alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

July 28, 2006

Seeing Through the Middle-East Darkly

by @ 2:50 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

There’s a couple of things I’ve seen over the last day or two that I wanted to pass along concerning the New Media and the Middle-East.

I try to listen to the On the Media podcast every week, but am just now getting around to last Friday’s broadcast, Balance Beam. It figures, because it deals exactly with what I’ve been trying to wrap my head around: a sense that what is happening now in Lebanon and Israel is critically important while at the same time sensing that we’re not getting the full picture.

Part of the problem is that I don’t live in the Middle-East. And, as Heinlein would probably say, you can’t really grok someone until you eat their food, and breathe their air. Actually, he said you can’t grok someone until you eat them, but eating someone from the Middle-East doesn’t like the surest path towards greater understanding. Instead, the best you and I can do is read about it, and try to form a picture from fragments.

And there’s the rub: while the foreign correspondence from the Washington Post and NYT is okay, okay is not the right standard for an issue of potentially historic proportions. (Here, I’m ignoring acts of journalistic barbarism like Fox News.) So, I’ve been going through BBC, Times of London, AFP, and Nouvelle Obs. (links go to rss feeds)

None of this is perfect either. It’s like learning about New Orleans by talking to people in Boston. Which is still better than learning about New Orleans by talking to people in Sweden.

This brings me back to the On the Media show I linked to above. The point of the piece is that everyone comes to the Israel-Lebanon situation with a set of assumptions. Those assumptions range from the meaning of the word “balance” to whether Palestine, or for that matter, the State of Israel, has a right to exist.

While I can’t tell you exactly what those assumptions are for the NYT and WaPo, I can tell you that it has a different feel to it than the foreign press. It’s kind of like the difference between Bistro D’Oc and an Au Bon Pain. No one needs to tell you which one is more authentic.

I wanted to add that for folks like me who don’t get a regular exposure to French, a couple of resources I’ve run across have been very helpful.

The first is the French Pod Class, an entertaining and educational weekly podcast on learning French.

The second is Radio France Internationale which offers news in basic French.

Et, Bon Appetit.

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One Response to “Seeing Through the Middle-East Darkly”

  1. shoofly Says:

    don’t forget the bloggers! like this one: lebanonupdates.blogspot.com/

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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