Colonization in print: How Western Liberal journalists distort Lebanon and Palestine

Western liberal journalism often disguises colonial assumptions as “objectivity,” reducing Lebanese and Palestinians to victims, extremists, or background figures. He traces this distortion through elite media networks, Zionist influence, and decades of reporting that obscures cause, context, and resistance.

On Wednesday, April 15, as the Israeli incursion in Lebanon that started in March and killed over 2,000 people and displaced over 1 million began to “wind down,” Charles Glass, a well-regarded British-American war correspondent who teaches at the American University of Beirut and has reported on the city off-and-on for 50 years, appeared online with a 3,500 word piece titled “Beirut, Now and Then” for The London Review of Books (LRB).

The LRB is the most Left-wing of Britain’s mainstream journalistic intellectual publications, with an audience of 74,000 paid print subscribers. It is arguably the most successful intellectual magazine in Europe and for some readers, including myself, it is the West’s most consistently reliable mainstream print magazine. Yet the defining feature of Glass’s summation for the LRB of reporting in one of the world’s most important cities was its complete and seemingly almost self-parodic lack of anthropology. Judging by Glass’s account, the protagonists of Beirut are not the Lebanese. They do not rate names. Glass’s protagonists, all named, are the barman of the Hotel Saint Georges who made “martinis and other concoctions”; the Swiss agent of the Red Cross who “negotiated…for the lives of…Palestinian[s] along with some poor Lebanese and Syrians”; and veteran or rising correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Associated Press, The BBC, and Reuters.

These Westerners, particularly the older ones, are “courtly” and “gracious.” They “supply one another with copious quantities of alcohol…in preparation for [reporting on] the [next] morning’s savagery.” They exemplify “the era of the journalistic raconteur, satirized by Evelyn Waugh…whose favored [pastimes] involved the finagling of expenses.” They believe that “the only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” They are bonded by “curiosity, competition and a lust to tell stories, but…also companionship.” By contrast, in Glass’s account, the Lebanese are “aspiring martyrs” or “Christian fanatics” who are “often drugged” and “shooting and shelling one another.”. Addicted to “gutting, looting and burning” they “besieged and massacred one another’s populations”, creating “a maelstrom that lacked sense as much as purpose”. Or else, in Glass’s equally broad-brush humanitarian inversion, they are not villains but victims “dying of thirst, hunger and lack of medicines”. Though Glass may have learned in Beirut “how to cultivate sources among the fighting factions” and “get to hospitals to interview survivors,” not one of these peoples’ testimonies appear in his article.

Of course, the absences in Glass’s account may seem not to matter, since he is, by his own acknowledgment, summing up his reportorial career rather than actually “covering” the current war. And yet Glass’s “off-duty” perspective is precisely what makes the piece so instructive. When Glass lets down his hair and speaks freely, the perspective he lets his readers into resembles, in more forthright terms, the quieter approach of many of the Western journalists actually covering this war. Namely: an approach which either fails to grapple with certain perspectives (most notably those of the “martyrs” and “fanatics”); or which reduces those perspectives to a factual and ethical muddle in which an overall story of cause and effect, and of the moral onuses at play, remains impossible to fathom.

The absences and unfathomability of this journalistic approach are often justified on the part of its practitioners by rejecting what in Western media is pejoratively called “positionality” in favor of “objectivity”: a “just the facts” approach that doesn’t “take sides.” But the flaws of this kind of “objective” approach have been recognized by creative nonfiction writers, practitioners of what is known as “New Journalism,” for many years: namely, that a writer can think himself “objective,” in an unexamined way, while being quietly affected by an ideology. And in fact, there is an underlying ideology many “objective” journalists are to greater or lesser degrees affiliated with that shapes their reportage, one that comes through persistently in Glass’s unfiltered summation of his years in Beirut. This ideology is the ideology of colonialism, sustained by a dominant liberal media culture connected to intelligence and financial networks: a culture which enjoys many of these networks’ privileges and which adopts these networks’ priorities as its own. These priorities are very clear-cut and almost always unacknowledged. “Order” is upheld in the name of “balance” and “fair-mindedness” against “chaos” and “extremism”: the “maelstrom” and “fanaticism” from which Glass sought refuge with his “courtly” and “gracious” band of reporters.

These priorities can also make for extremely limited copy, since reporters who take them seriously fail to fully question labels like “order,” “balance” and who really represents them. Indeed, Western reporters’ focus on what they see as order and balance and their aversion to what they see as disorder and extremism has led them, in the last half-century, to fail to fully examine an extremist fanaticist project which creates disorder, Zionism, to the detriment of logical contextual reporting on causes and effects. In my last report for Al Mayadeen English, I reported on the Zionist technologist billionaire Larry Ellison and his efforts to direct American media in a pro-Zionist direction. But Ellison is a late player in a wider—and a longer—game. Looking at the recent history of Western liberal reportage, the editors and owners who shape it, and the way Zionism has profited from it, helps elucidate how the insidious process of distortion works, and how it de facto disowns people outside of the West, particularly in Palestine and in Lebanon.  

