STILL WAITING FOR A CEASE-FIRE
Understanding the News When It Is in a Diplomatic Holding Pattern
A headline flitted across my screen early last week, seemed important:
CIA Director to Hold Talks in Cairo on Gaza Truce.
Then the story disappeared.
Why? Where did it go?
The talks went nowhere, the unidentified CIA Director, William Burns, left Cairo with no progress in discussions with Hamas and Israeli government reps to get the hostages released and a cease-fire in place. Although I had to look very hard online to find a mention of that frustrating outcome.
The war in Gaza is in the long resolution phase, and this post is dedicated to explaining how journalism functions at this point in a conflict.
If you follow events in traditional news media or on social media you will see these flare-ups: SOMETHING is happening, and then that something disappears.
Here’s the reason: Journalism is a calling but it is also a business. At legacy outlets, print or broadcast, huge amounts of money are spent covering a story like the Israel/Hamas war in Gaza. That expenditure needs to be justified. In the new social media news world, an individual’s online following needs to be constantly bolstered by frequent posts purporting to have new information preferably outrageous which keeps engagement levels high.
But as conflicts shift into the resolution phase the news flow slows down. Diplomacy really does require a certain amount of discretion, call it secrecy if you like, in order to successfully stop wars. Nobody knows what’s going on and that’s not a bad thing.
Yet in these periods hacks are pestered to keep the story going. The money has been spent, the top editors say, we’ve got to keep readers/listeners/viewers interested in it.
Skilled negotiators use this dynamic to spin public opinion. In 1995, towards the end of the Bosnian War, Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke was dispatched by President Clinton to the Balkans to try and negotiate a cease-fire and resolution of that country’s civil war.
Clinton had tried to avoid direct US involvement in the conflict. He had enough domestic political problems to attend to but the Bosnian Serbs massacre of 8000 unarmed men and boys at Srebrenica and the humiliation of UN peacekeepers in that benighted town, forced the issue on him.
The Republican Senate Majority leader Robert Dole, severely wounded fighting in Italy during World War 2, took a moral stand against the modern fascists running Serbia and its Bosnian proxies, and guaranteed Clinton bi-partisan support for military action. NATO jets engaged in a brief bombing campaign which acted like a slap in the face to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
The stage was set for diplomacy. Starting in October, Holbrooke shuttled between Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo speaking to the leaders of the warring parties. First task negotiate a cease-fire.
NPR sent me to the Balkans for this last phase of the conflict. I arrived in Zagreb and and was assigned a story about Holbrooke’s attempts to get a cease-fire in place. I stalked him for an afternoon, his press person told me to wait in his hotel. Hours went by, cigarettes got smoked. But then he walked into the lobby, I just pushed forward and said the magic incantation: NPR.
He pulled me into the elevator and began to talk into my microphone barely pausing for breath as we walked down the corridor to his suite. He assured me he would always talk to NPR. What did he say? Nothing related to the facts, which at that moment were fluid. The story in the NPR archives is slugged “Holbrooke Has Much Work To Do in Bosnia”.
He was spinning me so that people in the Administration, who listened to NPR religiously, as well as monitors for the warring parties based in America, would hear his message — work harder — clearly.
Three days later, in Sarajevo, he strode past the press corps assembled outside the town hall where he was to meet with Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. Holbrooke came out and made a statement repeating his message that much work was still left to do. No cease-fire. I raced back to my guest house, bashed out a news spot, hooked up the satellite phone and managed to make contact with the news desk. I read the script down the line. By the time, my spot had been put into the schedule for the newscast an hour later the announcement had been made, a cease-fire would go into effect in a week and as a confidence building measure the Bosnian Serbs would pull their artillery back from the heights overlooking Sarajevo. The city had been under siege since 1992. Water, electricity and gas supplies would be restored.
Holbrooke had not told us the truth and my news spot was dated. It never ran.
The reason I tell you this story is to illustrate why, when conflicts enter the resolution phase, you should take everything reported with a very large grain of salt. The Gaza situation is, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the resolution phase — unless there is some fresh atrocity: Hamas managing to slip a suicide team into Israel and killing a people in Tel Aviv or some group of deputized vigilante settlers under the command of Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir murder attack a Palestinian village in the West Bank leaving many dead.
Until a cease-fire/hostage exchange is agreed, the threat of a full invasion of Rafah is also a form of diplomatic spin. Much of the writing about the war right now is by journalist/commentators who have about as much knowledge of the full picture of negotiations as those of us following Holbrooke from Zagreb to Sarajevo had. They are easily spun.
This lack of concrete facts can lead legacy media into some strange places. This week one New York Times opinion columnist, Bret Stephens, claimed President Biden has made an error in withholding some heavy ordnance from Israel
The munitions cutoff helps Hamas
And Thomas Friedman wrote Biden has made a mistake not because he is helping Hamas but he is helping Bibi:
… the move has enabled Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect attention from the fact that the most dangerous leader threatening Israel today is not Biden but Bibi.
Anyway, as the words sluice out from a nearly infinite number of commentator monkeys (myself included) typing on a similar number of keyboards please remember:
You can’t fast forward reality but diplomats can obscure it for their own reasons and you should be on guard when you read things and keep your blood pressure in check.
Or re-focus your attention:
Or on what is happening in Tbilisi, Georgia
And, of course, there is a much larger scale war, with greater implications for global security still going on in Ukraine.
And since writing one Substack isn’t enough subscribe to my long term writing project, History of a Calamity