In the coverage of Israel’s military action in Gaza, I noticed an undercurrent that was consistently mentioned. To paraphrase, “The only good news is Israel’s timing to do this before Obama takes office.” Writers and reporters would then go on to mention that the decision was probably made due to uncertainty about the president-elect’s position and support of Israel, but the statement was also made with a nod toward how this benefited Obama in that the conflict might be resolved by the time he takes office, a fairly naive view of how foreign policy works.
That timing didn’t really pan out anyway, and the situation’s going to be here for a while (as if it really ever went away).
It occurred to me that framing the events in Gaza as benefiting the president-to-be was incredibly callous and self-centered. It might be the case, but shouldn’t it be more important to cover the events there and what they mean in greater terms? I understand the rock star quality Obama has, but to look at every event through those glasses is absurd. When the president-elect ate at Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D.C. landmark, in the past few days, someone asked him about the significance of eating there. He responded, “It means I’m going to get a hot dog.” To skew world events to how they might impact the president-to-be is to frame everything in terms of its Obama-significance, and I can’t stomach four years of that. (How long will the honeymoon last? Until he does something moderately unpopular with someone, which should easily be within the first hundred days.)
Obama-centric or America-centric, the U.S. coverage of what’s been happening in Gaza hasn’t been particularly great. It takes reading analysis to gather an understanding of what Israel’s trying to do (surgically remove Hamas as a viable force in the region and turn public opinion in the Arab world firmly against the group, isolating Iran’s influence from the greater Middle East) and how it’s turned out (badly–it’s near impossible to eliminate a group like Hamas without harming civilians, and civilian casualties make Israel look like the bag guy). I didn’t benefit from hearing about how the actions in Gaza affect the future president. If mainstream news outlets are going to cover irrelevant dimensions to a story, the least they could do is offer better coverage of the story itself and what it means. «»
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