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These days, whenever you check out the news, it seems to be war, war, war -- a focus today for TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson, author of a notable antiwar book, War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built. I mean, I just randomly looked at the Washington Post homepage and the top headline of that second was: "More than 100 killed in Gaza City, officials say; Israel cites stampede at aid drop." However tomorrow's news may explain those grim deaths, before they're swept away by yet more of the same, they only add to the 30,000 or more Palestinians already slaughtered (a figure that itself is undoubtedly a significant underestimate). Similarly, the 700-odd Gazans reportedly wounded in that incident only add to another nightmarish, if largely unknown total. And within just a few days, that death and destruction will undoubtedly have been shoved aside by whatever comes next, instantly becoming yesterday's news about Israel's devastation of Gaza.
Oh, and on that same Post page of headlines, if you skip the ones about the Biden/Trump trips -- oops, "dueling visits"! -- to our increasingly militarized southern border, the next in line might, in a sense, be far more disheartening: "Putin threatens nuclear response to NATO troops if they go to Ukraine." I mean, 78 years after those two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imagine that the possibility of nuclear war has now become an everyday matter for the president of Russia, "threatening retaliatory strikes against the West in the event of attacks on Russian territory" and adding that his country's "strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness."
Ho-hum, what's new? Slaughter, nukes, horrors galore, and it doesn't seem to stop anymore, does it? Ever. And all of this, mind you, is just sweeping into the distant past, the staggering casualties my own country inflicted on this planet in this century with its never-ending "war on terror." And yes, all of it keeps us in a distinctly human version of hell, but as Levinson suggests today, a kind of reportorial heaven. Tom
Is There a Journalism That Doesn't Love a War?
Covering Two Too-Long Wars
By Nan Levinson
War, what is it good for? Well, the media for starters.
Shortly after the Biden administration responded to the killing of three American soldiers in a drone attack on a base in Jordan by bombing 85 Iran-connected targets in Iraq and Syria, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) asked in a headline: "Is the press dragging America to war again?"
Again? I thought. Shouldn't that be "still"?
That headline was on a recent Media Today newsletter by Jon Allsop who regularly covers what could be considered the favorite topic of journalists: themselves. He was mulling over media criticism of how the government had (or hadn't) disclosed information about that just-launched bombing campaign, as well as its goals, while considering the accusation that some news platforms were rooting for a wider regional war. CJR is a fair-minded publication, so Allsop warned against generalizing (as I'm about to do), pointing out that "asking questions about planned strikes isn't the same as advocating them." Yes, I thought, but when you focus your questions on that subject, as so many media reports did after those American deaths and before the Biden administration launched its attacks, not surprisingly it can have that effect.
As the death toll in Gaza passed 30,000, on-the-ground reporting on the increasingly impossible living conditions there was making Israel's belligerence seem ever less defensible. Little wonder coverage in the American media focused ever more on prospects for a cease-fire. And seemingly in tandem with that possibility, coverage of anxiety over the course of the war in Ukraine returned to the digital equivalent of the front page, making me wonder whether the media requires at least one war to cheerlead for or fret about at any given time.
The situations in Ukraine and Gaza are anything but the same militarily, strategically, politically, morally, or journalistically, and there are timely reasons for focusing once again on Ukraine. It was, after all, the second anniversary of Russia's February 24, 2022, invasion. Cue up the requisite assessments of the situation, with predictions about Ukraine's military prospects ranging from grim to dire, and photos showing the hard, inglorious miseries of war. The U.N. verified that at least 10,582 Ukrainian civilians had been killed by late February, while estimates -- assumed to be wild undercounts -- put soldiers' deaths at more than 45,000 for Russia and 31,000 for Ukraine, with tens of thousands more wounded on both sides.
Add to the list of news pegs Donald Trump's extortionate claim that, were he to win the presidency again, he would encourage Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to any NATO country that doesn't ramp up its military funding to his standards; the opportunely revealed threat that Russia might put a nuclear weapon into orbit; and the suspicious death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and you've certainly got the attention of American news consumers. Meanwhile, funding for U.S. military aid to Ukraine has become a political football in Congress, whose dysfunction, while hardly new, was still headline-making.
So, war in Ukraine certainly counted as newsworthy, but beyond that there does seem to be something about war that journalists can't resist and blind spots they can't overcome.
The Wages of Fear
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