Two July podcasts hosted by progressive media stars and featuring leading Democratic legislators revealed the deep disconnect between the way establishment politicians and media operate and speak about the Middle East and the region’s realities.
Mehdi Hasan hosted Senator Mark Warner, ranking Democratic member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on his podcast Mehdi Unfiltered, while Congressman Adam Smith, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, joined Krystal Ball on her programme Breaking Points. The conversations were respectful, but neither legislator was prepared for the grilling they received from their respective hosts.
Both programmes demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from the conventional wisdom about Israel/Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass.
In Washington, most politicians (liberal Democrats and centrist Republicans alike) and the mainstream media figures who report on them work and live in the same neighbourhoods, send their children to the same schools, attend the same houses of worship, and socialise. There’s also a ‘revolving door’ factor, as some former government officials leave their posts to become highly paid TV hosts or commentators, and some journalists leave their positions to accept government appointments.
This fraternisation causes a tempering of media coverage. If a journalist aggressively crosses the wrong officials or breaks from conventional wisdom on a controversial issue, they risk losing access to officials – or even their position.
This problem is most pronounced in media coverage of the Middle East. While public opinion regarding Israel/Palestine has undoubtedly changed, but this isn’t the case for media and political elites.
When senior political figures from either party appear on major network TV shows to discuss the Middle East, the conversations are usually constrained by the uninformed conventional wisdom of both politicians and their interviewers. Almost no major network media figures know the history, culture or politics of the Middle East. For most reporters, that region’s history began the day they got the assignment. And the stable of experts the networks regularly invite as commentators are largely former government officials who’ve failed in the past and learned no lessons from their mistakes.
Legislators’ approach to the Middle East is similar. They’re either ignorant about the region or its history or ‘wilfully ignorant’ – not wanting to know because the clichés of conventional wisdom have served them well. ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’, or a variation on ‘Israel wants peace, but the Arabs only want to destroy Israel’.
Regardless of what Middle East-related issues elected officials are discussing, these clichés form the backdrop to their thinking. So, when Rep Smith and Sen Warner sat down with interviews with Ball and Hasan, they were clearly unprepared to be grilled on: how the US can continue to provide advanced military support to Israel when it uses this aid in violation of international law; whether millions of dollars from pro-Israel super-PACs are negatively impacting our elections; or whether Palestinians should be guaranteed equal rights in Israel/Palestine.
For example, when Ball pressed Rep Smith on why he’d support a provision providing for Israel to co-produce weapons with the US military, he immediately pulled out the tired cliché that since 1948 Arabs have been trying to destroy Israel. She reminded him of the expulsion of Palestinians, asked if he believed in equal rights and whether that applied to Palestinians’ right to return.
He felt compelled to answer negatively, arguing that if Palestinians had equal rights, then Arabs might become the majority, and Israel would no longer be an ethno-national state.
Smith might have gotten away with this on a major network news programme, but Ball was unwilling to accept this false historical narrative. Her challenges clearly made Smith uneasy.
Similarly, when Hasan asked Sen Warner whether he agreed that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, he awkwardly sidestepped the question, saying he wouldn’t use that term because it only fuelled those who want to eliminate Israel by chanting ‘from the river to the sea!’ Mehdi would have none of this nonsense and continued pressing the senator. Equally confounding were the senator’s convoluted evasions when asked if campaign contributions from AIPAC play a negative role in US politics.
The clear lesson from both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media.
They know the issues they cover, their questions aren’t scripted, and they are not afraid to challenge elites.
Dr James Zogby
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