FULL ARTICLES

BBC WARNS STAFF OVER “TERRORISM”

BBC warns staff over ‘terrorism’
By Tara Conlan
The Guardian
December 16, 2005

media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1668435,00.html

The BBC has issued new guidance to staff telling them to take care when using the term “terrorist”, and to opt instead for less loaded terms.

Following criticism from some quarters about the corporation’s coverage of the July 7 London bombings, the BBC’s governors have approved fresh guidance on “the use of language when reporting terrorism”.

The new guidance has been sent out internally and tells journalists: “The guidelines do not ban the use of the word. However, we do ask that careful thought is given to its use by a BBC voice. There are ways of conveying the full horror and human consequences of acts of terror without using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe the perpetrators. And there are a number of important editorial factors that must be considered before its use to describe individuals or a given group that can be justified. ”

The BBC said the rise of digital media meant there was no longer a split between domestic and overseas audiences, making careful use of such terms even more important.

“Careful use of the word ‘terrorist’ is essential if the BBC is to maintain its reputation for standards of accuracy and especially impartiality ... that does not mean we should emasculate our reporting or otherwise avoid conveying the reality and horror of what has occurred; but we should consider the impact our use of language may have on our reputation for objective journalism amongst our many audiences ... we must be careful not to give the impression that we have come to some kind of implicit – and unwarranted – value judgement.”

The edict reminds BBC staff of the existing BBC editorial policy, which states: “The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.”

“We should not adopt other people’s language as our own. It is also usually inappropriate to use words like ‘liberate’, ‘court martial’ or ‘execute’ in the absence of a clear judicial process. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as ‘bomber’, ‘attacking’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’ ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’.”

The new guidance suggested using words such as “bomb attack” instead, or “bomber” or “assassin”.

It concluded: “This is an issue of judgement ... If you do decide to use the word ‘terrorist’ do so sparingly, having considered what is said above, and take advice from senior editors.”

After the London bombings, the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, dismissed claims that the BBC banned the use of the word “terrorist” in its news coverage.

He told a House of Lords committee hearing on BBC charter renewal, that neither he nor the BBC news director, Helen Boaden, had issued a memo to that effect to journalists on July 7.

But he added that programme editors may have been reminded about the BBC’s guidelines on the use of language during such events.

The issue was discussed at the BBC governors’ meeting in July, and in September the governors heard that a review of the implementation of the editorial guidelines with regard to the use of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorists” had begun.

 

THE BBC DISCOVERS “TERRORISM,” BRIEFLY

The BBC discovers “terrorism,” briefly
Suicide bombing seems different when closer to home
By Tom Gross
The Jerusalem Post (Opinion Page)
July 12, 2005

www.tomgrossmedia.com/BBCDiscoversTerrorism.html

When it happens on your own doorstep, in very familiar settings like the London “Tube” or on a traditional red double-decker bus, right alongside the site of a building where Charles Dickens once lived, terrorism seems very different than it does when innocent people are murdered elsewhere.

Britain’s first bus bombing took place barely half a mile from the BBC’s central London headquarters, and for a day or so after last Thursday’s multiple bomb attacks, the BBC, the influential leftist daily the Guardian, and even the British-based global news agency Reuters, all seemed to suddenly discover the words “terrorism” and “terrorist.” In Saturday’s Guardian, for example, one or other of these words appeared on each of the first eleven pages.

In marked contrast to BBC reports about bombs on public transport in Israel – bombs which in some cases were even worse than those in London, since some were specifically aimed at children, and most were packed with nails, screws, glass and specially-sharpened metal shards in order to maximize injuries – terms like “guerrilla,” “militant,” “activist” or “fighter” were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

Nor – again in contrast to their coverage of Israel – did BBC correspondents, on either their domestic or international services, provide sympathetic accounts of the likely perpetrators, or explain to viewers that we must “understand” their “grievances”. Instead they did what an objective news organization should do: just report on the attacks, and their atrocious nature, and on the sufferings of the victims.

“A BARRIER TO UNDERSTANDING”

The world’s premier broadcast network appeared to throw away its own ridiculous “BBC Producer’s Guidelines”. BBC online reports, for example, had headlines such as “Terror of passengers stuck on tube” and “London Rocked by Terror Attacks.”

BBC executives had previously insisted that for the sake of what they call “even-handedness” terrorists should not be called terrorists. Their Guidelines state: “The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier to understanding... We should try to avoid the term, while we report the facts as we know them.”

But the hope of many of the British taxpayers forced to fund the BBC that it had finally come to its senses and would henceforth call terror by its proper name, turned out to be short-lived. By Friday, the BBC’s world service was slowly reverting to its old habits, both on air and on line. (Its domestic news broadcasts have for the time being continued using the word “terrorist.”)

Presumably hoping that no one would notice, the BBC subtly and retroactively altered its initial texts about the bombs on both it British and international websites. Unfortunately for the BBC, however, previous versions of its webpages remained easily accessible to all on Google, and enterprising British bloggers, long-fed up with the BBC’s bias, recorded the changes.

“Harry’s Place” noted, for example, that on Thursday evening a BBC News webpage headlined “Bus man may have seen terrorist,” began “A bus passenger says he may have seen one of those responsible for the terrorist bomb attacks in London. Richard Jones, from Binfield, had got a bus just before it was blown up...”

But on Friday at 10.14 am GMT, that webpage was suddenly changed. The headline now reads “Passenger believes he saw bomber”, and the text begins “A bus passenger says he may have seen one of those responsible for the bomb attacks in London. Richard Jones, from Binfield, had got a bus just before it was blown up...”

Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage, headlined “Testing the underground mood,” spoke of “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen.” But at 12.08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen.”

There are other examples of similar censorship occurring at the BBC. Stalin himself could hardly have done a better job of overseeing its award-winning website.

