RED AND BLUE BABEL: Blue tribe viewers heard all about it!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2023

Red viewers, not so much: Last Friday morning, in print editions, the news report topped the front page of the New York Times.

It ran beneath a double headline in the upper-right hand corner of that page. The headlines in question said this:

ISRAELIS SAW PLAN FOR HAMAS ATTACK OVER A YEAR AGO
Officials Brushed Off Detailed Blueprint, Concluding It Couldn't Be Done

In certain parts of our divided news nation, the report was treated as a major blockbuster. 

Elsewhere, the report was ignored. Online, the report, by Bergman and Goldman, starts off exactly like this:

Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.

The report continues from there. For the record, it doesn't claim that Israel's highest officials ever saw the "Jericho Wall" report:

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

So said the Times' front-page report on Friday morning, December 1. That morning, we were struck by the way the report was received across our deeply siloed "cable news" journalistic establishment. 

We learned about the front-page report as we watched MSNBC's Morning Joe program that morning. 

We hadn't yet scanned the New York Times. But on Morning Joe, the report was the subject of an uninterrupted, 29-minute discussion which began at 6:04 a.m., right at the start of the program.

Thanks to the work of the Internet Archive, you can watch the entire discussion. To do so, you should start by clicking here.

The Morning Joe web site posted a nine-minute excerpt of the much longer discussion. On the Morning Joe site, the excerpt carries this blockbuster headline:

Biggest intelligence blunder in 50 years and a day: NYT reporter on what Israel knew

To watch that excerpt, click this. You'll be seeing the program's interview with Ronen Bergman, one of the authors of the New York Times' report.

For readers of the New York Times—for viewers of the Morning Joe program—this front-page report was treated as a major news event. As we watched the lengthy discussion on Morning Joe, we wondered how the report was being handled over on the Fox News Channel—more specifically, on the channel's corresponding morning program, Fox & Friends.

Occasionally, we clicked over to the red tribe program. As we did, we saw a variety of topics being discussed. 

Some of the topics seemed to be trivial; some seemed more substantial. That said, we never saw any mention of the front-page Times report. 

Later, we searched all four hours of that morning's Fox & Friends broadcast. Once again, we were drawing on the invaluable work of the Internet Archive.

What we found was somewhat surprising. We found no sign that the blockbuster report in the New York Times had ever been mentioned that day in the four hours allotted to the sprawling Fox & Friends franchise.

(Fox & Friends First airs at 5 a.m. on weekdays. Fox & Friends follows at 6 a.m. and continues for three hours.)

Should the report in the New York Times have been mentioned on Fox & Friends? As with everything under the sun, that's a matter of judgment.

As you can see from this CNN transcript, CNN didn't open its 6 a.m. program that day with the Times report. The program began as shown:

ANNOUNCER (12/1/23): This is CNN breaking news.

POPPY HARLOW: Good morning, everyone. Glad you're with us. I'm Poppy Harlow with Phil Mattingly in New York. And we do begin with breaking news this morning.

The truce between Israel and Hamas is over. Once again, explosions are rocking Gaza, and giant plumes of smoke are rising over that skyline. The fighting started just minutes after the seven-day truce expired at midnight, Eastern Time.

Israel accused Hamas of breaking the deal by firing a rocket. The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza says today's strikes have already killed at least 32 people. And this is the aftermath of a strike in Southern Gaza this morning.

As you can see in this second transcript, CNN reported and discussed the Times report later in the 6 o'clock hour. That said:

In the four total hours of Fox & Friends, the "biggest intelligence blunder in 50 years and a day" was never mentioned at all.

We offer this as an example of the shape of our modern news / information landscape. Under current journalistic arrangements, we live in a nation of red and blue bayous—waters which ring a landscape largely littered with prominent red and blue silos.

Last Friday morning, blue tribe viewers heard all about it. Red tribe viewers didn't hear it mentioned at all.

We're inclined to think of this as a manifestation of a red and blue Babel. But what could we mean by that?

Tomorrow: The musings of Mark Levin