ABSTRACT
In The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw devotes an unusually full stage direction to the introduction of “a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding and reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism … he has perforce become a journalist.” The contemptuous view of journalists that is characteristic of almost every important imaginative writer since Smollett who has described them 1 is likely to be confirmed by a survey of reporting and editorializing on the Arab-Israeli conflict during the past decade, from about 1976–86.
