The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
 

Vol: 34 Issue: 8 - Thursday, July 08, 2004
Special Report: How to Read between the Lines
by Jack Kinsella

One of the more interesting creations of the modern media is the news
'analyst'.  It is a generic catch-all term to describe people who
interpret and explain what passes for news.  But it isn't because the news
is so complicated that it requires analysis.

Rather, it is so heavily propagandized that it requires interpretation to
separate truth from deception.   Bill O'Reilly's tag line is 'the spin
stops here,' but it is more than just a tag line for a TV show.  The fact
his show exists is ample proof that the mainstream press is neither
objective nor trustworthy.

To be informed in the 21st century, you can't simply 'read' the news. It
is first necessary to discern the agenda behind the reporting.  If you
only read the New York Times, you are not merely misinformed, you are not
just the object of someone else's agenda, but you become part of it.

Here are seven 'flags' to look for, seven 'lessons' in how to read between
the lines and analyze the news for yourself.

The first lesson in reading between the lines is to learn to look for and
recognize misleading definitions or terminology designed to imply a 'fact'
not in evidence.

To illustrate, one need look no further than the media coverage of Israel.
When the New York Times refers to the Temple Mount, for example, it always
describes it as being what 'Israel claims to have 'been the site of the
First and Second Temple'.  The Times also consistently adds the phrase,
'which the Arabs call the Haram al Sharif'.

It is an indisputable fact of history that both the First and Second
Temple existed on the Temple Mount. It is not a Jewish 'claim' subject to
arbitration; it is a fact of history.  Period.  The stones of the 'Wailing
Wall' erected by King Solomon have stood for three thousand years. They
are kind of hard to ignore.

But the New York Times never uses the term Temple Mount and never mentions
it as the single holiest site in Judaism.  And it never misses a chance to
frame it as the 'third holiest site in Islam', either.

At first glance, it seems like nit-picking, but once you begin to
entertain the notion that Israel's merely 'claims' the Temple, you become
susceptible to the notion that the Islamic claim might also have some
validity.

Once you are ready to accept that notion, you'll hardly notice that Ariel
Sharon never appears in print without his title of 'hardliner' and Yasser
Arafat is just plain old 'Yasser Arafat', not Yasser Arafat, leader of the
Palestinian terror movement for forty years.

In mainstream news coverage, you will also notice that al-Qaeda is a
'terrorist' group, as are the various offshoot groups chopping off the
heads of helpless captives when they aren't engaged in killing other
Muslims in Iraq.

But Hezbollah, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Islamic Jihad are all
'militant' groups. The reason?  Because the mainstream media is
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, so you should be, too.  It is hard
to portray 'terrorists' as sympathetic figures, but 'militants' are only
as evil as their cause.

The second lesson in reading between the lines involves figuring out the
agenda behind the reporting.  If a particular news source has demonstrated
it has a particular agenda, any news story that advances that agenda is
probably distorted and should be read with that agenda in mind.

CNN's reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was so distorted and
agenda-driven that the government of Israel briefly classified it as
'enemy propaganda' and ordered it removed from Israeli cable services.

So a report about Israel on CNN should be carefully compared to a report
on the same story as published in the Jerusalem Post.  Somewhere in the
middle lies the actual news.

The same can be said for the BBC.  In fact, the BBC is so biased that its
only real value as a source of information is to serve an as object lesson
to demonstrate what propaganda disguised as news looks like.

The third lesson in reading between the lines is to look for opinions
disguised as news. There are various ways to slant the reporting to suit
the news organization's opinion.

Quoting somebody else making a statement of 'fact' is a good one.  That
way, the news organization can claim 'objectivity' while still pushing its
own agenda.  Interviewers often disguise their opinions to sound like
interview 'questions'.

On February 7, 2001, "The Early Show" co-host Bryant Gumbel interviewed
former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross about what Ariel Sharon's election
victory meant for the peace process.

If there is a question in the following statement, I can't find it.  (For
the record, neither could Ross)

"But does he [Arafat] even have a chance with - with Sharon, when many
objective observers view him as - as not only a racist, a terrorist, a
murderous war criminal?"  Gumbel 'asked'.

