Propaganda War

QandO's McQ provides a couple of pieces on the propaganda side of fourth-generation warfare that is taking place in the Hezbollah/Israel conflict. He gives ample evidence of exactly what I was stating about the problem with the press.

I've been banging around the edges in recent days about the importance of propaganda in general and its application in particular concerning the current battle between Israel and Hezbollah. Tony Blankley does an excellent job today of addressing the importance of propaganda in forming opinions and how those opinions can have a far reaching and unwanted effect. The setup:

And it is vital to understand that while world opinion may be just the random collective judgment of mankind - it is usually not random, but rather, in part at least, a propaganda-manipulated opinion.

Currently, the United States and Israel find themselves confronting a world opinion that is being shaped and manipulated by unfriendly others, and by the residue of historic malevolence, including: Hezbollah propaganda, European anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism, Muslim anti-Semitism, historic European anti-Semitism, and a mainstream world media that is tropistic to the foregoing factors.

Some attempts are crude. Some quite sophisticated. Some are short-term efforts. Some are very long-term efforts. Most of the efforts attempt to exploit prejudices. Because the charges tend to be sensational and thus newsworthy the world media's attraction to reporting it is as natural as its existence.

He goes on with much more that's worth reading.

His second piece points out how Hezbollah has a press organ.

There is an orchestrated quality, or better said, integrated quality to their coverage. The are privy to Hezbollah's activities, a part of the fight and the first to report. They frame the story. Israel is left to either confirm or deny, but the story itself is already out there.

This is the war being badly lost by both the US and Israel. It is from Hezbollah's framing of the story which the world gets its first reports of what is happening in the fight.

Seems a no-brainer that it would be important to get inside that cycle and upstage their coverage. But when you have a free press which independently determines what and how they'll cover a story as opposed to one controlled by the combatant you're facing, that's difficult to do.

My question comes down to how much does the Hezbollah press organ affect the western media? How much of what we are hearing reported is a replay of "news" provided by Hezbollah? And, How much of the news is actually being reviewed? I assume that there is some review in the western press. Though I think companies like Reuters and API become a bypass valve for some of the checks.

I'm very pessimistic in believing that the average-joe takes the time to balance his news sources. I know I don't unless I have an early suspicion or the topic is interesting. Worse, I think that the EU press is much less interested in doubting the reporting, because they frankly dislike anyone that is powerful. I'm not saying all of Europe, but there seems to be some large countries there that take continual glee at seeing the US or Israel falter. Due to that, they tend to desire to believe the worst when it's handed to them.

The MSM in this country doesn't commonly appear to show sufficient skepticism on reports from these war zones. It also strikes me that the liberal leaning of a majority of the press takes a certain amount of pleasure when reports come in that make the present administration appear badly. Yes, that's my opinion, and likely comes from how and who I read from the MSM. It also comes from how I parse my news sources and compare their reporting of statements for or against US policy.