To the Editor:

David Bar-Illan’s article, “Israel, the Hostages, and the Networks” [September 1985] documents yet another case of a baffling and most destructive fever—the extraordinary addiction of Western cultures to self-reproach, self-hatred, and ultimately self-destruction. Under the pressure of the times, the disease threatens to become epidemic.

Useful as Mr. Bar-Illan’s article is, it contains a significant and popular error on a collateral point. Commenting on the assertion that Israel’s removal of Arab prisoners from Lebanon to Israel for obvious security reasons violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, he remarks:

To compare this kind of infraction (if such it was) to the TWA hijacking was like comparing a traffic violation to murder. . . . Nor did anyone seem to note that the Israeli rescue of hostages at Entebbe, the international pursuit of Mengele, and virtually all the proposed retaliatory measures against the hijackers . . . were, and are, strictly speaking, violations of international law.

Mr. Bar-Illan’s second sentence is mistaken. In all the episodes he mentions, the conduct at issue was entirely permissible under international law. International law has always recognized the right of a state in time of peace to use whatever force is reasonably necessary to cure another state’s violent breach of international law which damages or threatens its interests, when peaceful remedies for the breach are unavailable. A classic example of such legal uses of force is the protection of citizens abroad exposed to dangers through the acts or negligence of another state, the situation both in Entebbe in 1976 and in Beirut more recently.

Eugene V. Rostow
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

I was in the audience at Yeshiva University some years ago when the Israeli pianist David Bar-Illan gave a brilliant classical concert. . . . Equally impressive is the writer David Bar-Illan. . . . The thesis of his article is evidently that because of the numerous atrocities committed especially against American citizens and property in Lebanon, a conveniently located scapegoat had to be selected for news consumption. And this scapegoat had to be Israel, which held and was prepared to release all its Shiite captives anyway. Mr. Bar-Illan makes his point effectively, short of saying that the anti-Israel campaign also had overtones of anti-Semitism.

Henry Regensteiner
New York City

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To the Editor:

Very clearly and cogently, David Bar-Illan points out the ways in which the American television networks distorted various aspects of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the subsequent terrorist theater which followed, in large part through media assistance, cooperation, and ignorance. He cites examples which demonstrate the clear prejudice against Israel, and, as well, the anti-American tilt of the media, especially the television networks. Certainly, there can be no doubt of television bias or the network efforts to blame Israel for the affair, and of course to insist that Israel, by holding some seven hundred-odd Shiites, was the key to the entire “problem.”. . .

The networks are parts of large corporations designed to make money by purveying entertainment to the public which is paid for by companies with products and services they wish to sell. . . . A sub-section of the business is devoted to gathering and presenting the news which must, like all other television activities, pay its way . . . The “news” is a commodity of sorts which has to fill a certain time slot, regardless of the importance of what is being shown. . . .

The people who select, edit, and present the news have great public influence. . . . They pass judgment on convoluted political questions, on problems of ethics, taste, morality, and on legal matters without any of the qualifications which we would expect of people hired to teach such subjects in any institution of learning.

For some time, most journalists and their counterparts in radio and on television have been of the left-liberal persuasion in the political and social sense, and their reporting has been tinged perceptibly by this orientation, though this is not to suggest a conspiracy or plot to control our media. A few may be vicious at times, but generally speaking their views are simply the standard left-liberal position formed in their college years and unquestioned and unexamined since.

When such people contradict or assail the policies and views of those in government, this reflects, more than anything else, their lack of understanding of the problems as well as the fact that they bear no responsibility for their views and the consequences that flow from them.

We might try to educate them, but there is no certainty that this process would be successful in the money- and publicity-oriented world of television entertainment.

