Aren’t broadcast anchors supposed to know better? In a rare interview, Pope Francis spoke with an anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News, Norah O’Donnell, about a world increasingly wracked by war. Under the guise of straightforward questioning Ms. O’Donnell, a respected journalist, attempted to pigeonhole the pontiff on the crisis in Gaza by portraying Israel as the villain. The 87-year-old Holy Father refused to take the bait.
Following the requisite niceties, the first question that Ms. O’Donnell posed to Pope Francis was, “There are now pictures of starving children coming out of Gaza, what about those calling that a genocide?” This genteel vilification is a form of witness leading, as in trying to get your subject to say what you want him to say. When the interviewee is a movie star or Taylor Swift, that’s no big deal. When the topic is the Middle East, it can be dangerous.
A less agenda-driven reporter might have taken the opportunity to ask the pope straight out not for a simple condemnation of the Hamas massacre of Israeli innocents that triggered the war in Gaza — he obviously condemned it from the start — but about how Gaza was allowed to become ground zero for the antisemitism that helped fuel the largest assault on Jews since since the Holocaust. That query did not happen.
Ms. O’Donnell preferred to follow the current fashion of shifting the blame for Gaza’s myriad ills onto Israel’s shoulders. The pope, for his part, paused before answering the question in part by calling the situation very difficult: “Food goes in,” he said, “but they have to fight for it.” If that was a reference to Hamas terrorists routinely commandeering food supplies and humanitarian aid, often violently, he wasn’t asked about it.
If one can look past the narrative of looming famine in Gaza having been largely discredited — the overriding problem is not one of supply, but distribution — less pardonable is failing to address the catastrophe of food insecurity in African hotspots like Sudan. A brutal civil war has been raging in that large and impoverished country for more than a year now — and on a scale that dwarfs what’s happening at Gaza.
That is why Secretary Blinken just said that “18 million children, women, and men in Sudan face acute food insecurity, with the UN warning that the country is on the brink of famine.” That is considerably more people than the 1.1 million in Gaza who, according to a new UN report, could face food insecurity by July. The document is named the “Global Report on Food Crises,” and it makes for illuminating reading.
“Heavy fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces since April 2023,” the report says, “has had devastating consequences across the Sudan and in neighboring countries including Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan.” Furthermore, a new GRFC report notes, the country “has become the largest food crisis in East Africa and the world’s biggest internal displacement situation.”
Last year, nearly 282 million people in 59 countries suffered from acute hunger, the report said. If the global bandwagon is already stacked heavily against Israel, it could be because the Middle East narrative simply gets more publicity, such as a CBS interview that focuses on the region while neglecting other pressing hotspots.
While it is not exactly a platitude for Pope Francis to call for peace over war, it would hardly be front page news for the pontiff to say that he prays a lot. He does. When Ms. O’Donnell asked, “Can you help negotiate peace?” Francis, without skipping a beat, answered, “I can pray.”
With respect to Ukraine, the pope has courted controversy over his repeated calls for a negotiated settlement. His comments last March that Ukraine “should have the courage to raise the white flag” in particular drew much scorn, including from Kyiv. Wouldn’t it be something, though, if anchors perhaps too easily awed by the man who sits on the Throne of St. Peter had the courage to ask tougher questions?
