This week’s Econtalk podcast featured the Israeli journalist Matti Friedman who I featured a few weeks ago. He was the one who wrote about his experience when he worked with the Associated Press covering the Israeli-Hamas conflict back in around 2008. Here, he talks to Roberts about the same issue: how it is that modern western journalism obsessively wrings its hands over Israel to the exclusion of nearly everything else in the world. I thought the interview was particularly interesting for the discussion questioning the motivations that justify this intentional slant and bias.
The shortest tl;dr version of the discussion is that journalists view the conflict through the oppressor-oppressed narrative template. According to the narrative, Israel is the industrially rich and militarily powerful colonial oppressor, and therefore journalists have to spend all their efforts explaining how awful everything is that Israel does. It is their duty as journalists to fight evil, after all, and there’s no greater evil for those members in good standing of the journalists’ tribe than colonial oppressors. The Palestinians in this narrative have no role other than to be the passive victims. They aren’t actual people with agency. They only matter as corpses whose pictures can be broadcasted—or at least invoked as mental imagery. If real living Palestinians experience hate and commit violence themselves, it’s only because the Israelis make them do so. And so on.
WSJ just reported Chris Christie has left the Republican nomination race.
Sometimes waiting until the last minute pays off! 🙄
I finished writing about 3:30 yesterday, and uploaded the paper into the submission center. It crashed. I worked on a workshop proposal, submitted it about 4:50 (9 extra minutes to spare). It too crashed. But, the system said since I had tried to submit it before the deadline it was considered submitted on time. As long as it went through by midnight tonight they'd still accept it😊. I kept trying to re-submit, the system kept crashing. So I went to walk awhile, came back and began editing the paper. I normally like to write, set it aside a month, then edit it. It was a rough draft. But just having a few hours, I edited, trimming about 1,400 words from it (9,300 to <7,900). I narrowed the focus, I cut meandering passages ("murdering my little darlings"), even adding some contributions and future research to it. it now reads much better. About 12:45am I submitted it, took 45 seconds, and it's in! workshop proposal took less time.
So by waiting to submit I got an extra 7 hours to edit and refine my submission! 😊 I shared that with Katie, and 𝑻𝑯𝑾𝑶𝑪𝑲! 🙄 That crashing sound I heard was a tree branch coming down in the wind storm. But it was a small branch.