MSM -- missing all the big stories

Bret Stephens, an editorial writer for the WSJ has a column outlining how journalists have consistently missed the big stories:

The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless.

He goes on to describe how they completely missed the real story of what was going on with Arafat and Israel:

Take Western coverage of Israelis and Palestinians during the past dozen years. During the years of the peace process, a succession of journalists trooped through the region, reporting a handful of stories: the expansion of Israeli settlements; the chemistry between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli prime minister, and their relationship with Bill Clinton; the exact percentage of land offered by Israel at various stages of negotiation; the conflict between moderates and extremists on both sides.

These were true stories, in the sense that they were (for the most part) factually accurate and reflected the realities of the peace process. But the peace process was not the only relevant reality of the time. Arafat and his lieutenants continued to call for Israel's destruction in speeches to Arab audiences. Palestinian Authority maps of the region, posted in schools and public buildings, had nothing named Israel on them. Billions in foreign aid were pumped into the PA, but there was little to show for it in terms of a better economy.

Arafat's political opponents were sacked, arrested, tortured or simply shot by masked men in the street.

All this was public knowledge throughout the '90s. But because the information sat so awkwardly with the central premises of the peace process – namely, that Arafat was committed to peace and that the Palestinian problem was foreign occupation, not domestic tyranny – it tended to be dismissed as so much trivia. So the PA is corrupt; what else is new? So Arafat makes incendiary speeches? Rhetoric for the masses. Few people could recognise then that Arafat wasn't the key to peace but the principal obstacle to it. Today that's conventional wisdom.

A similar dynamic took place once the intifada began and the media meta-narrative switched from peace process to cycle of violence. Here, supposedly, Israelis and Palestinians engaged in acts of tit-for-tat killing; whenever a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up in a Jerusalem cafe, one could be sure to learn that his brother had been killed by the Israeli army. Yet while the cycle-of-violence hypothesis was highly convenient for reporters reluctant to pin the blame on one side, it was also falsifiable – and false. When the Israelis invaded the West Bank and killed the top ranks of Hamas, the incidence of terrorism didn't rise. It peaked.

It is, of course, impossible to anticipate events, in Harold Macmillan's sense of the word. But none of the examples listed here belong in that category. Norman Podhoretz predicted the peace process would lead to war. Charles Wolf saw the hollowness of Japan Inc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. And George W. Bush understood, and said, that a free Iraq would serve as a beacon of liberty for the oppressed Arab world.

Bret is too nice to say that they missed all this because they lack any diversity in their ideology and they see their role as actively promoting their point of view. They didn't run these stories because the information conficted with what they wanted to believe.