Hugh Hewitt, LA-based blogger, professor of law and former NPR broadcaster, has just ‘endured’ two weeks of the Beeb.
I am just returned from two weeks in Europe, which meant having to watch CNN International, with its wall-to-wall anti-Bush anchoring, reading the International Herald Tribune –a New York Times lite– and of course enduring the BBC. I don’t know if the world hates us, but American and British media reporting to the English-speaking world living in Europe certainly do. The coverage is most distorted on the issue of the war, where anchors routinely set up questions that presume the failure of the war in Iraq and the collapse of support for the war in the United States. No bit of good news is allowed to stand unchallenged, even when its significance cannot be overstated. Like the arrival of a multi-ethnic, multi-regional representative government on its way to direct elections.
Case in point: This BBC interview with Sir Jeremy Greenstock. The Today Programme interviewer frames questions in the most negative way to reinforce the view that the new interim Iraqi government is failed from the start.