The adage “You can kill the mes­sen­ger, but not the mes­sage”  pur­port­ed­ly traces its roots to some­where in the Mid­dle Ages. Its 21^st cen­tu­ry appli­ca­tion is to do the lit­er­al killing bla­tant­ly, and dis­prove the sec­ond half of the admo­ni­tion furtively.

To see proof, one need look no fur­ther than the unholy admix­ture of Gaza and merg­ers and acqui­si­tions that trap media chains in the maw of enter­tain­ment behemoths,
More than 120 jour­nal­ists and media work­ers have been killed in Gaza, almost all of them by Israeli actions.
 No one knows exact­ly how many jour­nal­ists Hamas has silenced as per­ceived ene­mies or spies, but there’s no doubt they have done so.
Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders sug­gest­ed this week that U.S. TV out­lets focus less on stu­dent protests in the U.S. and “maybe take your cam­era and go to Gaza and show us the ema­ci­at­ed chil­dren who are dying of mal­nu­tri­tion because e of Netanyahu’s policies.”
Accord­ing to the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists (CPR), some 4,000 for­eign jour­nal­ists have gone to Israel to try to cov­er the war. I know a good num­ber of  them per­son­al­ly and by rep­u­ta­tion, and can assure the sen­a­tor with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion that if Israel would allow them into Gaza, they would be out of the Press brief­ing rooms and off their live shot hotel bal­conies and into the war zone faster than he can coin a quotable Sen­ate floor putdown.
It’s what real jour­nal­ists do, and why the Israeli author­i­ties make more effort to  curb, frus­trate and con­trol rather than coop­er­ate with them.
A CPR report this week not­ed that Israel’s actions, includ­ing cen­sor­ship, are “mak­ing it expo­nen­tial­ly hard­er to con­firm infor­ma­tion about the conflict’s dev­as­tat­ing impact on Gaza’s media com­mu­ni­ty – and, by exten­sion, about the broad­er impact of the war.”
An Israeli High Court deci­sion upheld the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) deci­sion “to pre­vent almost all for­eign media from Gaza. The only excep­tions are a hand­ful of tight­ly con­trolled army-led press tours”
 Ask your­self why, and then note that Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu’s cab­i­net voted unan­i­mous­ly to ban Al-Jazeera, which has local reporters in Gaza, from broad­cast­ing and work­ing in Israel.
Shut­ting down media you don’t like is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the “strong­man men­tal­i­ty”, but what it shows is weak­ness. The Israeli gov­ern­ment may have good rea­sons for dis­lik­ing Al-Jazeera, not least of which is on-the-ground report­ing by its impres­sive­ly brave and com­mit­ted local jour­nal­ists in Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel would under­stand­ably pre­fer to keep in the shad­ows, if not com­plete dark­ness. And that, as the mot­to of the Wash­ing­ton Post points out, is where democ­ra­cy goes to die.
Ban­ning Al-Jazeera is a clas­sic  “cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face” move.
A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of  Israelis who mat­ter in the world of pol­i­cy, opin­ion and deci­sion-mak­ing speak good to flu­ent Ara­bic. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera is the only major media out­let where Israeli offi­cials could put their point of view, or case, in front of  their Arab neigh­bours, untranslated.

                  ROLE MODELS

Mean­while, lead­ing West­ern media out­lets are hell-bent on their own ver­sion of self-harm.
When I was hired by CBS News in 1980, there were well-staffed for­eign bureaus in Lon­don, Paris, Bonn, Rome, War­saw, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Johan­nes­burg, Beirut, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Mani­la, Seoul, Tokyo and Mex­i­co City, with sub-bureaus in San Sal­vador, Man­agua, Amman and Beijing.
Last month, the once-upon-a-time Tiffany net­work closed its 50 year-old Tokyo bureau and laid off most of the staff as a cost-cut­ting mea­sure, so only four of those bureaus now exist.
This at a time when the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty deemed the Asia-Pacif­ic region it is most con­cerned about in terms of “renewed threat of nation-state aggression.”
With the excep­tion of CNN, the oth­er U.S. net­works are lit­tle if any bet­ter when it comes to reduc­ing for­eign news cov­er­age to long-dis­tance reporting.
In the days before prof­it topped being first and best for news divi­sions, the cul­ture at CBS was basi­cal­ly ‘noth­ing-is-impos­si­ble-to-cov­er-if-we-want-it-on-air’. No flights avail­able? Char­ter a plane, an exec­u­tive jet if nec­es­sary. Need a boat or a heli­copter? Fine. Air­line won’t let you fly with­out a visa for your des­ti­na­tion? Sign a waiv­er. If you got detained and shoved on the next flight back, well, it was worth a try.
Accord­ing to CBS leg­end, a for­eign edi­tor before my time once informed an accoun­tant who told him he was over bud­get: “You can’t bud­get news. If I’m over bud­get, the budget’s wrong.”
Today the blame is put on social media and its effect on adver­tis­ing revenue.
That’s a valid argu­ment, but only, in the mor­tal phrase the belea­guered for­eign edi­tor in Eve­lyn Waugh’s “Scoop” used to reply to  his proprietor’s wilder claims and ideas; “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”
The dirty secret is that the sit­u­a­tion suits both gov­ern­ments with some­thing to hide, and cor­po­rate man­age­ment with prof­its to the fore and no obvi­ous prin­ci­ples or com­mit­ment to what news is.
It curbs prop­er report­ing, and thus short­changes the pub­lic, which deserves what the admirable but in this case naïve Sen­a­tor Sanders exhorts frus­trat­ed jour­nal­ists to provide.

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