BY GEORGE SALAMON / “Iranian military commander tells Obama ‘all options are on the table’” Raw Story, March 16, 2013; “’All options are on the table’ in dealing with Iran,” Obama said, CBS News, March 20, 2013; “’All options are on the table,’” President Obama on Syria, USA Today, June 1, 2013; “’All options are on the table,’ Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense Danny Danon warned,” WND, November 24, 2013
BY GEORGE SALAMON / Media coverage can’t please either side on the Israel-Palestine or Israel-Iran conflicts. Once that’s accepted as a given, the differences in stories no longer garner much attention. The “liberal” media reveal bias for the Palestinian cause and are soft on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and goal of wiping the Zionist entity off the map. The “conservative” press expresses uncritical support for Israel and fails to recognize Iran’s legitimate quest to join the world’s nuclear powers club, which includes Israel. That’s the long-standing mantra of the complaints.
By George Salamon / There it was, as it usually is, the word that pops up in most stories about or related to the Holocaust: “banality.” This time it appeared in the headline and in its adjectival form in the text of an opinion piece in the Sunday Review Section of The New York Times on November 17: “The Banality of Robbing the Jews,” by Sarah Gensburger, a social scientist at France’s Center for Scientific Research.
BY GEORGE SALAMON / Just this past Sunday journalism’s unceasing debate on anonymous sources reared its head again. In the October 13 Sunday Review section of The New York Times Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s fifth public editor, wrote about “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources.” Dan Okrent, first public editor from 2003 to 2005, confronted the same issue during his tenure. Even then, novelist and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen had already had enough: “…the customary righteousness, disingenuousness, futility and wonky tedium of such debates are for me almost unbearable.”
BY GEORGE SALAMON / What an enticing headline the New York Times featured on Page 1 Sept. 30: “Warren is Now Hot Ticket On the Far Left.” The story, written by Jonathan Martin, told readers how Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has become the darling and favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 among America’s “far left,” and thus a threat to the party’s centrist front-runner, Hillary Clinton.