The Israel-Syria war of words
Friday, August 17th, 2007This week’s story is about the likelihood of an Israeli war with Syria, and in part about the role of the media in hyping it up. Israel has some terrific journalists, whose reporting is cynical, spin-conscious and explicit about political agendas in a way that is rare in many other countries. Yet when it comes to what they hear from intelligence sources, quite a few are happy to sprinkle it liberally into their stories without making it clear where it comes from, let alone analysing their sources’ motives.
Intelligence sources are always dubious: spies know that journalists find anything with a whiff of secrecy very tempting, and what they tell you is, by its nature (and on purpose), very hard to check. There’s been a lot in the Israeli media over the past months about what they’re really thinking in Damascus and Teheran–stories like this and this, where it is hard to see how the information can have come from anywhere but the Israeli security establishment. I don’t think the establishment’s agenda is to provoke a war, but rather to cover its backside against accusations that it didn’t foresee one. But as the rash of pronouncements about “we don’t want a war and nor do they” this week showed, it realised that the media spin had started to take on a life of its own.