“LET’S BLAME THE JEWS”

In its round-up of world reactions, BBC online was also quick to highlight the views of conspiracy theorists. The very first article listed by the BBC started by quoting Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani saying Israel was behind the London attacks, followed by a commentary on Iranian state radio explicitly blaming the Mossad.

With its unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners), BBC coverage is important in formulating worldwide public opinion.

But even more influential – and in respect to the London terror attacks, far more irresponsible – was the Associated Press (AP).

The AP played into the hands of anti-Semites by irresponsibly running a bogus “Israel advance warning” story on its international newswire shortly after the London attacks. Although the story has since been retracted by the AP, the damage has been done. As was the case after 9/11, a thousand “Israel knew”-style conspiracy theories have already been spawned on extreme rightist and leftist websites worldwide.

The AP story headlined “Netanyahu Changed Plans Due to Warning,” written by Amy Teibel of the AP Jerusalem bureau, and alleging that Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in London for an economic conference, was tipped off “minutes before Thursday’s explosions,” was put out by the AP on their worldwide news wires at 11.14 am GMT (7.14 am EST) on Thursday.

BLACK PROPAGANDA

Fox News ran the AP story on air at 7:50 am New York time. AP’s story also appeared on the websites of over 100 credible news outlets in the US, Canada, Ireland, India and elsewhere. More disturbingly it appeared on Al Jazeera and other Middle East media.

How could any serious editor or reporter not see that this was “black propaganda” and a replay of the post-9/11 libels? And how could the AP Jerusalem Bureau Chief not have checked before running it?

But despite the various shortcomings in the coverage of the London bombs, there was also much resolute and sensible commentary, not just from the right and center but from some on the left too.

While the usual suspects, such as the notorious Robert Fisk of the Independent (who was singled out as a journalist one could admire in Osama bin Laden’s video message last October), immediately blamed Tony Blair and George Bush for bringing the bombs upon London, most commentators saw the atrocities for what they were.

“Face up to the truth,” wrote Nick Cohen, a leading columnist for The Observer, the Sunday sister paper of The Guardian. Addressing what he called “my world of liberal London,” Cohen said “We all know who was to blame for Thursday’s murders... and it wasn’t Bush and Blair.

FULL ARTICLES

MEDIA BIAS IS REAL, FINDS UCLA POLITICAL SCIENTIST

Media bias is real, finds UCLA political scientist
UCLA News release
December 14, 2005

www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co-author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low-population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants – most of them college students – to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.

“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets – Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Five news outlets – “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown,” Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and the Drudge Report – were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS’ “Evening News” and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NBC’s “Nightly News,” USA Today, NBC’s “Today Show,” Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR’s “Morning Edition,” CBS’ “Early Show” and The Washington Post.

Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op-Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts.

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

“One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites,” said Groseclose. “Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media.”

Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined.

“By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet,” Groseclose said. “Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post’s. If anything, government-funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.8).”

The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias – or the appearance of same – in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research.

“No matter the results, we feared our findings would’ve been suspect if we’d received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided,” Groseclose said.

The results break new ground.

“Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers,” Groseclose said. “Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity – politicians.”

 

JOURNALISM, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

Journalism, Hollywood-style
By Terry Teachout
Commentary magazine
December 2005

www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12005071_1

There has always been something faintly silly about Hollywood’s worshipful portrayal of journalists. With the exception of such cynical comedies as Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), most American movies purporting to show journalism as it is take for granted the trustworthiness and good intentions of the average reporter. Not surprisingly, these films are usually the work of outsiders who know nothing about the daily workings of newspapers, magazines, or TV news divisions. Even when a branch of the media is shown as gravely flawed, as in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), James Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987) or Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), one need not look too hard to find the starry-eyed idealists in the woodpile, earnestly speaking truth to power.

If George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama about Edward R. Murrow – the title is the catchphrase with which Murrow closed his radio and TV newscasts in the 1940’s and 50’s – were merely another such exercise in hagiography, it would be unworthy of consideration for other than its purely cinematic qualities. But Clooney, the latest of Hollywood’s Left-liberal actors to go behind the camera and make politically oriented films of his own, has added to the mix a more telling form of idealization: in this movie, he also becomes the latest Hollywood director to make a film in which the truth about American Communism is deliberately falsified. Moreover, in a piece of bad timing, his film happens to have been released simultaneously with Bennett Miller’s Capote, in which a serious effort is made to suggest precisely some of the inherent moral ambiguities of real-life journalism that Good Night, and Good Luck mostly overlooks.

What the two films have in common is the meticulous reproduction of surface appearances that is characteristic of modern-day Hollywood’s efforts to evoke the past.

Good Night, and Good Luck is especially noteworthy in this regard. Handsomely shot in black-and-white, it duplicates with uncanny exactitude the on- and off-air appearance of See It Now, the CBS news program that Murrow hosted and co-produced between 1951 and 1957 in collaboration with Fred Friendly (played by Clooney, who also co-wrote the script). One might be looking at the same TV studio from which See It Now was telecast a half-century ago. Similarly, David Strathairn, who plays Murrow, flawlessly reproduces the familiar cadences of the newscaster’s speech and even manages to suggest his famously saturnine good looks, despite the fact that Strathairn is far less imposing, both vocally and physically, than his model.

In Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman, like Strathairn a much-admired actor, delves even more deeply into the quirky personality of his character, the celebrated writer Truman Capote (1924-1984). He, too, has the difficult task of imitating his subject’s distinctive and well-remembered speaking voice, which Norman Mailer once described as “a dry little voice that seemed to issue from an unmoistened reed in his nostril.” Hoffman’s success in doing so without stooping to caricature is typical of his performance as a whole, which suggests Capote in all his complexity – and peculiarity.

Much the same can be said of the rest of Capote, which tells the story of the writing of In Cold Blood, Capote’s 1966 best-seller about the 1959 murder of a Kansas farmer, Herbert Clutter, and his family. To be sure, Bennett Miller, unlike Clooney, has not gone out of his way to duplicate literally the world of which Capote wrote. The scenes set in Kansas, for example, were actually shot in Canada.1 Still, Capote is both sufficiently and specifically evocative of an America far removed from the present, and the viewer willingly enters into it as if it were the real thing.

