"I have had the bizarre--and frustrating--experience of watching the current [Middle East] conflict play out on U.S. cable television," writes Lawrence Pintak in the
Columbia Journalism Review.
Pintak, who runs a media center at the American University in Cairo, says the often simple-minded coverage reminds him "why many Americans have such a limited--and distorted--view of the world." He
would normally monitor the events through "voracious consumption of Arab and U.S. media," but was on vacation in California during the first week of this violent go-round. That meant catching
"glimpses of the conflict in bite-sized snatches" on cable news. "At times, the coverage has seemed as much a fantasy as Disney's Space Mountain, and the level of Middle East knowledge on the part of
some television anchors only a few notches higher than that of the tattooed biker couple waiting in line for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride," he laments.
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