VOICES
If Only They Knew
Cowed media can't keep Americans informed
War fever was steadily mounting that Sunday morning. Little wonder, then, that an article in The Washington Post jumped out at me — a poll saying that while three in five Americans favored using force to get rid of Saddam Hussein, "sentiment shifted significantly when voters were asked whether the United States should launch an attack over the opposition of U.S. allies." In that event, 47 percent were opposed. In other words, American views were substantially affected by how our allies saw the issue.
But how, I wondered, were Americans to know? I had just that morning heard a fellow reporter — recently returned from several weeks working in Europe — do a lengthy lament on Americans' paltry understanding of European views on our policies. For months, the European press had been brimming with evidence that "the opposition of U.S. allies," as the poll put it, was substantial — indeed, that America's willingness to go it alone was widely seen as arrogant and dangerous. Or, as Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, noted some days later, "Mr. Bush's instinctive humility has given way lately to Texas cowboy lingo when talking about Iraq. I'm sure it helps whip up crowds at Republican fund-raisers, but, as [Le Monde senior editor Alain] Frachon put it, 'it doesn't cross the ocean well.'" Yet precious little of the European critique was making its way into the American press. How is the American public going to influence foreign policy — already a problematic question — when people are so scantily informed?
The reason, I think, is that we in the media are cowed. We are deflected from our driving purpose — to keep readers informed. Our newsrooms are marketing-driven and profit-oriented, our staffs are poorly trained and dispirited. We dread being called liberal, we hate to be seen as unpatriotic. We fear making our readers unhappy, we don't want to insult powerful people — indeed, we seem to yearn for their favor. Seymour Hersh told an audience last winter to look at the transcripts of the press conferences Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was holding post-9/11, and notice what took place: "Question, answer, laughter; question, answer, laughter." We've greatly reduced the amount of coverage we give to foreign news. And the foreign news we do provide is distortingly focused on ourselves. A recent Aspen Institute report looks at the gulf between the public's "fundamental attitudes" and the "misperceptions and confusion that undermine public support for more effective U.S. global engagement." It concludes that the media's handling of international news fosters the misperceptions and widens the gulf between public views and foreign policy. The report notes: "A newspaper story about food subsidies, for example, headlined a pledge of $7.9 billion by the 'U.S., Japan, Other Nations' — but the U.S. contribution accounted for just three percent of the total."
The rap du jour against Americans — that we're overfed and undernourished — applies here, as well: America is getting larger and larger — and less and less well informed.
It's not the public's fault, but the media's. The lack of international coverage renders debate ineffective. If we covered the world, people would know things, and if they knew things, their policy choices would likely be just fine.
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