On the other hand, many of the same things might be said of any number of recent Hollywood films. To replicate the decor of a New York TV studio circa 1954, after all, requires in the end nothing more than a combination of diligent research and painstaking execution. If mere visual verisimilitude were all that mattered, then Quiz Show (1994), Robert Redford’s sanctimonious docudrama about the TV quiz-show scandals of the 50’s, would be a masterpiece. Even a piece of acting as precisely and imaginatively re-creative as Jamie Foxx’s impersonation of Ray Charles in Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004) is vitiated by the fact that Foxx is too often called upon to do little more than spout the usual Hollywood-style cliches.

The screenplay of Capote, written by Dan Futterman, departs drastically from this norm, not merely because of its avoidance of cliche but because of its emotional detachment.

Capote, for instance, is shown not as the fearless crusader beloved of filmmakers but as a hugely ambitious writer who sees the Clutter murders as little more than a heaven-sent opportunity to try out his own literary theories on the grandest possible scale. Indeed, he antagonizes Alvin Dewey, the Kansas detective in charge of the case, by assuring him upon his arrival that he “doesn’t care” who killed the Clutters. To him, their mysterious deaths are the ideal subject matter for the “nonfiction novel” he has dreamed of writing, and in pursuit of that goal – which he hopes will make him rich and famous – he is prepared to do anything whatsoever.

To be sure, Capote commits no spectacular peccadilloes along the way to writing In Cold Blood apart from bribing a prison official, a transgression which may or may not have happened in real life (we have only his word for it). His gravest offense is to feign intimacy with the naive Kansans who are in a position to tell him what he wants to know – and, later, with the two killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, to whom he misrepresents himself as a crusading journalist seeking to have their convictions overturned.

In fact, we know that Capote had no doubt of their guilt. Though he identifies himself emotionally with Smith, and assists both men in finding counsel to make their appeals, his real interest lies elsewhere: he cannot finish his book until they are executed, and once he realizes this, he abruptly breaks off contact with them. For all of his protestations of friendship, not to mention his claim that “the book I’m writing will return [Smith] to the realm of humanity,” he is no more truly interested in Smith or Hickock than in Alvin Dewey (or, for that matter, the Clutters), and the coldbloodedness with which he courts their favor is presented with a candor hardly less shocking than the murders themselves.

This is not to say that Capote offers a totally unsympathetic view of its eponymous subject. Capote is clearly tortured by the morally equivocal position in which he finds himself vis-a-vis Smith and Hickock, so much so that the resulting tension ultimately destroys him (though not before In Cold Blood is serialized in the New Yorker and becomes a best-seller). Even so, he continues to subordinate all other ethical considerations to the claims of his own unswerving ambition, and no small part of the artistic success of Capote derives from the fact that Bennett and Futterman never let us forget this. However fine the resulting book may have turned out to be – and the film leaves us in no doubt that it was very fine indeed – we know what Capote was willing to do to write it, and are appalled by the knowledge.

Not only is this cold-eyed detachment far removed from the partisanship of most films about journalism, but Capote is also largely faithful to the factual record of the writing of In Cold Blood. Indeed, it may be more faithful than In Cold Blood itself, whose claim to being (in the author’s words) “a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences” has been substantially challenged in the years since its publication.2 While Bennett and Futterman have made no attempt to indicate the extent to which In Cold Blood departs from the truth, their dramatization of its writing, a certain amount of compression and simplification notwithstanding, is in most relevant ways true to life.

Moreover, the movie seems true to life, in that the audience has no difficulty believing that the real Capote would have behaved more or less the same way as his on-screen counterpart. For unlike filmgoers of an earlier generation, most of us have by now seen too many high-profile cases of journalistic fraud to take the work of any journalist, however celebrated, at face value.

George Clooney, in sharp contrast to Bennett Miller, opts for the traditional pieties of on-screen journalism, which are all the more irritating because of the technical skill with which they are dished up.

Like Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck deals with a self-contained episode in the life of its subject. In 1954 Murrow and Fred Friendly devoted three episodes of See It Now to various aspects of the anti-Communist “witch hunt” led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The most widely remembered of these telecasts, aired on March 9, was (as Murrow put it) “a report on Senator McCarthy told mainly in his own words and pictures.” The purpose of the program was to brand McCarthy as a purveyor of “smears” and “half-truths.” In Murrow’s words:

“It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of Communism.... The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.”

What was remarkable about “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” was not the critical position it took – McCarthy had already been under attack by numerous other journalists for some time – but the fact that Murrow was using See It Now to criticize him. It had been the long-standing policy of the news division of CBS not to editorialize on the air, and though Murrow closed his nightly radio newscast with a commentary on the day’s events, these “end pieces” were kept separate from the reportage to which the remainder of the program was devoted. Similarly, See It Now had never before explicitly attacked a politician, or advocated political positions of its own. In doing so on this occasion, Murrow crossed a still-bright journalistic line – in prime time, and without first seeking the approval of his corporate overseers.

In Good Night, and Good Luck, Murrow’s actions are presented not as imprudent or inappropriate but as an act of high political courage, even nobility. At the time, however, he was sharply criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for having attacked McCarthy under the guise of reporting on him, thereby abusing the power of the press. Moreover, Murrow himself was well aware of what he had done and, by all accounts, full of misgivings about it. “Is it not possible,” he had written on an earlier occasion, “that . . . an infectious smile, eyes that seem remarkable for the depths of their sincerity, a cultivated air of authority, may attract huge television audiences regardless of the violence that may be done to truth or objectivity?” Those words would come back to haunt him after “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” was telecast.

Murrow’s doubts, however, go unremarked in Good Night, and Good Luck. So does the fact that McCarthy’s witch hunt, however irresponsible in practice, was at least nominally motivated by the existence of actual witches.

