

Beyond personal reasons, I am intensely overwhelmed by the never-ending cycle of war and the destruction and chaos it brings. In Control Room the narrative that is threaded throughout the entire film is that each side, the USA and Arabs, frequently insist that the media from the other side is propaganda and largely staged. 

“We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again. What they do is when there’s a bomb that goes down they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children and it seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the truth to say what we know to say what we don’t know and recognize that were dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case…” Donald Rumsfeld said. This is a perfect example of a US representative slandering an entire news organization just to make the USA look like the good guys, or maybe he truly believes that which is just as unsettling. 

Media Analyst Abdallah Schleifer tried insisting to Eid Al-Shammre, coorespondant of Abu Dhabi Television, that it was his job to put all personal feelings aside and report on the war with a smile on his face. Al-Shammre became frustrated saying “how could I smile when my people are being killed.” 

I believe that in situations like war, the ability to be completely objective becomes impossible, no matter what anyone says.  Joanne Tucker, manager of Al Jazeera.net said in an interview that having objectivity in an event like this is a mirage, when talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For example, Lt. Josh Rushing, Press Officer, Central Command, said when they saw images of dead us soldiers it affected them a lot more than when they saw images of dead Arabs. This speaks to that unintentional lack of objectivity. 

Rushing also said, “when I watch al Jazeera and I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing by choice, same thing when I watch fox on the other end of the spectrum.” You see this happening now with the Israel Palestine war. Different news outlets are reporting on different pieces of the whole image based on the target audience and values of the news outlet, rather than steering away from sensationalism and reporting all sides and only reporting facts. 

“History tells us that human beings have short memories. Who thinks now in the United States about what happened in Somalia in 1993, nobody. Who thinks about what happened in Bosnia, nobody thinks about that. History is written by the victors. All what will be left from this war are just scrips and some history books and that’s it,” Samir Khader, senior producer Al Jazeera said. “We wanted to show that any war has a human cost, okay, we focused on that there is a human cost because we care for Iraqi people, we are not like Rumsfeld who says we care for the Iraqi people. He doesn’t care at all okay, we care for them, we are Arabs like them, we are Muslims like them.”

In “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” Brooke Gladstone says that “there’s a sense that the world is unraveling,” when speaking about the current Israel-Palestine war and other conflicts. I feel that the disparities between reports on the story regarding decapitated babies and the hospital bombing, for example, are so immense and no one has answers. “All sides have lied before,” said Gladstone. Journalists seem to be quickly eating up information released without fact checking or even having a way to fact check. So many reporters/journalists are sensationalizing news surrounding this war.

“There hasn’t been a lot of international journalists inside Gaza for a while. There is a dwindling number because of the high risk and the calculation made covering that conflict over the years,” Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. At the end of the day, it is up to each journalist to decide how much they will risk telling a story. In the case of any war, without people on the ground reporting, it is challenging to get the facts, so the people who do put themselves in harm’s way to report the truth the best they can have all of my respect. 

Situations like this make the grey area of ethics become even more muddled. Arguably, the only way to ethically consume media in cases like this is to take the immense amount of time to vet out sensationalized news and do a large amount of independent research to discern what the truth even is. This is a wildly taxing task, both mentally and emotionally. It is supposed to be the journalists job to provide this information, to do that research for the average person, but when journalists succumb to sensationalism, informational disaster ensues. 

Tareq Bacori talked about how this war could have a domino effect around the region as Palestine becomes a vehicle for “people in the region to begin to express their anger and dismay at regimes who are aligning themselves in ways that are ideologically opposed to their own people.” Places such as Jordan and Egypt have a “cold peace” with Israel. Lebanon is still formally at war with Israel and has aligned itself with the Hamas. 

Bacori said it was a huge miscalculation on the part of the Israeli government to assume that the blockading of over two million people in Gaza was sustainable, also underestimating the anger and passion with regard to the plight of Palestinian people throughout the region. “To think that this is something that is limited to Palestine is to miss the possibility that Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran could very quickly be embroiled in this just because of the politics around Israel-Palestine. In a global reality where we also have a European war, and we also have major geopolitical realignments happening, this is more explosive than it’s ever been in my lifetime, at least.”

https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/680

https://www.betterhelp.com

https://www.spj.org/ethicswartime.asp#:~:text=The%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20of,”%20and%20“Be%20Accountable.”