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Biased Media Bash the U.S. Barry Farber In Kafka's "Metamorphosis" the victim wakes up one morning and discovers he s a cockroach. In Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" the victim thinks at first it's all a joke, getting chained to a pipe after dinner in his host's basement and watching his host calmly build a mausoleum around him brick by brick which will entomb him forever. My awakening is closer to Poe than Kafka, but really somewhere in the middle. I heard a TV comic in 1960 say, "I remember when the media was our ally, like the British and French!" He was complaining about negative media way back then. The damage the media did then was small; non-threatening and really nothing to frown about. I laughed. The media since then has wiped that smile off my face ever so slowly but ever so steadily. Join my school and you'll learn that so-called global warming is a fraction of the problem they proclaim and media negativity is many times worse. The problem is not so much that the media turns Americans from pro-Americans into anti-Americans. I think in that they re failures. They ve angered more Americans than they ve converted. The problem is, the enemy misinterprets American media negativity in an interesting and dangerous way. Can you name the last enemy we Americans ever had who had a free press? I'm not sure I can. Did Germany's Kaiser in World War 1 permit the press to write what it wanted to?
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Did the journalists in Spain have American-style press freedom during the Spanish-American War? We can safely say all our recent and relevant enemies have been slave-press people. (Bless the honest Russian who during the Cold War told an American, "You and we both have freedom of speech. The difference is, you have freedom after speech!") Here's where we Americans get stung by that ugly creature flailing its totalitarian tail on the beaches of dictatorships. Our enemies read and hear the negative American media bashing America and figure, "Gee. If the Americans are admitting things are so bad, if they're admitting they're so divided and incompetent and dysfunctional and weak and stretched thin and poorly-led; then the truth must really be a hundred times worse!" Understand why they think that. They know their own media would never haul off in the free-press fashion and offer negativity of any kind displeasing to their own regimes. When things get so very bad the truth becomes unconcealable under those regimes — Soviet military defeat in Afghanistan, communist crop failures leading to major hunger in major cities, unusually violent outbreaks of peasant rebellion (Two hundred incidents a day in Communist China!) — the most repressive regimes on earth permit a tiny little bit of candor; minor admissions of failure. In dealing with the above examples a slave-press might say in the case of disastrous military defeat something like, "Our military leaders expressed frustration at what some may consider our slow progress and have exhorted our brave soldiers to even greater effort." In the case of spreading famine, "Our leaders have demanded a speed-up in food shipments to the cities and agricultural experts are hopeful of a bumper crop next season." In the case of violent rebellion, they might even give a fairly accurate report on the violence taking great care to place the blame on local leaders and local issues, while carefully shielding the party and the higher-ups from any of that blame. Early in its disastrous famines the communist regime of North Korea came out cheerfully and announced that late-breaking scientific studies prove it's much healthier to limit oneself to only one meal a day!
The people subjected to such media become skilled code-breakers and learn to magnify each setback to its proper proportions. The Soviet people learned in 1953 that hated Interior Minister Lavrenti Beria had been purged, not from a forthright news story in Pravda. There was none. They got the point when his name was omitted in Pravda from a roll-call of Kremlin dignitaries attending the opening of the Bolshoi Ballet! During World War II American financier George Haas was a German prisoner of war held in a camp on the English Channel Island of Jersey. He managed to escape in a stolen rowboat beating what sober islanders later said was a one thousand to one shot. The Nazis published a daily newsletter in English for their prisoners with news from the battlefronts. But the captive American and British soldiers learned how to be pretty good code-breakers, too. This was late 1944, after the Battle of the Bulge, as the Allies were pressing the Germans eastward into Germany s heartland. Every day the POW newsletter would rave about great, fantastic German victories. George says he and his buddies quickly noticed that each German victory occurred a little more to the east than the one before! Failing to understand — or even believe — American freedom of the press, our enemies take all the negativity in our media to represent only a mere fraction of the true American dilemma. "How much longer can a country as bitterly at war with itself as America obviously is continue to oppose us?" therefore becomes a rational conclusion for our enemies. And an emboldener. And an inspiration. And a solid fuel. The most pro-American journalist would have to report that the Japanese extinguished American resistance in the Philippines in May, 1942. And the most anti-American reporter would have to admit America won World War II. That leaves continents of coverage in between where the negative is routinely preferred over the positive in our own American media. Also, the negative attitude of the mainstream media is by and large embarrassingly impossible to conceal or disguise. Why should American journalists be so negative about America? Wiser heads than mine armed with doctorates in psychology have tried to explain. If amateurs are allowed, let me take a whack at it? I don't know what octane of self-esteem surges within when you become officially an insurance agent, an investment banker, a union painter or an executive in dry-wall hanging or industrial abrasives. I can reliably report, however, that when you land a regular job involving TV cameras, microphones or a job in newspapers or magazines, especially if you re privileged to write under your own byline; you feel exalted. You feel a palpable superiority to most of the rest of mankind. How, now, do you express that elevation? You don't run around telling plumbers and welders, "Hey. I'm better than you!" Instead, some media stars may take the opinions they associate with those under-classes and flay those opinions with the whiplash of their keenly-felt superiority. The masses are, let's say, rather proud of America. That's the cue for that certain media lion to growl, "Well, I guess that's about par for ordinary folks like you down there but I'm way up here and it's my duty to tell you a thing or two. This America that you little folks think is so great has a lot of problems, short-comings injustices, and evils. And you'd better be glad people like me are smart enough and brave enough and thoughtful enough to grab you by the collar and beat up on you and your feeble, banal opinions and reach over your head and try to right all those shameful American wrongs." One man and one woman are the ideal beginning of a family! Illegal aliens are against the law! Beer, OK; pot, no! God Almighty has a role in our lives! Oh, what fun it is to flatten these flowers of orthodoxy under the steamroller of their vastly more valid and sophisticated insights. Being negative doesn t always make you right. The American people have spit in the face of the mainstream media s choice five out of the last seven presidential elections. While we re being told how hated America is world-wide, Germany and France haul off and elect pro-American leaders. (Neither country would be having elections if it weren t for America!) The media hates to report anything from eastern Europe because they love America, George W. Bush and America s pro-liberation policy. The economy is OK. The stock market is better than okay. Gas prices soar but nobody drives less. Al-Qaida has failed to destabilize one single Arab government, Shiite or Sunni. And I think I may be the only one who enjoys the delicious irony of the left claiming America is the worst country in the world and one of the worst things about America is we won't let in everybody who wants to come! Fortunately no American journalist has yet succeeded in transmogrifying the truth to suit his agenda as effectively as Adolf Hitler s star broadcaster Ludwig Sertorius. In late 1942, the British smashed German Gen. Rommel's forces in north Africa at the Egyptian town of El Alamein sending Rommel's army in pell-mell retreat. As the German army was in the middle of the longest and fastest retreat in all history, Sertorious came on the German radio and proudly proclaimed, All British attempts to interfere with our orderly and brilliantly-planned advance to the rear have been successfully smashed!
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