There are quite a number of stories in major media outlets these days about a recent outline of a plan offered by the US Govt. The basic problem I have with the coverage is that story titles and headlines almost universally refer to it as a "Middle East Peace Plan." Just because it involves Israel and Palestine, which are unquestionably in the Middle East, it ignores the vast majority of the Middle East and offers nothing that purports to quell far greater violence and violence-related human suffering in many other places that include Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. The Palestinian and Israeli populations in total comprise about 5 percent of the total population of the Middle East. The plan entirely ignores 17 Middle Eastern nation states, the vast majority. Trump is known for exaggeration, but why are the Guardian, BBC, NBC, the NY Times, etc., conflating a tiny area that has a population of 14 million people with the entire Middle East, the population of which exceeds 370 million? Is it just desperate competition for reader/viewer eyeballs and advertising revenue, or is exaggeration now considered to be an essential element of truth in journalism? The area of Israel and Palestine is exactly as relevant to the Middle East as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is to the US. Sure, it's a part, but a small one, and no professional journalist should be conflating and confusing the whole and its part. If the Middle East was otherwise a region of brotherly love, it might make sense to describe this plan that way, but it isn't so it doesn't. I'm not addressing the merits or deficits of the plan itself nor Trump's well-known penchant for hyperbole and exaggeration that goes back decades, but simply its labeling and characterization by third-party observers and reporters who should know better.