John E. Slaughter
Gainesville, Florida

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To the Editor:

David Bar-Illan’s article on the conduct of the networks during the TWA hostage crisis underscores the sad reality that network executives and news producers subordinate factual accuracy and fairness to the sensationalism deemed necessary for good “showbiz.” In giving primacy to putting on a good show for American living-room audiences, as demonstrated in the so-called reporting from the streets of Beirut, truth takes a back seat to fabrication and media-induced happenings. Thus, the viewer is treated to what passes on the networks as news but which is in fact no more than distorted or contrived film footage coupled with equally inaccurate “commentary”—e.g., ten-year-old ruins represented as current devastation . . . ; demonstrators who have been previously coached to wax hysterical for the camera; and planes, crowds, and corpses photographed repeatedly from different angles to give an inflated impression of their numbers. . . .

Television reporters and commentators seem intent on glorifying terrorists and police-state bullies as the architects of some brave new world. The plain fact is that, their bias aside, playing ball with the terrorists and other bullies is a necessary predicate to staging the show that passes as news.

While Mr. Bar-Illan’s analysis of the illness is correct, he fails to provide a suitable remedy. At a bare minimum, I propose that each network be required, in prime time, to provide weekly at least one hour to review its reporting of that week’s news by a panel of media critics. I dismiss as inconsequential midnight exchanges every several months with an assembled audience moderated by Ted Koppel; perfunctory thirty-second readings of abridged pro and con letters on 60 Minutes; and “in-house” network review boards. I propose critiques by outsiders knowledgeable about and representing varied views concerning the week’s events. Such a panel . . . would be a step toward redressing complaints about inaccuracies and distortions. At least it would put so-called “television journalists” on notice that reckless, irresponsible, intentionally distorted and prejudiced reporting will be exposed not only in rare newspaper columns but before their own prime-time viewers.

Alan L. Doochin
Larchmont, New York

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David Bar-Illan writes:

I am grateful to Eugene V. Rostow for setting the record straight and disabusing me and, I am sure, many others of the notion that the Entebbe rescue mission and similar actions were in violation of international law. His remarks are especially welcome at this time, since there are many who still insist that the Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis and the interception of the Egyptian airliner carrying the Achille Lauro terrorists were also such violations.

I hope my mistake serves to underline the danger of media distortions. Unfortunately, these media-enhanced errors are not inconsequential. For a whole decade we were bombarded with assertions, presented and accepted as indisputable, that the “root cause” of OPEC policies and the resultant energy crisis was the Arab-Israeli conflict and the “Palestinian problem,” and that oil shortages and high prices would become disastrous unless the U.S. pressured Israel to make “meaningful concessions.” This became the political catechism of four administrations, conducing to, among other things, a lopsided Camp David accord and the sale of AWACS and other sophisticated American weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. Only the coincidence of the Lebanon war and the oil glut exposed the absurdity of this shibboleth and put it to rest, at least temporarily.

With similar illogic, and notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of terrorist acts in the world are unrelated to Israel and that most victims of terrorism in the Middle East are Arabs killed by-Arabs, we are incessantly told that the “root cause” of terrorism is—what else?—the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem. This too has become political gospel, according to which combating terrorism is futile, since only settling the Palestinian problem—on Arab terms, of course—will bring an end to it.

In assessing the motives for these media attitudes, I tried to steer clear of facile allusions to “overtones of anti-Semitism” mentioned by Henry Regensteiner. But certain semantic habits have become so ingrained in media parlance that the temptation to discern more than just political hostility is understandable. During the Achille Lauro incident, for example, the anchormen on CNN kept referring to the hijackers as “commandos,” and to the prisoners whose release they demanded—headed by a PLO gunman sentenced to prison in a democratic court of law for bashing the head of an infant in front of its father and then killing the father—as “Arab hostages held by Israel.”

All of which makes Alan L. Doochin’s suggestion particularly cogent, albeit more wishful than realistic. That the media have become as powerful and influential in determining the course of our lives as any branch of the government is a given, if for no other reason than that, as John E. Slaughter points out, “the people who select, edit, and present the news have great public influence.” But unlike the institutions of government, they are subject to virtually no checks and balances. A panel of critics subjecting the networks to scrutiny on prime time would not only help combat ignorance and irresponsibility; it should become a popular show by giving the public an opportunity to vent its frustration and anger vicariously at the media’s arrogance.

But to expect the networks to overcome their arrogance long enough to contemplate such a show is, I fear, an impossible dream.