Very quickly, for I must eat

Here's a very good post by Lawrence Pintak, the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo and a former CBS Middle East correspondent, which far more artfully describes the American media's incompetence in covering the Middle East that I've been talking about.

Hype abounded. "This could be World War Three!" more than one reporter was heard to say. The same dramatic images were endlessly repeated, as if on a loop. Rumor was elevated to fact -- and the networks seemed proud of it. One CNN promo showed an unedited sequence in which a nameless photographer told Anderson Cooper, in northern Israel, that there was a rumor of rockets on the way. Cooper then turned to the camera and authoritatively reported, "The police say more rockets are coming."

...

There was little effort to identify the politics of many of the pseudo-experts who were trotted into the studios. Right-wing Lebanese Christians and representatives of Israeli-backed think tanks -- both with axes to grind -- were offered up as independent analysts. Anchors and reporters, meanwhile, frequently wore their politics on their sleeve. When an American woman trapped in southern Lebanon decried Washington's failure to stop what she said was Israel's brutal killing of civilians, CNN anchor Tony Harris snapped back, "That's not the view over here," and cut her off, saying he didn't have time to debate the issue.

...

NBC anchor Brian Williams made much of the fact that when he went on a helicopter flight with an Israeli officer to take a look at the fighting, "We got closer than we intended." Turns out that some shells landed in the distance. War is Hell, Brian.

Even more troubling was the fact that the Williams segment, along with reports by several other NBC correspondents, ran on Scarborough Country, an overtly politicized talk show, further blurring the line between news and opinion and muddying the waters of cable journalism.

Amid segments from such stalwart NBC correspondents as Martin Fletcher, there was Scarborough describing Hezbollah as an "Iran-backed terror group" and throwing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak softballs like, "Why is it the more Israel is willing to give up to the Palestinians, the more your country comes under attack?" Meanwhile, conservative iconoclast Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie, has been out there "reporting" from the Israeli border, asking real NBC correspondents such leading questions as, "Do we have any idea whether this city was targeted by Hezbollah because of its Christian population?" (This isn't just about "good" Christians and "bad" Muslims, Tucker.)

I'm about to burst into tears.