Fit to Print?

A unity government in the Palestinian Authority, emergency state visits in Syria and Lebanon, and calls for resignation in Israel this week demonstrated how this summer's war is still shaking the Middle East.

It doesn't take a journalist to tell you that the recent fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah was terrifying. Living in Tel Aviv at the time, working for an Israeli newspaper, the immediacy of the violence should have been the most shocking experience of my summer.

Instead, my most horrifying discoveries came once I had returned to the United States, in the middle of the war, and watched its duration play out in the American media.

I thought distance would be the principal factor differentiating the representation of the war in the United States from its actuality in Israel and Lebanon. But with nearly round-the-clock live feeds on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, I did not get far from graphic images of destruction. The pictures themselves were not startling; I had seen far worse on Israel's three news networks, on the Arab satellite stations, and in person.

Rather, my disgust was the result of a perverse sense of spectacle that I had not encountered in the Lebanese or Israeli media. The same footage of war, to which I had grown accustomed, grew more sickening when accompanied by the almost palpable excitement of the American and British reporters. Our media's Hollywood production values could be seen in the major networks' lead-ins, which resembled action movie trailers. I never realized the implications of sensationalism until I had experienced the war on both sides of the divide between participants and spectators.

The more common complaint of media bias-in either direction-is normally the sole cause of viewers' ire. But my frustration has less to do with objectivity and more to do with the distracting nature of saturation coverage.

I knew why I wanted to watch. I was living in Israeli society. An apartment building I used to live in was hit by rockets. I worried about family and friends, with peers living in northern Israel, fighting deep in Lebanon. And I had other friends in Beirut, Lebanon.

Still, it seemed disingenuous for Anderson Cooper to be on-screen every hour of the day, dressed up in his flak jacket. It may rattle the rock-solid entitlement many Americans feel they have to weigh in on the Middle East, but I could not help asking, why is he there? Why is the entire news cycle drowning in this?

Every minute spent covering Israel-Lebanon was yet another minute that the Western media could be diverted from issues that directly engage their populations. According to a study from Johns Hopkins University, the American-British invasion of Iraq has killed around 100,000 civilians. Russia has killed hundreds of thousands in Chechnya. And, for all our impassioned platitudes we spout off in the academy and its surrounding cafes, none of these countries show any hint of changing their tune.

Granted, both neo-cons and liberals often believe that Western powers should actively intervene in global affairs. But, even as one personally entrenched in this war, I must question the intentions of news outlets that gave non-stop attention to a conflict that resulted in fewer than 2,000 casualties. Why is everyone this side of Nicholas Kristof unwilling to give such coverage to the millions of lives at stake in Darfur? Even Hurricane Katrina-an ongoing local catastrophe whose importance was so quickly effaced-had a higher body count than the flare-up between Hezbollah and Israel. It is hard to find the criteria for our media's obsession with this particular conflict-other than its exoticism, perhaps its sexiness.

This point is often made by people who wish to deflect attention from the suffering of their opponent (Israeli or Lebanese). I wish to raise it, instead, in light of both of their suffering. This summer, the media wrapped lost human life around entertainment. If the stress on these reporters' faces were genuine, why did they go out of their way to avoid areas that might implicate their own viewers' responsibilities as American citizens?

The few authors and reporters who have covered America's reckless path in Iraq are usually found only on Comedy Central, during Jon Stewart's interviews on The Daily Show. Likewise, it took a year for America finally to have a piece of television that matches the scale of the apocalyptic abandonment of the Gulf Coast: Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. This, too, is relegated to the sidelines of our distracted media-available only for HBO subscribers.

Such coverage priorities bode ill for those truly concerned about preventing suffering. The style of coverage of the recent war undercut its own relevance and weight. There is a dangerous preference by the world's most powerful countries' media to freeze their populations in the audience seat. America's role, one of diplomatic impotency, only prolonged the violence. The Mideast cease-fire that took hold was mostly thanks to European intervention.

But the worst part may have come when the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah ended. After watching the news a week later, one friend of mine joked, "Could you Israelis start fighting again? I'm sick of JonBenet."

Good to know what the second most important news story was.

With 130,000 troops in Iraq, and the Gulf Coast still in shambles, I fear the Middle Eastern sideshow has set a dangerous precedent for the way Americans forget the wounds that they are actually in a position to heal.