As is now widely acknowledged by scholars of the period – and as American intelligence officials knew at the time – the American Communist party was used by the Soviets as an intelligence apparatus through which, starting in the early 30’s, Soviet spies successfully infiltrated the U.S. government. Yet with the exception of one glancing, carefully unspecific reference to Alger Hiss, the script of Good Night, and Good Luck takes no notice whatsoever of this well-known fact. Rather, we are invited to suppose that the activities of Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and other Soviet agents were nothing more than a paranoid fantasy on the part of McCarthy and his supporters.

We know better, but, damningly for Clooney’s project, Murrow himself did not. He had been, for example, one of the most vocal defenders of Laurence Duggan, a State Department official who committed suicide in 1948 after the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that Whittaker Chambers, the Soviet agent who was Hiss’s controller, had identified him as another agent. Decoded Soviet cables made public years later proved that Chambers was telling the truth, just as he had told the truth about Hiss.

Needless to say, Duggan goes unmentioned in Good Night, and Good Luck. Instead, Clooney devotes several minutes of the film to footage from another episode of See It Now in which McCarthy is shown interrogating Annie Lee Moss, a Pentagon employee who worked in the Signal Corps code room, a highly sensitive area. McCarthy accused Moss of having been a Communist without offering evidence to back up his claim. Murrow in turn offered this interrogation as proof of McCarthy’s irresponsibility – yet, again, no mention is made in Good Night, and Good Luck of the fact that the Communist party’s own records later proved Moss to have been a party member.

Clooney’s unwillingness even to acknowledge such inconvenient facts, much less engage them, makes it impossible to take Good Night, and Good Luck seriously as a historically informed portrayal of McCarthy and his activities. But, then, that was not his purpose in making the film.

In reality, as Clooney has readily admitted, Good Night, and Good Luck is intended to persuade its viewers that journalists today have abdicated their responsibility to do as Murrow did.3 As he recently told a Washington Post reporter:

“I’m not a journalist, I’m just an observer, but there are times when the media takes a bit of a pass at asking the tough questions. The bigger concern is when Judith Miller writes stories saying there are definitely weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq], and then the New York Times later apologizes because they say, ‘Listen, we should have asked tougher questions.’ That’s a dangerous place to go. . . . When I was growing up, my father’s argument was always, it’s not just your right, it’s your duty to question authority. Always.”

Here, Clooney echoes the New Left mantra endlessly regurgitated by aging baby boomers longing to assuage their liberal guilt by keeping faith with the never-to-be-questioned commandments of the 60’s. Presumably it has never occurred to him, or to his fellow Hollywood liberals, to question the authority by which the news media offer themselves up as sole purveyors of the truth. Hence his determination to romanticize Murrow – and, by extension, all reporters who dare to “question authority.”

Despite his nagging doubts about the McCarthy broadcast, Murrow himself was given to the same romantic view of the journalist’s calling. At the beginning and end of Good Night, and Good Luck, we see him giving a speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association in which he declared that commercial TV had a responsibility to explain the world to its viewers:

“Let us dream to the extent of saying that on a given Sunday night the time normally occupied by Ed Sullivan is given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education, and a week or two later the time normally used by Steve Allen is devoted to a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East. Would the corporate image of their respective sponsors be damaged? Would the stockholders rise up in their wrath and complain? Would anything happen other than that a few million people would have received a little illumination on subjects that may well determine the future of this country, and therefore the future of the corporations?”

Clooney offers this speech, delivered by Murrow in 1958, as the last word on the responsibilities of the journalist. But in showing it without comment, and similarly recounting the story of “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” without any explanatory historical context, he tells us far more about his own political beliefs than about the realities of network TV news. For just as Murrow blindly defended Laurence Duggan, so did CBS News besmirch its reputation a half-century later by airing a report on President Bush’s National Guard service that was shown almost immediately to have been based on forged documents – a report whose timing was clearly intended to influence the results of the 2004 presidential election.

To watch Good Night, and Good Luck is to ask why, in the wake of such oft-repeated fiascos, anyone in his right mind would suppose today’s mainstream news media capable of making “a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East” based on anything other than the unexamined prejudices of the journalists who made it.

What has changed since 1958, of course, is the willingness of a fast-growing number of Americans to continue taking for granted the objectivity of the news media.4 With the emergence of such decentralized “new media” as blogs and talk radio, it is no longer necessary to settle for whatever news CBS and the New York Times see fit to publish. As a result, Edward R. Murrow’s successors do not wield anything remotely approaching the influence they had well into the 80’s and beyond, nor is it likely that they will ever do so again. And for all the unabashed nostalgia with which Good Night, and Good Luck portrays those long-gone days, it seems far more likely that Capote offers a truer picture of the skepticism with which ordinary Americans now view the reporters they once trusted to tell the truth.

[Footnotes]

[1] Richard Brooks’s 1967 film of In Cold Blood, by contrast, was shot in the locations described by Capote in the book, including the house in Holcomb, Kansas, where the Clutters were murdered.

[2] For a concise but thorough summary of the numerous distortions and fictionalizations introduced by Capote, see Van Jensen’s “Writing History: Capote’s Novel Has Lasting Effect on Journalism” (Lawrence, Kansas Journal-World, April 3, 2005, available online at http://www2.ljworld.com/ news/2005/apr/03/writing_history_capotes).

[3] One suspects that Clooney also had in mind HUAC’s various investigations of Communist attempts to infiltrate the U.S. film industry, it being taken for granted by the vast majority of present-day Hollywood liberals that the only villains in that particular “witch hunt” were those ex-Communists like Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg who “named names,” identifying their former compatriots – most of whom were in fact Stalinists of the deepest dye – to FBI and HUAC investigators.