Your eyes were immediately drawn, I suspect, to the description of Sharon
as, 'a racist, a terrorist, a murderous war criminal'.  What you should
have noticed FIRST was Gumble's attribution of that assessment to "many
OBJECTIVE observers".

To Bryant Gumble, that is an 'objective' assessment of Ariel Sharon, so by
definition, it is also Gumble's assessment of Ariel Sharon.

Reading between the lines reveals a lot more than just the news.  It also
reveals the truth, which is seldom the same thing.

The fourth lesson in reading between the lines is to look for context in
the story.

The October 23 edition of 'Teen Newsweek,' a magazine distributed to
middle school students across America, featured a prominent photo of three
Palestinians, with the man in the middle holding up his blood-covered
hands.

The caption reads: "In the West Bank city of Ramallah, bloodied
Palestinian protestors express their rage." In context, the caption should
have read, "Palestinians still blood-soaked from stabbing and
disemboweling two innocent Israelis"-- but that would only convey the
facts.

The editorial objective was to convey propaganda disguised as news.

The fifth lesson in reading between the lines involves looking for what
ISN'T being reported.  We regularly discuss stories that should be all
over the front pages, but aren't.

Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi recently told a skeptical Tom Brokaw that, "I
believe very strongly that Saddam had relations with al Qaeda. And these
relations started in Sudan. We know Saddam had relationships with a lot of
terrorists and international terrorism. Now, whether he is directly
connected to the September atrocities or not, I can't vouch for this. But
definitely I know that he has connections with extremism and terrorists."

Since that is a direct quote from the Prime Minister of Iraq, I went to
the New York Times and entered the line; "But definitely I know that he
has connections with extremism and terrorists" into their search engine.

The New York Times' motto is 'all the news that's fit to print'.  The
Prime Minister of Iraq linking Saddam Hussein to New York's own Twin
Towers didn't fit the New York Times agenda.

(It also didn't fit into the paper, proving that it is sometimes possible
to read between the lines, even when there are no lines to read between.)

The sixth lesson in reading between the lines involves looking for true
facts being distorted in order to imply false conclusions.

For example, the phrase; "hundreds of people have been killed, the vast
majority Palestinians" is an indisputable fact. The true fact implies the
false conclusion that Israeli soldiers are the aggressors and routinely
use excessive force.

It is also a true fact that the Palestinian death toll works out to LESS
than one death per Palestinian riot, but THAT true fact implies an
entirely different conclusion.

They are both true facts. The both say the same thing.  One implies a
pro-Israeli conclusion; the other implies a pro-Palestinian conclusion.
Neither conclusion is correct.  The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

You find it by reading between the lines.

The seventh lesson in reading between the lines is to be on the lookout
for the distortion of known facts.

Not too long ago, a picture of a bloodied and battered young man crouching
beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman graced the front page of the New
York Times, the Associated Press, the BBC and throughout the Arab world.

The caption identified him as a Palestinian victim of the recent riots.
The implication was that the Israeli policeman beat him.  The photo evoked
considerable sympathy for the victim and confirmed the popular view of
Israel as the brutal occupier.

When Tuvia Grossman returned home to Chicago, he informed the New York
Times that they had the story wrong.  Grossman, an American Jew, was the
bloodied 'Palestinian' in the photo.  He had been bloodied by a
Palestinian mob that had beaten and stabbed him for ten minutes before the
club wielding policeman arrived to fight them off.

It wasn't until Grossman went public that the New York Times printed the
correction, together with the true story of his near-lynching.

Without the public pressure applied on the Times editors, Grossman would
still be the poster child for Palestinian 'victims' of Israeli
'aggression', instead of a Jewish victim of a Palestinian lynch mob.

When asked, "What will be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the
world?" the very FIRST thing Jesus said in reply was, "Take heed that no
man deceive you." (Matthew 24:3-4)

The Apostle Paul admonished us to, "Prove all things; hold fast that which
is good."   (1 Thessalonians  5:21)

"Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not
of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others;
but let us watch and be sober." (1 Thessalonians 5:6)

"But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the
people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among
them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at
the watchman's hand." (Ezekiel 33:6)