The roots of this point of view reach back to the end of the Second World War and the rise of the “second” Anglo-American Empire, as America succeeded Britain in setting the terms for much of the world. Journalism, though it was not acknowledged this way, was a de facto extension of that endeavor. Indeed, Glass may have learned his craft in Beirut in the 1970s from “legendary correspondents” of newspapers like The Sunday Times, but these correspondents learned from other people in Britain’s and America’s imperial cores with agendas of their own.

One of these teachers was Evelyn Waugh’s friend Ian Fleming: famously the hard-drinking author of the James Bond novels and less famously an ex-intelligence officer and the foreign editor of The Sunday Times who seems to have recruited his reporters largely from British intelligence. Fleming, significantly, was politically connected as well. In 1956, Fleming hosted Prime Minister Anthony Eden for two weeks in Jamaica when Eden had a nervous breakdown after the failed Suez Canal “capture” with France and "Israel". In 1960, Fleming spent an evening at a house in Georgetown advising presidential contender (and Bond aficionado) John F. Kennedy how to “take out” Fidel Castro in Cuba; and Kennedy’s CIA later developed anti-Castro plans suspiciously similar to Fleming’s.

This mixing of journalism with intelligence and imperial politics was typical, and so were the opinions that flowed from it: ones supporting empire in the name of balance and “civilization” and order. Fleming’s co-attendee at the 1960 dinner, Joseph Alsop, a prominent Washington Post columnist, was a regular attendee of gatherings in McLean, Virginia, with CIA chief Allen Dulles, whose biographer credited Fleming with introducing Dulles to espionage two decades earlier, and his deputies James Jesus Angleton and Desmond FitzGerald. These were hard-drinking WASPs who engineered America’s entanglements in Vietnam; the latter of whom died a few years before his daughter, Frances, won a Pulitzer Prize for Vietnam reportage. The New York Times’s executive editor omitted key details from stories, for example, reports on the upcoming invasion of Cuba, which became the Bay of Pigs, out of deference to Allen Dulles. Kennedy’s confidante, Clare Boothe Luce’s husband, Henry Luce, actively supported the Dulles Brothers’ endeavors via his ownership of Time Magazine. Time’s ethos, infused with “prodigious quantities” of wine, “French and domestic,” was described by ex-Time journalist John Gregory Dunne as “pervaded by…Protestant entitlement and arrogance…often spectacularly unearned…or earned largely in the city rooms of the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News or the Daily Princetonian” and run through Luce’s Presbyterian belief that Anglo-American Empire and civilization were one and the same.

Fleming’s character Bond aggressively models this worldview: an upper-caste consumer of the finer things (martinis “shaken not stirred”) who doubles as maintainer of civilization against the “primevally” egoistic machinations of the “underworld.” Fleming’s and Waugh’s friend the journalist Graham Greene handled this view more subtly but equally definitively in his novella and movie The Third Man: a send-up of American “swagger” in which a popular writer of Westerns arrives in postwar Berlin to be “educated” in the “complexity” of the ravaged city, in Greene’s telling a “maelstrom” of savage avarice held together by British civil servants who are the true heroes of the piece. A family friend of Fleming’s, Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Zionist Oxford intellectual and an ex-spy who became a mentor to the editors of America’s main intellectual-journalist magazines after 1980, expressed this view philosophically when he portrayed Anglo-American Empire’s “liberal” guarantee of “negative liberty” as the only safeguard against totalitarian fanaticisms. Even Frances FitzGerald, who critiqued the War in Vietnam as an essentially colonial endeavor, fell into what one perceptive reviewer described as a liberal trap:

a problem facing all writers with radical views [like FitzGerald] who want to convey the situation in Vietnam to liberal readers. Anyone brought up in the liberal tradition absorbs a profound sense of symmetry which includes the belief that “there are two sides to every question”…In order to be plausible to liberals [FitzGerald] appears to feel obliged to put any moral scraps she can on the American side of the scales…[and] has accepted the official American view too uncritically.

In the extended aftermath of Vietnam, these liberal imperial straitjackets on reporting did not loosen in the face of hard reality. They tightened instead. Some of this tightening had to do with changes in the way politicians and military-intelligence operators treated the press. After Vietnam, military restrictions on the press increased, transforming independent journalists commiserating with each other at night into a herd operating together by day. By January of 1990, The Los Angeles Times was reporting regarding the coverage of the War in Panama that “nearly a hundred and twenty-five journalists, after spending less than twelve hours in Panama without leaving Howard Air Base, where they were informed that there was shooting in the streets of Panama City…accepted the Southern Command’s offer of a charter flight back to Miami.” In 1991, during the First Gulf War, the American Press corps accepted an agreement with the military that “only a pool of journalists would be permitted to cover the war directly...That pool went wherever the American military press officer chose to take it….When other reporters, [tried] to get independent information…members of the pool actually berated them.”

But the other reason for the tightening was that, as the Cold War neared its end and American attention turned to the Middle East’s newly-available natural resources, American media networks were sold by WASPs to adherents of a religious supremacist ideology, Zionism, which depends on America’s support of "Israel".

To finish this report, go to Al Mayadeen English.

Photo credit: Batoul Chamas at Al Mayadeen English.