[4] Significantly, Good Night, and Good Luck was bluntly criticized for its distortions and evasions by a handful of mainstream-media commentators, among them Jack Shafer, the press critic of Slate, and Stephen Hunter, the film critic of the Washington Post, the latter of whom wrote that the film “does a disservice to history: it suggests that McCarthy was an arbitrary sociopath disconnected from a larger issue... But nothing in real life is ever that simple, and to pretend that it is has to be a lie itself. That’s the truth that should be spoken to the power that Clooney represents.”

FULL ARTICLES

SPIELBERG: “FOR ME THIS MOVIE IS A PRAYER FOR PEACE”

His “Prayer For Peace”
By Richard Schickel
Time magazine
December 4, 2005

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1137684,00.html

Just after finishing his new movie about the aftermath of the massacre at the Munich Olympics, Steven Spielberg talked with TIME movie critic Richard Schickel, who collaborated with him on the TV documentary Shooting War, about his reasons for taking on Munich, his anger at the International Olympic Committee and his modest plan for improving Arab-Israeli relations.

TIME: WOULD IT BE FAIR TO SAY THAT THIS MOVIE IS, IN THE END, ABOUT THE HUMAN COST OF A QUAGMIRE? Yes. And also for me this movie is a prayer for peace. I always kept thinking about that as I was making it. Some-where inside all this intransigence there has to be a prayer for peace. Because the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence. Do you know Amos Oz’s books? There’s a wonderful quote we found, that sort of makes sense to me: “In the lives of individuals, and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted.” They see in each other’s faces a reflection of some larger oppressor. That may well be the case with the 100-year conflict between Arabs and Jews.

DO YOU THINK THIS FILM WILL DO ANY GOOD? I’ve never, ever made a movie where I said I’m making this picture because the message can do some good for the world--even when I made Schindler’s List. I was terrified that it was going to do the opposite of good. I thought perhaps it might bring shame to the memory of those who didn’t survive the Holocaust--and even worse to those who did. I made the picture out of just pure wanting to get that story told. I thought it was important that at least my kids someday could see what happened, just to hear that story being told. I feel the same way about Munich. I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today.

BUT IT’S CERTAINLY WORTH A TRY. Everything’s worth a try. I didn’t make this movie to make money, and I don’t know if I’ve made a commercial movie at all. But I certainly feel that if filmmakers have the courage to talk about these issues--whether they’re fictional representations of real events or are pure fiction or pure documentaries--as long as we’re willing to talk about the real tough, hard subjects unsparingly, I think it’s a good thing to get out in the ether. It’s not a bad thing. And there’s a project I’m initiating next February that I think might also do some good.

WHAT’S THAT? What I’m doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives--not dramas, just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they had to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to--and then exchange the videos. That’s the kind of thing that can be effective, I think, in simply making people understand that there aren’t that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians--not as human beings, anyway.

IN THE SAME WAY, EVERYONE IN THE MOVIE IS HUMAN. YOU FEEL FOR THEM ALL. Right. I think the thing I’m very proud of is that [screenwriter] Tony Kushner and I and the actors did not demonize anyone in the film. We don’t demonize our targets. They’re individuals. They have families. Although what happened in Munich, I condemn. One of the reasons I wanted to tell this story is that every four years there’s an Olympics somewhere in the world, and there has never been an adequate tribute paid to the Israeli athletes who were murdered in ‘72, and I wanted to tell this as a tribute to them. That was an important motivation for me, one of the earliest reasons I wanted to tell this story. I wanted this film to be in memory of them, because they seem to have been forgotten. The silence about them by the International Olympic Committee is getting louder for me every four years. There has to be an appropriate official acknowledgment of what happened.

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT EVEN THOUGH YOU SAY, “I DIDN’T MAKE THIS MOVIE TO MAKE MONEY,” OBVIOUSLY YOU DO WANT AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE TO SEE THE MOVIE BECAUSE OF THE ISSUES THAT IT RAISES. The subject matter isn’t the kind of subject matter that is going to outgross King Kong--not even on the last day of [Kong’s] release. But one never knows in this business. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’ve never had one, even though I’m accused of having one secreted away somewhere. I don’t. And I don’t know. I’m lucky at this point in my career that I can make the movies I want to make without having a studio come in and second-guess me. I always say thank goodness for Jaws, because Jaws gave me final cut. I’ve had it now for 30 years, and because of that I only have myself to blame for anything that goes wrong.

PEOPLE ASK ME WHAT YOU’RE REALLY LIKE. THE SHORT ANSWER I ALWAYS GIVE--AND IT’S A TRUTHFUL ONE--IS THAT I DON’T KNOW ANYONE WHO’S BETTER AT KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH HIS INNER CHILD. ON THE OTHER HAND, YOU MAKE AN AWFUL LOT OF MOVIES, LIKE MUNICH, THAT ARE FAR FROM CHILDLIKE. GUESS I’LL HAVE TO COME UP WITH A NEW ONE-LINER ABOUT YOU. I don’t know if you can, Richard. Maybe the child in all of us dies just when we need him the most. I cannot tell you how many people come over to me on the street and repeat almost verbatim the line the Martians say to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories: “You know, we like your earlier, funnier films.”

THEY COME UP TO YOU? They’ll say, “Why can’t you get back to making E.T. or Raiders?” This is not from young people but from older people, who I guess grew up with the movies I made when I was a kid and they were kids too. So I’m bewitched by Woody Allen in the sense that I keep hearing this scene from Stardust Memories played out in my real life. It’s very bedeviling.

SO DOES THAT MEAN YOU’RE GOING TO PUT AWAY CHILDISH THINGS FROM HERE ON OUT? Well, you never can tell. I keep looking around for things, but then when I get the opportunity, say, to direct Harry Potter, I say no. When I get the opportunity to do something like Spider-Man, I say no. The films that are offered me that have childlike souls, I tend to say, “I’ve done that.” I don’t know if that just means I’ve grown up for good or whether something’s going to come along that’s going to make me say, “O.K., whatever I said to you is full of hot air, and the child lives in all of us until we die.”

