Wall Street Opinion Journal Daniel Henninger August 4, 2006

“Where is the press? Where is the media to see this massacre? Count our dead. Count our body parts.” The man complaining this week about the media’s inadequate coverage of the Lebanon conflict was a village mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, whose words and the loss of his son in an Israeli strike were quoted by Associated Press reporter Hussein Dakroub. Later that day, another AP reporter, Hamza Hendawi, filed a graphic description of the funeral: “Weeping as he walked in a funeral procession hours later, Jamaleddin pulled at the limbs of the dead, carried to a cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-loader.”

Writing on this page about Lebanon last week, Riz Khan, the host of a program on Al Jazeera’s forthcoming English-language TV channel and a former anchor for CNN International, described “the American media’s sanitization of the conflict,” and “those observing war from the safety of their living rooms.”

Indeed, “those observing war from the safety of their living rooms” have become the most important political force engaged today in modern warfare. There is now a belief, held for different reasons by pacifists and propagandists, that if the media forces the people in America or Europe to see and read the bloody details of these conflicts, then public opinion will force their leaders, as Kofi Annan would put it, to stop the fighting.

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