Why aren’t the American hostages receiving more attention?
Yesterday Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted: “The White House admitted Hamas is holding nearly 500 Americans hostage in Gaza.” To be clear, those are Americans not allowed to leave Gaza (NYT), they are not being held in a compound. As for hostages in the narrower sense of that term, there seem to be about ten. Neither are instances of liberty, nor are they safe positions to be in. Personally, I would consider both groups to be hostages.
No matter which definition of hostage you prefer, I don’t see so many major MSM articles about these hostages. I remember the much earlier Iranian hostage crisis, when many Americans even knew the identities and life stories of individual hostages. It was a front page item almost every day. As I am composing this post (the day before), I don’t see it on the NYT front page at all. Same with WaPo, though they do have “Biden hosts Trick or Treaters at the White House.” If you consider this New Yorker story, well yes it covers the American hostages somewhat, but it is nothing close to what I might have expected. They are not even the article lead. So why so little coverage? I have a few candidate hypotheses, which may or may not be true:
1. The MSM wants Biden’s reelection, and they don’t want him ending up painted as “another Jimmy Carter” who cannot rescue the hostages.
2. The young Woke staffers at MSM don’t want to make Hamas look too bad, or to make the Israeli retaliation look too good.
3. These hostages are themselves not “The Current Thing,” even though the war itself seems to be The Current Thing. Has “The Current Thing” become so narrowly circumscribed?
4. For some national security reasons, MSM has been told by our government that too much hostage coverage would endanger their possible release or rescue.
5. The Biden administration is pressuring MSM not to cover the hostages too much, out of fear that the domestic pressures for America to intervene will become too strong.
6. It simply hasn’t happened yet, due to noise in the system.
What else? I am not saying any of those are true, and some of them are more conspiratorial than the kinds of explanation I usually find persuasive. So why don’t the American hostages receive more attention?