YOU SEEM TO HAVE THIS PATTERN OF DOING TWO MOVIES BACK-TO-BACK AND THEN STEPPING BACK. DO YOU LIKE DOING IT THAT WAY? I hate doing it that way. When I don’t have a movie, I don’t take a job just for the sake of working. I just sit it out until I find something I’m passionate about. If I find something light, I’ll make it. Like Terminal. It wasn’t a film that I’ll be remembered for, but it’s a film I’ll remember for the rest of my life, a sweet short story that gave me a chance to work with Tom Hanks--and people think I’m crazy for saying this--giving what I think was his best performance. Some people have said, “Why did you make that little movie when you could have been doing something important?” And I said, “Well, at the time it was important.” And if I find something dark and historical--like this Doris Kearns Goodwin book [Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln] I’m working on now--I’ll do that. It’s just how things work out. It’s all about timing.

 

“THE MESSAGES ARE PROBLEMATIC”

Israel LA envoy criticizes new Spielberg film ‘Munich’
Ha’aretz
December 11, 2005

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/656341.html

Israel’s consul-general in Los Angeles levelled critism Sunday at Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” saying that the new film drew an incorrect picture of the Mossad’s hunt for the PLO terrorists of the 1972 Olympic massacre, taking the legendary director to task for morally equating the agents and the terrorists and for addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with “a certain pretensiousness” and “quite superficial statements.”

The film follows a Mossad hit squad assigned to track down and kill the Palestinian Black September gunmen behind the abduction of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. Eleven atheletes were killed in the operation and an ill-fated rescue attempt by German security forces.

“The film is based on the book written by George Jonas, a book in which there is no truth,” said Ehud Danoch, Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles, in a reference to Canadian journalist Jonas’ book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

“It is, in fact, based on things that [self-styled Mossad man] Yuval Aviv told the author,” Danoch said. “This same Yuval claimed to have been in the Mossad and the head of a Mossad team, a claim that was untrue. At most he was a ‘selector’ for El Al for a few months,” Danoch said, referring to the airline’s unarmed security personnel who interview departing passengers.

According to Danoch, throughout the film Spielberg equates the Mossad agents and the terrorists. “This is an incorrect moral equation. We in Israel know this. There is also a certain pretensiousness in attempting to treat a painful, decades-long conflict by means of quite superficial statements in a two and a half hour movie.”

“As a Hollywood movie, I assume that in Hollywood it will be defined as a well-made film, but from the standpoint of the messages it sends, the messages are problematic.”

As an example, Danoch cited a scene in which a Palestinian terrorist named Ali delivers “a monologue of two or three minutes in which he lays out the Palestinians’ arguments. There is no counter-monologue to this.”

The diplomat said that Israeli officials had inquired about the film, but that the screenplay had been a closely guarded secret.

“When we asked regarding the screenplay, we were told, of course, that Spielberg would not do anything that would hurt Israel.”

Danoch, speaking to Israel Radio, declined to answer directly when asked if the film was likely to aid those who criticize Israel’s policy of targeted assassination of terrorists and their commanders.

 

ISRAELI OLYMPIC WIDOWS PREVIEW MUNICH

Israeli widows preview Spielberg’s “Munich”
By Dan Williams
Reuters
December 9, 2005

www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L09769928.htm

Steven Spielberg faces fierce debate over his film about Israel’s retaliation for the Palestinian attack on its team at the Munich Olympics, but the director has at least one fan: the widow of a slain athlete.

Ilana Romano, whose weightlifter husband Yosef was the first Israeli sportsman gunned down during the 1972 guerrilla raid, said she attended an exclusive courtesy screening of “Munich” in Tel Aviv this week along with fellow widow Ankie Spitzer.

An advance copy of the thriller, which opens in the United States on Dec. 23 and in Israel next month, was flown out by its producer Kathleen Kennedy and screenwriter Tony Kushner.

“They were very nice, and wanted to get across the point to us that the film was made with utmost sensitivity,” Romano told Reuters on Friday.

“For me, it was important that the film does no dishonour to the memory of the murdered athletes, nor to the image of the State of Israel. Both my criteria were satisfied,” she said.

Though no stranger to tackling highly charged historical events in his films, Spielberg has kept a low profile over Munich. Confidants say the director, recognising the potential for his film to spark controversy, wants it to speak for itself.

Munich tells of the Israeli agents assigned to hunt down and kill the Palestinians suspected of planning the Olympics assault, in which 11 athletes died. With Israel and the Palestinians still locked in conflict 30 years on, it remains a loaded episode.

Spielberg has also hinted that his portrayal of Israel’s reprisals tactics would not be entirely flattering and would raise questions about the U.S. “war on terror” since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

SPOOKED BY SOURCES

Veterans of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency came out of the cold to question Spielberg’s sourcing after it emerged that Munich was based in part on “Vengeance”, a 1984 book drawn from the purported confessions of a former assassin who said he broke rank in protest at the retaliations policy.

“I think it is a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should have based this film on a book that is a falsehood,” said David Kimche, a former Mossad deputy director.

Israel has never formally acknowledged responsibility for the series of shootings, explosive booby-traps and cross-border commando raids that killed 10 Palestinians linked to Black September, the group behind the Munich slayings.

The reprisal campaign included the 1973 killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for Black September’s leader. Six members of the Israeli hit team were prosecuted for murder, and Israel eventually paid compensation to the victim’s family.

Black September mastermind Mohammad Daoud has also questioned the basis for Spielberg’s portrayal.

While Romano said Munich contained “historical surprises” -- on which she declined to elaborate, citing reluctance to spoil the film for viewers -- the widow credited Spielberg with fairly exploring Israel’s reasons for mounting the reprisal missions.

“At the time, I had no dilemma (about the policy),” she said. “There was simply no other way. The film strengthened this view, for me.”

Spitzer, whose fencer husband Andrei was killed in a botched German attempt to rescue Israeli athletes taken hostage by Palestinian gunmen, could not be reached for comment.

