URGENT: None So Blind...

BAYEUX, France — This gem of a medieval Normandy town, nearly flattened by allied bombers in 1944 to stop a power-obsessed madman from swallowing Britain and moving on, puts looming American elections into sharp, stark focus.

Today, Bayeux encapsulates a hoary adage now fraught with urgent meaning: There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Conflicts flare across an overheated, hungry planet that already sloughs off humans like dead skin. A patently deranged narcissist uses Hitler's playbook to con the clueless into giving him absolute control of a dis-United States at war with itself.

Donald Trump has no ambition to conquer the world. He wants to ignore it behind closed borders while using America's economic and military heft to exploit the other eight billion people who share an imperiled planet.

Whether he succeeds depends on how many eligible voters decide to opt out — to be deserters — or to support Trump, in effect, by wasting a ballot on a third-party candidate because of a thin grasp of the world as it is.

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The Bayeux Cathedral is preparing a spectacular new display of the world's first newsreel. Weavers spent a decade on a 224-foot tapestry that depicts William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066. Reporters work faster now.

International journalists gather annually here for the Bayeux-Normandy-Calvados War Correspondents Prizes. We mourn our dead — 57 added this year were mostly from Gaza. And we compare notes on what we have learned up close around the world.

This time, more than ever, I was staggered by how much our collective eyewitness reality differs from perceptions back home in America. But also, by how much our jury disagreed among ourselves about what matters most and merits top prizes.

Striking images define "news" today. People with short attention spans, blasted nonstop with contradictory "content," react mostly to dramatic photos and video. But a picture, however powerful, means little without the thousand words it is supposed to be worth.

Gaza swept the boards at Bayeux. Israel bans foreign reporters, so the story is left to gutsy, gifted Palestinians. Their lenses focus on their own families and friends dying horrible deaths in the smoking rubble of a destroyed enclave they cannot escape.

Townsfolk crowded a huge tent for final ceremony. They roared cheers and dabbed eyes as Mahmud Hams of Agence France-Presse approached the stage waving a Palestinian flag. His photos deserve the adulation. But they reflect a troubling conundrum.

Should war reporting be judged on impact it conveys or on how well it lays out complexity so the public it is meant for can draw their own conclusions? I lean to the latter. During 60 years on the job, I have yet to see a story with only "both sides."

Pictures like Hams's and heart-rendering dispatches by other Palestinians who were suddenly made reporters by circumstance may inadvertently put Trump back in the White House to make the crisis he created indescribably worse.

Those vaunted Abraham Accords condemned Palestinians to permanent apartheid status. Young men revolted when Israeli troops protected Jewish settlers who moved into the West Bank. Hamas launched its despicable attack from Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu's support from Republicans in Congress and pro-Israel voters allows him blow off Joe Biden's efforts to contain his self-serving belligerence despite blunt talks with Netanyahu and Antony Blinken's 11 trips to the region.

Biden is not being "played." In curse-laced talks off the record, he excoriates the Israeli prime minister whom insiders say he has loathed for years. He supports what Israel is supposed to be, a strong decent democracy that keeps order in a tough neighborhood.

Kamala Harris affirms support for Israel but takes a much tougher line. The assault on Gaza is unconscionable, she told Netanyahu, and she will hold him to account.

Still, in the crucial state of Michigan and across America, protesters urge voting for a can't-win candidate, or abstaining, to express their displeasure. Now that Israel is pounding Beirut and beyond, Lebanese Americans add to their numbers.

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The Bayeux prizes reflect a sea change in global news coverage. Profit-obsessed "corporate media" cut corners. Countless other purveyors rely on freelancers who often put their lives on the line for a pittance.

In earlier days, staff reporters and photographers traveled from foreign bureaus, using networks of "locals," stringers or fixers, to find sources, translate and handle logistics. Editors back home factchecked their stories and prioritized them to fit limited space.

The one-way flow was a mixed blessing. Readers and viewers could not correct mistakes or provide context. But neither could they add guesswork opinions or blatant propaganda to cast doubt on news gathered firsthand, often at high risk and expense.

News organizations' main asset was credibility. Seasoned editors kept close watch to avoid retractions. Reporters who got their story wrong were shamed by competitors who didn't. If they made something up, they were fired in lasting ignominy.

