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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 13, 1982
PAGE 5
affected by the continuing bloodshed in Lebanon.
"I lost
patience a long time ago," the President noted sharply to report
ers on returning from Camp David the weekend before Israel's
latest assault. � than anything �, the vivid television
coverage of Israel's relentless pummeling of civilian areas has
altered the President's thinkin<J.
Referring 'to one powerfliI
image broadcast a week ago, an aide says: "That picture of the
baby with arms burnt had more impact on him than 50 position
papers." An Administration aide attaches even more importance to
the President's gut-level reactions. "Reagan," he says, "gets
50% of his foreign policy from Dan Rather" [ the CBS news anchor
man].
That's a bit of an overstatement, considering that Messrs. Reagan and
Rather are poles apart ideologically.
Nevertheless the now "underdog"
P.L.O. tends to come off better on "the tube" (the telly). Joseph Kraft
analyzes why in the August 9, 1982 LOS ANGELES TIMES:
The violence of Israel's enemy, the Palestine Liberation Organi
zation, appears from time to time. But much less dramatically
••••most of the current operations [ of the P.L.O.] involve guer
rilla infiltrations and terrorist attacks, difficult to identify
in the general mayhem. They�, .!2 to speak, below the range of
the camera.
The Israeli army is a modern force equipped with the most ad
vanced weapons of destruction, and led by officers capable of
making bold strikes. The level of these operations serves as a
kind of magnet for television. ""¥he P.L.O. military operatTons
are designed to make the most of that sensitivity. They rely�
acts of terror that fall below the level of sustained interest
_ey
television. The casualties that they inflict are designed to in
duce retaliation of a kind that gets played back to Israel or Am
erica with devastating results.
Worse yet, nightly television news is concerned only with the�-
It de
taches news from history. The news accounts of Lebanon, said one expert,
"beg, unrequited, for explanation." Television reports and cameramen have
no time, in their haste to meet morning news, 7 o'clock news, 11 o'clock
news deadlines, to delve into even the recent past. There is little to no
explanation as to how the P.L.O. brutalized Lebanon for years, especially
in the south and how Lebanon had been, for all practical purposes, a con
quered country under the heels of the P.L.O. and other leftist forces plus
those of Syria since 1975. There are too few reports on television, for
example, of thousands of Lebanese streaming back into southern Lebanon to
recover their homes from which P.L.O. gunmen evicted them years ago, or of
convoys of Israeli trucks carrying supplies north into Lebanon to relieve
civilian suffering. Some of this background information has appeared in
articles in major newspapers--but newspapers now £.!!y second fiddle to
television in the dissemination of news.
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Facts, But Little Understanding
Israel, says a leading Israeli journalist, is paying a heavy price for the
way American television journalism is providing "facts without concepts."
JERUSALEM POST editor Erwin Frenkel was in the U.S. when the war started and