The Foghorn Of War (Update)

A War Of Words & Pictures

The oft-repeated claim of “40 beheaded babies” has metastasized into its own battle, with news organizations that initially ran with the unsubstantiated assertion suddenly reversing course over the last 24 hours due to an inescapable lack of evidence. The White House had to “walk back” Biden’s assertion that he’d seen images he hadn’t seen, and, after finally declining to verify the claim, the Israeli government publicized images of dead children … not “beheaded,” but, ultimately, still shocking and graphic.

Earlier this morning, Secretary of State Blinken was the first to see those images during a meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu. That inspired Blinken to call Hamas’s massacre the equivalent of “Ten 9/11s.” At a late morning briefing, Biden NatSec spokesperson John Kirby parried questions about Biden’s faulty claim, saying that the President’s remarks captured the essence of Hamas’s brutality. And by the afternoon, the new images made their way to CNN and other news outlets under the increasingly ubiquitous headline “babies murdered and burned.”

Of course, much of this can be ascribed to the foggy chaos emanating from the massacre and its aftermath. But it also demonstrates the dangerous journalistic flaccidity of our viral media environment, where the most incendiary headline is irresistible clickbait and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) turns media personalities, news organizations and infotainment outlets into stampeding herd animals. The post-tragedy stampede can be both an organic outgrowth of the endless, tech-juiced news cycle and a tantalizing opportunity for those with agendas to drive the herd exactly where they want them to go.

It’s something we’ve seen and experienced before. As I mentioned yesterday, dead babies were key to moving a reluctant herd toward the first Gulf War and, to Blinken’s unintentional point, unsubstantiated claims in the aftermath of 9/11 led to the suspension not just of reason, but of the Geneva Convention, the rule of law and the US Constitution. And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were trampled by the herd, despite the speciousness of the claims made about their nation. The indelible impact of specious claims and the lingering fog of 9/11 made all that “collateral damage” all-too acceptable to the American people.

None of that is necessarily predestined to happen now. But the unsubstantiated claim in question here has already been ensconced in the hearts and minds of many. Even this afternoon Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe repeated the claim in a segment on MSNBC. And on the other side, both earnest critics and shady apologists are pointing to it as an example of Israel’s “lies” and manipulation. The well has been poisoned. The saddest part of this episode is that some basic due diligence on the part of self-described “journalists” would’ve avoided all of this without detracting from the horror and brutality of what actually did happen.