Today, unfiltered reports come from everywhere in real time via cellphone or satellite. Stringers and fixers now often replace correspondents who once parachuted in. Many report insightfully within their own cultures. Fewer of them see crucial bigger pictures.

After the fight for Syria, an exceptional self-taught young pro showed up in Bayeux. He learned photography as a teenager to document the war around him. Soon he was on the road, covering Sudan and other hard-to-reach places for major Western media.

Charming, affable and damned good at his work, he quickly became a Bayeux stalwart. One morning, I peppered him questions about Sudan, locked in a bitter civil war with the world's worst humanitarian crisis, nearly impossible to cover adequately.

He laughed at how he invited government goons tailing him to lunch. They asked how he spotted them. "I'm from Syria, and I grew up with this shit," he said. "You've been following me for five hours. Let's sit down and eat." He left with a full notebook.

But his face darkened when I mentioned Biden. "I hate him more than Netanyahu," he told me, savaging weakness in Gaza and elsewhere. Inured to dictators, he had little sense of the constraints on presidents whose foreign policy faces partisan stonewalls.

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An encounter over the "Afghanistan debacle" stunned me. Badly misreported, it torpedoed Biden's popularity early on to a level from which it never recovered. Three years later, Trump's preposterous distortions may help propel him back to power.

During the relaxed closing dinner, I chatted amiably with a photographer friend I admire. Then Afghanistan came up, and he stiffened. From that day, he said with surprising heat, he despised Biden as a misguided, incompetent weakling.

I explained my reasoning. Trump's abject capitulation had left only 2,500 American troops in the country. When Biden took over, an emboldened Taliban was knifing through a disheartened Afghan army toward the capital. He persevered.

I'd gone to Kabul immediately after 9/11. Senator Biden argued for capturing Osama bin Laden then withdrawing to avoid a quagmire. As vice president, he pushed to end the war, but Barack Obama sided with the generals.

My friend nearly shouted when I mentioned I'd covered similar sudden evacuations -- by nature, chaotic. That one quickly turned into a rare military feat, flying out 124,000 people within two weeks from a single runway with negotiated help from the Taliban. In harsh terms, he told me he was also an experienced reporter.

In hindsight, his reaction was understandable. A glut of information gives us all a sense of omniscience. He is great at what he does, mainly photography in Africa. We worked together in Kenya, and I grilled him for hours on things he knew far better than I did.

When he calmed down, he suggested we should agree to disagree and move on. I persisted, asking what he would have done.

He said America should have sent 20,000 troops to subdue Afghanistan until everyone put in danger by helping U.S. forces in the past was safely evacuated. A noble thought but hardly feasible. Biden had pledged the opposite in his campaign to wide support.

Jessica Mathews, ex-president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a long-time government insider, set the record straight in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

The war was lost well before 2021, she wrote. The deaths of 13 servicemen and 160 Afghans in a terrorist bombing at the airport was tragic, but sending more troops would have rekindled a 20-year war that killed twice as manyAmericans as the 9/11 attack.

Besides winning back allies' trust, restoring essential multiple international accords and deepening U.S. presence in Asia, Mathews wrote, Biden "ended the longest of the country's 'forever wars' -- a step none of his predecessors had the courage to take."

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As it happens, this year's jury president was Clarissa Ward of CNN, whose reports outside Kabul airport described pandemonium. Cameras showed a mother hefting her baby over the fence in the desperate hope that someone would take him to safety.

Her emotional standup left me with the clear impression the airlift was a hopeless shambles, and it was Biden's fault. We talked that over, and I got it. Live TV is a tough job. Reporters say what they see in the moment. More will follow.

But CNN still runs that house ad. In a special report, it cast doubt on the official investigation of suicide bombing, and it gave wide coverage to Republican whitewash Congress that absolved Trump and blamed Biden.

Just recently, a top anchor asked Harris to account for the administration's Afghanistan debacle.

True, divergence between Defense and State hampered the embassy evacuation. Discord between those two departments has been Washington status quo for a very long time.

When even seasoned news professionals stand firm on rockbound misperceptions, any gifted conman can sway voters who pay scant attention to actual reporting.

This long-term problem will likely worsen as so much reporting focuses on the moment, with little reference to the essential past or implications for the future. Today, the danger is clear, present and drop-dead perilous.

