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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: America Can Beat Iraq. But Can It Vanquish France? (February 19, 2003) There's nothing new about France's self-defeating line. What is new is that the administration isn't buying it. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Perverting the Legal System: The Lead-Paint Rip-Off (February 19, 2003) No victim of lead poisoning will get a dime in compensation from Rhode Island's pending lawsuit. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Cowboy and the Diplomat (February 19, 2003) Together, Bush and Powell bring leadership and legitimacy to the U.S. policy on Iraq. By William Schneider. Media: Tragedy Becomes Us (February 12, 2003) We don't just report the horror of tragedy anymore, we wallow in it. By William Powers. Political Pulse: Still Asking, 'Why Now?' (February 12, 2003) Less than one-third of the American public says it considers Iraq an immediate threat. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: The Case Against the Attacks on Bush's Case for War (February 12, 2003) Some ordinarily astute Bush critics have lapsed into arguments that seem neither astute nor logically tenable. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Wealth of Nations: America Is An Empire, It Had Better Start Acting As One (February 12, 2003) America's challenge is to run the empire well, but that means first acknowledging its existence. By Clive Crook. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The Poodle SpeaksForeign critics are barking up the wrong tree when they complain about U.S. news media coverage of Iraq by William Powers ..... The wave of anti-Americanism now breaking across Europe and much of the world is producing some really juicy news stories. "Sneers From Across the Atlantic" was the headline on an excellent one this week, a Washington Post feature story filed by Glenn Frankel from Britain, arguably the capital of this new down-with-America movement. At one point, the story cited a rally in Oxford where "a packed audience cheered as Ken Nichols O'Keefe, a former U.S. marine, described the United States as 'the most despicable and criminal nation in the world.' " Such "scenes of anti-American fervor have become a regular feature of the political landscape," Frankel wrote. And of the media landscape. Among the by-products of the global Iraq debate, and the anti-U.S. feelings it has aroused, is a striking rise in the number of foreign news pieces denouncing U.S. media outlets and the journalism they practice. They argue that the American media have been reduced to the Bush administration's poodle, actively promoting war while stifling real debate. "In the American press, day after day, the White House controls the agenda," reported Britain's Guardian newspaper last month. "The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites, hardly barks, but really loves rolling over and having its tummy tickled." Similar views have been popping up more and more in media outlets abroad. "The U.S. media are being manipulated," a columnist wrote in the Toronto Star, "Dissent is labelled 'siding with terrorism.' " Novelist John le Carre claimed, in a column for The Times of London, that a "compliant U.S. media" helps ensure that "a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press." And so on. Viewed from inside the poodle, what's remarkable about this stuff is how much it resembles pure fiction. What the U.S. public is actually reading, watching, and hearing about Iraq in the news media is precisely the opposite of what these critics claim. The war debate has been covered carefully, thoughtfully, and with scrupulous attention to fairness. Anyone familiar with what's happened to the American media since the Persian Gulf War can only marvel at how seriously even the trashier elements of our journalism world—even television!—have taken the war question. If you turned on ABC's Good Morning America one random day this week, there was Diane Sawyer, symbol of America's decadent glam-sham media. And whom was she interviewing? Perhaps the contestants from the new ABC series, Are You Hot? The Search for America's Sexiest People. Nope. She was in Baghdad, grilling Dr. Rihab Taha, the Iraqi bioweapons scientist known as "Doctor Germ." Before millions of mittel-American viewers, the doctor avowed that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction purely in self-defense and long ago destroyed them. And Colin Powell was just issuing "psychological propaganda to horrify people." Given what the foreign critics claim about American media, isn't it odd to see one of our most powerful media outlets devoting some of its most valuable airtime to this Iraqi woman's claim that the White House is brainwashing us? Look around the U.S. media, and the foreign critique melts away. The major newspapers are full of war opponents, both quoted sources and columnists, and these pieces go out on the wires and appear in smaller papers coast to coast. And those smaller papers have been conducting their own thoughtful editorial debates since last summer, often with more common sense than the elites. The airwaves are full of brainy talking heads offering up every possible opinion. Cable channels once dominated by asinine Monica warriors lately could pass for a staff meeting at the Brookings Institution. Thanks to the U.S. media, we know what's been said in the Bush war councils, and we even have an idea of what the battle plans are like. Has any other country in history ever seen such transparent coverage of a pending war? After the State of the Union speech, The Sydney Morning Herald published a piece by a columnist named Mike Carlton. After the speech, which he compared to "a plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party" (because that's how totalitarian the United States has become), he noticed that several Democratic senators, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, posted critical reactions to it on their Web sites. But would the craven U.S. media report this? Not a chance, suggested Carlton, for "as the drums of war grow louder, such voices are barely heard, most especially in their homeland. The American media are avid for the missiles to start landing, slavering at the soaring newspaper circulation and TV ratings that war will bring." Just one teensy problem. Kennedy was all over the media the next day, including a quote on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and a separate anti-war opinion piece, signed by the senator himself, on that paper's editorial page. In the two weeks since, his views have gotten regular play pretty much everywhere, even on Fox News. The Washington Post's story on anti-Yankism noted a recent statement by Denis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe: "Scratch an anti-American in Europe and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard, or to have an article published in The New York Times." Which raises a question: Where would all these critics be without the American media they so loathe? Nowhere.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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