 

AN ARAB-AMERICAN CRITICIZES STEVEN SPIELBERG

Spielberg is wrong
By Joseph Farah
Freeman Center for Strategic Studies
December 6, 2005

In a little more than two weeks, Steven Spielberg will release “Munich,” his epic film about the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

But the movie, Spielberg warns us, is not really about this unjustifiable, murderous act. It’s really about the human cost of a political quagmire - the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As Spielberg puts it in the latest issue of Time magazine, “The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.”

If that is truly the message of “Munich,” the film is a blatant lie, propaganda, a waste of time. He suggests, “The worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted.”

That statement suggests, rightly or wrongly, that each side in the conflict is persecuted.

Now there is no question that the Israelis are persecuted - hated for who they are because of who they are. And there is no question that the Arab people are oppressed.

But are the Arabs persecuted?

I don’t think that’s the right terminology and I say this as an Arab-American.

Though I haven’t seen the film, I can judge Spielberg’s words and descriptions. It’s time for someone to recognize that the Israel people are persecuted and the Arab people are oppressed by the same enemy.

That enemy is the Muslim leadership in the Middle East and elsewhere that oppresses its own people and scapegoats the Jews as a way of turning the enmity of its own oppressed people away from its rulers and channeling it toward the persecution of the Jews.

There’s another reason Spielberg’s premise of “intransigence” is so obviously false.

One side in the Middle East conflict - the Israeli side - has bent over backward to solve the problem. The Israelis have sacrificed concerns about their own security in an effort to give the Arabs what they say they want - a land of their own. And every time they make another unilateral move in that direction, they are met with more violence and higher stakes.

To accuse the Israelis of “intransigence” is about as big a lie as one can tell.

The problem in the Middle East, ultimately, is that one side seeks to destroy the other.

Can anyone deny that the Arabs still seek to destroy Israel and eradicate every Jew from the Middle East?

On the other hand, Israelis do not seek to destroy their enemies in the Middle East. If they sought to do so, they have the capability of doing it. They have possessed that capability for a long time. They have never used it. In fact, they have been a model of restraint even when faced with the possibility of defeat and destruction themselves.

The real danger in the Middle East, to which Spielberg appears oblivious, is that we are nearing a time when the Arabs will have for the first time the ability to destroy Israel.

That is the real thriller on our horizon.

Instead, Spielberg has chosen to make a movie about the past, about the balance of terror that has kept the quest for peace and freedom in the Middle East at an intractable impasse.

Coming very soon, the Muslim powers that have both persecuted the Jews and oppressed the Arabs will have within their arsenal weapons of mass destruction that could destroy Israel.

Will they sit on them the way the Israelis have for more than 40 years?

I don’t think so. I doubt Steven Spielberg believes that. I don’t know anyone in their right mind who would want to take that chance.

Steve Spielberg is a gifted moviemaker. But he fails to understand one of the central lessons of history. Appeasement of evil never works.

FULL ARTICLES

“A MOVIE THAT WISHES TO BE SHOCKING AND INOFFENSIVE AT THE SAME TIME”

Washington Diarist
By Leon Wieseltier
The New Republic
December 9, 2005

www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051219&s=diarist121905

A few days before I read in Time that Steven Spielberg’s new movie is so significant that there would be no advance screenings of it, I went to an advance screening of it. The fakery is everywhere, isn’t it, though in this instance it nicely captures the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film. The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays. For this reason, perhaps, they have devised a movie that wishes to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time. It tells the story of the Israeli retaliation for the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972--specifically, of the nasty adventures of a team of five Israelis that is dispatched to Europe to destroy eleven Palestinians. The film is powerful, in the hollow way that many of Spielberg’s films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid. Spielberg knows how to overwhelm. But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away.

The real surprise of Munich is how tedious it is. For long stretches it feels like The Untouchables with eleven Capones. But its tedium is finally owed to the fact that, for all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself. It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israelis make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents. All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective. (I am referring only to the war between the terrorists and the counterterrorists. The larger picture is darker. Over the years more civilians were killed in Israeli air strikes than in the Palestinian atrocities that provoked those air strikes. The justice of Israel’s defense of itself should not be confused with the rightness of everything that it does in self-defense.) No doubt Munich will be admired for its mechanical symmetries, which will be called complexity. But this is not complexity, it is strategy. I mean of the marketing kind: I note that the filmmakers have nervously retained the distinguished services of Dennis Ross to guide the film through the excitable community of people who know about its subject. Munich is desperate not to be charged with a point of view. It is animated by a sense of tragedy and a dream of peace, which all good people share, but which in Hollywood is regarded as a dissent, and also as a point of view. Its glossy caution almost made me think a kind thought about Oliver Stone. For the only side that Steven Spielberg ever takes is the side of the movies.

The screenplay is substantially the work of Tony Kushner, whose hand is easily recognizable in the crudely schematic quality of the drama, and also in something more. The film has no place in its heart for Israel. I do not mean that it wishes Israel ill; not at all. But it cannot imagine any reason for Israel beyond the harshness of the world to the Jews. “The world has been rough with you,” the oracular gourmand godfather of an underground anarchist family, a ludicrous character plummily played by Michael Lonsdale, tells Avner Kauffman, the Israeli team leader. “It is right to respond roughly to such treatment.” Avner’s mother, whose family was destroyed by the Nazis, preaches this about the Jewish state: “We had to take this, because no one was going to give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes.” Zionism, in this film, is just anti-anti-Semitism. The necessity of the Jewish state is acknowledged, but necessity is a very weak form of legitimacy. There are two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse. One of the Israeli killers recalls a midrash about God’s compassion for the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, and keeps on killing. Another one of the Israeli killers protests that “Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong. ... We’re supposed to be righteous,” and keeps on killing.