In just days, voters who rank "foreign affairs" at the bottom of their concerns may hand over America to a pair of those conmen who are bent on creating a money-talks autocracy with an incalculable impact on the wider world.

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Garry Trudeau foresaw the core problem years ago in his Doonesbury cartoon. Roland Hedley, his Hunter Thompson-ish correspondent, wore a vest stuffed with notebooks, lenses, a tape recorder and a TV camera strapped on his head. It is near reality today.

Newsgathering demands separate skills, but too often a single person does it all. Reporters build rapport so sources open up. A lens in their face shuts them down. Newsmakers posture on video but often reveal opposite thoughts in a quiet interview.

Even the once-stalwart AP relies on untested stringers and other news providers with different standards. It covers U.N. headquarters in New York and vital international doings in Geneva each with a single staff reporter. Both are solid pros, but in what can be an 18-hour workday much gets ignored..

The obvious result, certainly in America, is a limited and skewed worldview. People who care need to choose their news sources carefully, then dig deeply on their own to confirm and amplify conclusions.

At Bayeux, I talked with correspondents who have gotten their stories straight for decades to offer some guidance for Americans on what they think matters most.

No one I talked to has much short-term hope for the Middle East with Netanyahu running rampant. Killing Hamas and Hezbollah leaders incites deeper hatred, makes way for more extreme successors and swells terrorist ranks with volunteer martyrs.

Israel spent years failing to stop Hezbollah from lobbing rockets over the Lebanon border before its fighters were deeply dug in and armed with far more lethal firepower.

The last thing Iran wants is war. But if pushed toward it, hardline leaders are likely to double down on nuclear weapons which that deal Trump scrapped with contempt would have brought under international surveillance.

Old hands remember the 1980s when Iran fought Iraq, then a U.S. ally, to a standstill for eight years by sending human waves shouting "Allahu Akbar" into artillery barrages.

China is America's most significant adversary over time, but Xi Jinping is in no hurry so long as diplomacy makes headway. He knows no one can win an all-out nuclear showdown.

For most, the crucial flashpoint is Ukraine. If Republicans withdraw support, even increased European aid is unlikely to stop Vladimir Putin from bleeding out its exhausted defenders, then moving on to other parts of Moscow's former empire.

Biden revived the NATO that Trump nearly neutered, with Sweden and Finland joining its ranks. Unless a new administration weakens it again, the alliance holds firm.

But the grinding war is coalescing a new Evil Empire. North Korea, which Trump turned from a manageable hermit fiefdom into a hostile wild-card power with long-range nuclear weapons, sends troops and heavy weapons to Russia. The Chinese and others help blunt the effect of sanctions.

Remy Ourdan of Le Monde has burrowed into Ukraine since the war started, emerging only occasionally for brief trips to Paris.

He is too well-informed to predict an outcome, but he sees the strain on Ukraine as enthusiasm wanes among outgunned troops living for months on end in trenches hemmed in by mines, tank traps and concertina wire with pinpoint drones overhead.

He gets rare access to top-level commanders and the second tier of frontline troops. Field officers call him to tag along on daring operations. But, he says, no one gets to the advancing first tier. Beyond combat, it is a war of perception.

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With so much emphasis on photos and television, the "print" category is an also-ran like best supporting actor at the Oscars. But, for me, the standout of all entries was an exhaustive New York Times Magazine investigation titled "America's Monster." It lost out to reportage from Gaza, dismissed by some jurors as old news.

In fact, it revealed how the Afghan chief of police murdered thousands over the years, not only Taliban sympathizers but also tribal rivals and personal foes, yet remained in high regard by U.S. commanders, either ignorant of his crimes or indifferent to them.

The story, news to many who had covered Afghanistan, made a fundamental point. It harked back to a remark often attributed to FDR about Anastasio Somoza, a Nicaraguan dictator: "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

That comes in various versions, but I've seen the truth of it in Mobutu's Congo and other places since then. Administrations line up behind monsters who support their aims. Saddam and Bin Laden once had American support.

As American elections approach, a world on the edge needs a continuity of leaders up to the job. Harris has been training in president school for nearly for four years. In sound mind and body, she is likely to be around for eight more years.

The alternative is too frightening to think about.