"Our world. It’s gone. Did we ever grieve or cry, no."
The shift from domestic politics coverage to foreign war coverage is always jarring. It's even more jarring in a social media maelstrom.
This week’s soundtrack: Brutus - “War”
Over the weekend, Hamas launched a multi-front incursion into southern Israel from Gaza. Rockets were fired, gunmen made their way into cities in Israel and hostages were taken. At last count, Hamas has killed more than 900 Israelis. It’s the deadliest war in Israel in a long time. It’s going to be even deadlier and it’s probably going to last a long time.
The American news media shifted from coverage of the Speaker mess to the war almost immediately upon the first strikes over the weekend. TV news shifted to around-the-clock coverage, with on-the-ground reporting in Israel and interviews with Israelis, foreign affairs officials and anyone with knowledge of the war.
Ultimately, the “if it bleeds, it leads” notion wins out in covering a war, especially if that war is far away from American borders. Many have died so far – 1,100+, as of this writing, the vast majority of them civilians – in the war and more will definitely die. Like the Ukraine-Russia war, coverage may wain if the conflict goes on for a year or more, but the newness of this particular war means it will be at the front of mind for the next week.
Broadly, the news media covers war not unlike it covers politics, often with winners and losers. This, of course, is facile.
And perhaps this is my legacy media bubble (I’ll get to social media below), but I’ve found that the coverage has been better than expected and certainly better than Israel’s blanket bombing of Gaza a few years ago. Israel gets more favorable coverage than it deserves in American media, but this particular conflict hasn’t tracked that way too deeply (there haven’t been enough Palestinian voices in the American media, but it’s been better then usual). The New York Times, for example, has filled its homepage with background coverage, context and information on civilian deaths in southern Israel and in Gaza. While it is impossible to provide every angle on a war, this one, for the most part, has been well-covered. The coverage has outlined what has happened now, the broad history of the conflict and the future of the war that awaits Israel and Gaza.
(Apple News sent out a morning email today with the headline “What to know about the Israel-Hamas conflict” and I cannot recommend against the word “conflict” enough . I am all for using careful language in journalism, but a war is a war. Call it that. “Conflict” obfuscates. “War” does not.)
The Speaker fight has been relegated to the middle or bottom of the front pages of major newspapers, sometimes in connection to the budget’s money for Israeli foreign aid. With the at least nine American citizens among the dead, the American relationship with Israel (the U.S. is sending military help right now) and the tragedy of civilian hostages and casualties…it’s hard to see this going away in the American press. Terrorism has been one of the common plot points of the 21st century foreign policy media coverage and this war will ignite a lot of interest in the U.S. audience.
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My expertise, such as it is, lies in the legacy news media, new media, domestic policy and the intersection of those things. That’s kind of what this newsletter addresses; it’s where my analysis mostly covers. The newness of this war and the recent developments in the north of Israel complicate things quite a bit a bit, so my own personal feelings about the place (it’s the country I’ve spent the most non-U.S. time. I was there as recently as one year ago) are in a bit of a mental blender right now.
That said, the name of this newsletter does reflect my worldview, writ large. It’s not breaking news to say that the situation in Gaza (and the West Bank, in very different ways) is a tragedy and it’s not breaking news to say that such despair brings people to unjustifiable things. Multiple things can be true at once and the long-term intractability of Gaza makes solutions very hard to find; Amos Harel’s piece on the four bad options strikes me as very apt.
Hamas’ place in Gazan society makes all of this even harder. It is, in fact, both a terrorist organization and a ruling political party. That makes it hard to flatten Hamas into ISIS, as Binyamin Netanyahu did on Monday, just as the context of Hamas’ charter, history and authoritarian nature makes it hard to simply compare it to Fatah.
Hamas used its role in Gazan civil society to lull Israeli officials into believing that violence was not on the horizon, according to a stellar Reuters report on Hamas’ training and planning for the war. Bombing Gaza into a parking lot strikes me as a bad move, but no one ever asks me about my plans for Gaza (and I hardly have the expertise to advise anyone).
(No one asked Mr. Not-a-Bedbug, either, but he’s got some suggestions. They are, of course, unhinged.)
In the context of my expertise, the degradation of Twitter (admittedly, not a super popular network in Israel and Gaza as compared to WhatsApp or even Facebook) continues to be a problem in this vein. The social media service’s various changes have made things far easier to spread disinformation about breaking news and various rumors and innuendo have spread like wildfire; Instagram has the same problem, of course, but Instagram never fancied itself an actual place for news (if I never see another IG story about “we stand with Israel”or a reminder that Hamas is a terrorist organization … it’ll be far too soon). Ed Zitron has a great analysis of the breakdown of Musk’s adjustments – the blue check problem, making links into images, removing the disinformation staff, etc. – over at his Substack.
I was texting with friends about the war – including people with whom I’ve traveled around Israel and the West Bank – and one friend summed it up well for many American Jews (especially people like me who have deep feelings for the place, if not the government): “It makes me so sad and feel so helpless.”
Considering the violence ahead, it’s the perfect summation.
Programming Update
Over at the ranch, we’ve got reporters covering the Association of the United States Army convention here in D.C. this week. That connects to the war in Israel right because the war has been a common point of conversation at the convention. As mentioned, the
This is all to say: Stay tuned to our site in the coming weeks. We’ll have the coverage as to how the U.S. public service IT world, the national security tech world and others are coordinating, watching and responding to the war.
Lulu update
Here are some photos from this week of Lulu. I’ve no exciting windup.
A Recommendation: Laura Shin’s The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
Writing a book about cryptocurrency is like assembling a plane while it’s in the air; the newness of the entire concept means that things change a lot between the book’s writing and its publish date. Connected is the other issue with crypto books being written now, as the authors self-select themselves as people who care about cryptocurrency. We’re not going to
That said, Laura Shin’s The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze is a fairly good, albeit semi-out-of-date, look at crypto and what it means. Shin buys a little into it, but she features some of the main characters (Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum fame features heavily) and strips them fairly bare. It’s an interesting time capsule to examine right now, in light of recent events.