Before I begin, let me say that I am appalled by the Israeli hard right government seizing land owned by Palestinians outside Gaza and around the country. Israel is clearly no longer the refuge for Europeans from the Holocaust, but has morphed into something else.
Having said that, as someone who has watched the PBS News Hour since the McNeil/Lehrer days, it is hard to watch since October 7. Since then the horrid pictures of dead and wounded children are the lead of every broadcast.
Tonight, Amna Nawaz did a 10 minute interview with a very appealing Palestinian poet who was arrested and harassed before he escaped to Egypt.
Bias does not have to be bald and stated, as it is on FOX News, it can be simply the selection of what story you choose to report. Before this segment, were stories on Gaza residents with the bodies of their families.
My own personal estimate is there are 10 minutes of stories of Palestinians injured vs stories of Israelis injured.
One would like to think if PBS existed during the Holocaust, they would have been reporting every night from Auschwitz, and aroused public opinion in the United States, which had Nazi sympathizers right up to the moment Hitler declared war against America, and some even after that.
But one wonders about where PBS News would have been when Americans fire bombed Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, and dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Presumably, Americans would have had little sympathy for those innocent civilians we bombed on the way to defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The rational would be:
1. They started it. We're ending it.
2. Those civilians voted for Hitler and in Japan, without a vote the people supported the Emperor; they are not really "innocent."
3. This is what war is: In modern war, there are always innocent victims.
What PBS could do would be to have people who are good at analyzing the ethics of what we are willing to allow to achieve military ends discuss all this at length on air--they have a full hour on their broadcast. During this, some would argue about what the "rules of engagement" mean, how they were developed, and how to analyze the horrific events going on in Gaza and Israel, what the background of this conflict is now (with Israel settlers pushing Palestinian off their land) and the suffering of Israelis under rocket attacks and terrorist attacks from Gaza.
There are no good guys in this conflict and plenty of bad guys, but it's disappointing to see the News Hour giving way to a personal bias from one of its newscasters.
Just think what would be said if every broadcast began with a story about Israelis dealing with the death and kidnapping of their relatives by a news anchor named Judith Cohen.
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