the news us style

No wonder the Americans are kept blind and ignorant in front of their goggle boxes... Must be the most parochial, developed nation on earth...Talk about manipulation.

Know thine enemies

The American media seems to think the US is at war with France as well as Iraq, writes Duncan Campbell

Tuesday April 8, 2003

I was buying some groceries in a store just after the war in Iraq had started when the man taking my money asked whether or not I thought we were about to come under attack.
I can understand that being a topic of conversation in Basra, but we were in LA - the sun was shining and there were surfers heading for the beach.

I assured him he need not worry, the Iraqis were not about to mount an invasion on California. Yes, he said, but what about the French?

It was only when I was about to tell him that French troops were already making their way south from Quebec and that Napoleon was confident they would be in Long Beach by Easter that I realised he was serious.

There has certainly been a lot of silliness about the French in the media here of late, but I had not realised some people thought the US was at war with them as well as the Iraqis.

So who gave the cashier this idea? Where are we all getting our news on the war from?

The LA Times ran an interesting poll on the subject last week which showed that 69% of those surveyed were turning to cable news - CNN, Fox or MSNBC. This compares with 30% for newspapers, 23% for local television news, 18% for network news and 13% who go online. Radio news got 8% and "family and friends" 2%. (People could list three sources.)

This started to explain things. The French attract almost as much ire from cable news commentators and talk show hosts as Saddam Hussein. If you were quietly flicking between channels and English was not your first language, it would be easy enough to get the impression that the US was indeed at war with France.

I have seen various online petitions from people complaining about the media coverage of the war and there are ritual denunciations of the media at all anti-war rallies. The complaints seem to be directed not at the journalists in the field, who are doing a conscientious and brave job, but at the editorialising of the studio-based hosts and "experts".

Chief complaints centre on the ommission of mention of civilian casualties and the derogatory treatment of the anti-war movement.

Before the war started, I met Ron Kovic at a rally in San Francisco. He is the anti-Vietnam war veteran on whom the film, Born on the Fourth of July was based. He must be busy, I suggested, doing the rounds of the television talk shows. He was, after all, a national figure. Not at all, he said, virtually no-one would give him the time of day.

But this is war. What do we expect?

Fox News, for instance, which pulls in a larger audience now that CNN, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and makes no great secret of its conservative bias. The station's slogan, "fair and balanced", is meant as a knowing joke and not to be taken seriously; I have seen enough "Faux News" T-shirts in the Fox News logo to realise that most people are in on the joke.

Equally, Clear Channel Communications, which owns 1200 radio stations, has been leading the charge by publicising pro-war rallies. It was Clear who, after September 11, advised their stations not to play certain deviant records - like Imagine, for instance.

Critics of Clear suggest that the gung-ho support will not be unhelpful at a time when the Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to regulate the number of stations one company can own. It may be depressing that one company owns so many stations - six times the number of its nearest rival - but it cannot be a surprise what they do with that power.

If you live in LA, the Bay Area, New York, Washington or Houston, you can, for respite, tune in to one of the Pacifica network radio stations, which for more than 50 years have been broadcasting news from the left. Their war coverage is entitled "Assault on Peace" rather than "Showdown Iraq" and on an average day on my local station, KPFK, you can hear Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and members of the anti-war movement with a completely different take on the war and items of news not broadcast anywhere else.

My local national public radio station, KCRW, has been covering the war well by swapping between the BBC, CNN and NPR, who often have three varying takes on the same event to report. The station also has a host, Warren Olney, who could teach most television anchors many lessons on how to conduct a debate by allowing people to say their piece without patronising or undermining them.

One of the great long-running myths here is that of a "liberal bias" in the media, a fantasy propagated by a number of undertravelled commentators who haven't bothered to look up the word in the dictionary. The lesson of the war has been to prove that myth even more laughable and also to show that, if you want to know what is going on, you certainly cannot rely on one source.

But I must stop now, put out the lights and lock the door. Both Fox News and NPR have just announced that Napoleon will be here tomorrow. They say it is a television film starring John Malkovich. But who knows?