All this is consistent with Tony Kushner’s view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was “not the right answer,” and that the creation of Israel was “a mistake,” and that “establishing a state means fucking people over.” (If he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean fucking people over.) When Avner’s reckoning with his deeds takes him to the verge of a breakdown, he joins his wife and child in Brooklyn and refuses to return to Israel, as if decency is impossible there. No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive. And the progressive Jewish playwright Tony Kushner’s image of Israel oddly brings to mind the reactionary Jewish playwright David Mamet’s image of Israel: For both of them, its essence is power.

The Israeli response to Black September marked the birth of contemporary counterterrorism, and it is difficult not to see Munich as a parable of American policy since September 11. “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values,” Golda Meir grimly concludes early in the film, and one is immediately grateful for the un-Cheney-like sensation of a dissonance. Yet the film proclaims that terrorists and counterterrorists are alike. “When we learn to act like them, we will defeat them!” declares one of Avner’s men, played by Daniel Craig, already with a license to kill. Worse, Munich prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion. This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety of other people can hold.

[Correction on The New Republic’s website: This article originally stated that Time wrote there would be no advance screenings of Munich. In fact, Time wrote there had been no advance screenings. We regret the error.]

 

“HOLLYWOOD IS ALL ABOUT BEING TRENDY AND ISRAEL IS NOT THE TREND”

Spielberg is no friend of Israel
You never want to be labeled a fan of Israel in today’s Hollywood
By Jack Engelhard
Ynetnews
December 11, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3182751,00.html

It remains to be seen, literally, if Steven Spielberg has switched sides, from kosher (“Schindler’s List”), to treyf. His movie, “Munich,” will be opening in a few days and early word has it that he has indeed gone “Hollywood.” This means that he’s joined the trend to the Left, and that’s the way to go if you want to do lunch in that town again.

If advance screenings prove accurate (the movie is set to open December 23), Spielberg has used the Olympic Massacre of 1972 to send a message that brings to mind the words of MGM tycoon Louis B. Mayer: “Movies are for entertainment. If you want to send a message, send a telegram.”

Regardless, Spielberg’s message is that the bad guys who murdered 11 Israelis are not all that bad, and that the Israeli secret services that pursued the killers, the good guys, are not all that good. They’re troubled by second thoughts. There isn’t much difference, according to Spielberg’s telegram, between killers and avengers.

Observers of our culture may conclude that Spielberg has bought an even bigger script than the one at hand, featuring moral equivalency as a sub-title.

No doubt Spielberg is serious, and that’s the problem. People aren’t buying popcorn as much as they used to and altogether box office numbers are down. People want to laugh, or cry. They don’t want to be sold. I know this from experience. I still get questions about “Indecent Proposal.” Why did I let Hollywood make those changes?

Well, when you sell a novel to Hollywood it’s gone with the wind. Hemingway suggested that we (writers) throw our novels over the Hollywood border, grab the money and run. That’s more or less what I did.

The interior voice of my novel - “what would you do for a million dollars – would you sell your wife for a night?” - was the Arab-Israeli conflict, mostly on the side of Israel. For Paramount Pictures, that was too much of a message, so they made changes, and guess what, I agree.

What about Exodus?

Or rather, I agreed then, not so much now. For some time I’ve asked this question - would Leon Uris get “Exodus” to the screen in this climate? I keep coming up with the same answer. No! Things have changed and not only for movies but for books as well. Again, personal experience, as with my latest, “The Bathsheba Deadline, ” that’s running as a serial on Amazon.com. Lucky for me that Amazon.com came along, the largest of them all put together.

But not so fast. The novel was turned down by a dozen New York publishers for being too pro USA and much too Jewish, too pro-Israel. One top publisher said it plainly, or half plainly: “I really got caught up in your novel; enjoyed it very much; powerful stuff. But I will not make an offer, and I think you know why.”

Yes, I knew why and I know why.

Don’t look at me. A thousand other writers of my persuasion have had similar brush-offs from New York and Hollywood. Tom Clancy writes a novel that features Arabs as the bad guys, but Hollywood, for reasons of sensitivity or box office, conveniently changes these villains to neo-Nazis. “The Sum of all Fears” may well have been titled “The Fear of all Sums.”

French-Israeli filmmaker Pierre Rehov travels deep into jihad territory, exposes the universe that indulges and glorifies terrorism, and he’s been getting some attention, but he is struggling to find a major distributor for his eye-opening documentaries.

Spielberg has no such problems, first because he’s Spielberg, and second, in the case of “Munich,” he’s produced a baby that Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Stone could love - and these people can do lunch in Hollywood any time they want, and maybe that’s what it’s all about.

Telegrams should go back and forth

In Hollywood today, where David is Goliath and Goliath is David, you never want to be labeled a conservative or a fan of Israel. Hollywood is all about being trendy and Israel is not the trend. You won’t get invited to the right parties and you won’t win any Oscars if your heart bleeds for a nation that is always on the verge of being wiped off the map.

My problem? If Uris could not get “Exodus” funded in an atmosphere that still reeks of “Durban” (and where is the movie about all that, Steve?) then Spielberg should not be green-lighted for “Munich.” Sure, Hollywood, go ahead, make your day. Show us their side of the story, but what about our side?

Where is the counterpoint? If you are trending toward political themes, yes, that is your right, but where is our Right, in which decidedly I mean the Right side of politics that has us walking with a target on our backs, meaning those of us who differ on moral equivalency and other trends?

Jews pioneered Hollywood. If, as our enemies say, we own Hollywood, well, here’s the plot twist - we have lost Hollywood, and we have lost Spielberg. Spielberg is no friend of Israel. Spielberg is no friend of truth. His “Munich” may just as well have been scripted by George Galloway.

Yes, Hollywood, send a telegram, but, to communicate and to get the message fair and straight, telegrams should go back and forth.

(Jack Engelhard is the author of the bestselling novel and movie “Indecent Proposal”)

 

“A NEW KIND OF ANTIWAR MOVIE FOR A NEW KIND OF WAR”

What ‘Munich’ Left Out
By David Brooks
Op-Ed Columnist
The Ne