All right, I have to respond to a post on Media Whores Online entitled "Americans Lag in Holding Corrupt Leaders Accountable." (No permalink; just scroll down.) After quoting a poll wherein 56% of Britons find Blair "untrustworthy" and only 36% "trustworthy," he comments:

So why are polls here not yet reflecting a similar, wise public evaluation of the duplicitous fraud currently occupying the people's White House?

The reason is that because of our failed national media, there is now a significantly greater proportion of Moron-Americans here than Moron-Brits there.

Oh yeah, that's it. It must be the extremely reputable UK media. It must be that the American public is just dummer, and the wily supervillains in the press have abandoned their great white burden to edumacate them and have instead pursued a certain insidious agenda. Is this starting to sound familiar? Like, say, check this stuff out:

By casting Junior as "honest and trustworthy" - despite that the characterization has has never been supported by a single piece of evidence - the media whores intended to create a stark contrast to their other, equally unsupported invention: "pathological liars" Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Sound familiar yet? How about when, two paragraphs down, he actually uses the phrase "right-wing media" to mean the entire media? Yep, you got it: he sounds like the right during the Clinton impeachment. We're all starting to sound a bit like that on the left. "Why don't the American people agree with me, me being, obviously, totally correct? Aha, it must be the media obscuring the truth! The horrible, biased media!" Gee guys, I dunno. I guess we can "play to the refs" like the right does if we want, but try not to make me want to punch me while you're doing it, OK? And what the hell is that with saying there's no "evidence" for Bush being honest and/or trustworthy? What the hell constitutes evidence for that, exactly?

I don't think you can really blame the media for this particular fact, because, d00d, they're two different countries. It makes a difference, for instance, that way more people opposed the war in Briton. ("But that was the media's fault!") It makes a difference that it was clearly America's war, and so Americans have way more invested in trusting the reasons behind it. It makes a difference that Blair has been in office for, what, a decade now, and has been duplicitous on, shall we say, a few other occasions.

Look, guys--all y'all on the left--I like the Guardian, too, but honestly, the NYT is just as good. Sure, you'll get more stories about how America is bad from the Beeb, but that's less a reflection of honesty and more a reflection of a bias just as insidious as the US media's. That bias actually leads the UK press to overcompensate with their anti-Americanism sometimes, and while it's a great source of some of the stuff that doesn't get play in America, you have to take it all with a grain of salt. And since both sets of (ahem) "whores" are acting on biases, I'm not sure I see the problem. Journalists are going to be a wee bit nationalist at times, for reasons of source access if nothing else.

Blech. Some of the rhetoric on that site just does not make me feel well.
posted by Mike B. at 12:17 PM 0 comments