What we don’t cover.

I am fascinated by editors. Editors of movies and editors of newspapers and other forms of social media. They have unique vantage positions and they occupy an incredible important role in the 4th Estate that belongs to the people. The impression that media is a private enterprise is actually quite modernly quaint. The freedom given to the press is because they are meant to and belong to the people of the country in which they operate.

Editors can shape opinions. Yours, mine and your children’s. They can do it a variety of ways, some of it can be as simple as guilt by association. They can put two dueling images side by side. An article about a white murderer above an article about a black Federal justice. The mind being what it is goes with its own biases and mis-appropriates blame and… makes up its own… Opinion. The opinion is not a sentence, it is a vague often ephemeral fleeting set of impressionistic paintings. A newspaper can take an incredibly serious story and next to it put a frivolous story and the total impact is reduced. There are many, many ways in which editors can influence, the choice of words used, the choice of article placement, the choice of articles unleashed from storage to mitigate the effect of other articles etc etc.

Gaza has been an interesting story. That is the least sanguine version of it. Or perhaps the most. Israel devoted a great amount of its military attention to it and succeeded in destroying 92% of all infrastructure and living spaces in Gaza. Since I have never been there, I can’t convey the immensity of 92% destruction. If you neighborhood had a 100 apartments or home, 92 of them are gone. That makes it a bit more personal. Yet it doesn’t fully convey the amount of death and injured, the inhumanity and callousness of shooting a child in the face, and many, many other war crimes.

The New York Times, because of the high level of Jewish readership often covers stories about Israel with a deep interest that borders on the fanatical. And yet today, they did not cover Gaza while the BBC did. An Al Jazeera journalist was killed there along with 9 other people. Another 40 or so people were killed in Lebanon. I present the following pages simply as a record. These are not exhibits since there are no cases against the press. Simply an un-ending set of editorial decisions.