(I despair when I see what passes for serious political interviewing in the US media).
Labby, I realize that the above quote is taken out of context, but I want to respond to it anyway. You are correct when you say that the US news media is biased, either to the left or to the right. It always has been. If you were to read the various accounts of the Boston Massacre in 1770 (where an angry group of citizens threatened a platoon of infantry and got shot at for their troubles), you'll find that some portray the soldiers as bloodthirsty fiends just itching to shoot a colonist at the slightest provocation. You'll also find reports that the soldiers fired on a mob which was bent on tearing them all limb from limb. Some of those same accounts were printed in Britain, too.
Not long ago, I watched a BBC "documentary" which alleged that President Franklin Roosevelt not only knew that the Japanese planned to attack the US, but that he knew the exact date, time, and location of the attack, and that he arranged things so that the US military in Hawaii would have no warning.
One of the pieces of evidence they included was a scratchy recording of two men discussing the timing of the attack. The voices were identified as those of Prime Minister Tojo and Ambassador Nomura of Japan, who was in Washington at the time. The amazing thing is that the recording had both men discussing a top-secret military plan on an open trans-Pacific telephone line - which was supposedly tapped by US Army Intelligence - in English!
That is so far-fetched as to be laughable. That wasn't the only blatant falsehood in the show, but it was the one that jumped the shark for me. So don't get on your high horse and accuse the US media of being biased (which it is, no question) without remembering that
every media in the world has a bias. Some are simply more blatant than others.
I agree that we all have to be very careful about our source of news these days, but you have to remember that it's always been that way. The Spanish-American War in 1898 wasn't caused by the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst, but his newspaper empire did whip the public into a frenzy over the alleged mining of the battleship Maine by Spain. (The Spanish didn't blow it up. An explosive fire in a forward coal bunker blew a hole in the ship's bow and sank her, but to read Hearst's headlines you might have thought Spain was set to take Florida and Texas away from the US.)
So let's all be careful about pointing fingers and throwing stones at other people and other nations. I used to watch Hannity and Colmes on Fox until I realized that neither man was all that interested in the answers to the questions they were posing; they were more interested in stating their own opinions in the guise of "interviewing" their guests.
I respect the opinions of others, even when they differ from mine. If everyone in the world thought and acted just like me, it would be a boring place. But we can be interesting without flaming each other.
At least, I hope we can.
