spinbadz own

(PLEASE NOTE: Within days of the alleged interview with Philip Bennett appearing in the Chinese People's Daily, as described below, blogger Hugh Hewitt obtained a version from Bennett which appears to be at odds with that version on many substantive points)

***************

Perusing The Washington Post Managing Editor's interview with the China People's Daily, one gets the impression of a guy who is so tied up inside an anti-Republican echo chamber that he may have no idea of how hostile and bemuddled his views appear to the outsider.

The interviewer, Yong Tang, seemed bemused at various points. I know I was.

Consider some excerpts:

Bennett: ... I don't think there is much evidence that promoting democracy is what the US is doing. It is what it says it is doing...

So Bush is a liar, plain and simple. And, we can infer, a sinister one.

But what of the logic, tactically, in promoting democracy - the corollary between people power in a free-market democracy acting as a restraint upon 9/11-style terrorist promotions against another nation.

What of the deeper understanding of a fellow democracy's realities and mechanisms that might also ward against such attacks? What of the democratic free speech that enables a prospectively targeted country to transmit it's views direct to the people of the prospective aggressor?

Are these - as well as the track record of harmonious co-existence between democratic nations - not solid reasons underlying the Bush policy? Reasons that US soldiers are fighting and dying for.

What of the fact that democracy does appear to be breaking out - and welcomed - in the Middle East?

And what of the likelihood that American enemies will draw encouragement and succour from Philip Bennet's words ... ?

Evidently, such questions are not legitimate to Mr. Bennett, or are not worth devoting time to, so easily are they answered.

So he jumps a few rhetorical levels, to show that his bias-free news organisation is merely trying to help the lowly likes of you and me to understand what is really happening - that unworthy Bush is leading the simpletons of unworthy America down a ruinous, megalo-garden path:

Yong Tang: ... (D)o you think America should be the leader of the world?

Bennett: No, I don't think US should be the leader of the world. My job is helping my readers trying to understand what is happening now.

If we are heading into another period of imperialism where the US thinks itself as the leader ... then I think the world will be in an unhappy period.

One of the jobs of our correspondents in Baghdad is to tell our readers what the Bush administration is trying to hide...

Imperialism - soo thaat's what Bush is all about!

Interesting word, "imperialism". My own gut instinct is to associate it with the olden-days Spanish, who sucked gold out of the America's in the name of the Divine while putting heathen natives to the sword by the Auschwitz-load, or the olden-days British, who plagued a chunk of the planet with opium to denude it of gold, or the Naploleonic French, or the exploring Portuguese, or...

That is to say, the word can be associated most significantly with Europe, and by definition with subjugation, pillage, greed, all of the above. The Chomskys and Pilgers of this world use the word a lot, often in conjunction with the United States, precisely (one suspects) because of the word's negative connotations.

Thank heavens for the Washington Post editor, here to warn us that this is the vision of the United States of George Bush.

We must ignore what Bush says, ignore the mass slaughter of innocents that appeared to set the wheels of current US policy in motion, ignore the post-WW2 reconstruction of Japan and Germany, and try to imagine the unhappy future - the aim of US greed, lies and imperialism - Mr. Bennett selflessly pre-sages.

Let's pray Osama can continue to rescue us from unhappiness. He's done such a great job so far. And Jacques Chirac too - there's a man with greed-free, imperialism-free vision.

If only Bush himself would cave in and admit the mendacity in his policy, and carry out what is expected of him by the leftist international community / mainstream media, he would have no more image issues - issues that he has but brought upon himself and his government, issues that to Washington Post management have nought to do with any perceived starting agenda amongst their fellow denizens of MSM:

Yong Tang:..(H)ow do you think of this growing anti-American sentiment?

Bennett: The world image of US is so clearly linked to its foreign policy and particularly its policy toward Iraq and Middle East, say its support of Israel and its occupation of Iraq.

... (T)he US government and Bush administration reacted (to 9/11) by deciding that the country would make decisions in foreign affairs that respond only to US interests. ... That caused rift even among the US allies. So it is natural to see that the image of America is the lowest in public opinion.

Interesting blame and causality chain in the Washington Post editor's worldview, isn't there.

For starters, no challenge, as one might expect from Mr. Bennett, to the spurious proposition that "anti-American" sentiment is growing, where it appears to already have been broadly sustained at high levels over a long period. Nor any challenge to the legitimacy of such sentiment.

Instead, we see that in Mr Bennett's thinking, the actual 9/11 attacks, and attacks by terrorists against Israel, aren't particularly relevant in assessing US (or Israeli) policy or any cockeyed image thrust upon such policy.

Only the reactions to terrorism are open to criticism: For Mr. Bennett it goes without saying that the ("occupation") policy in Iraq is wrong - well not really, he already said that - and that "support of Israel" is "wrong".

Focusing on said reactions, the Washington Post and allied media have delivered 19, 656,744,466 anti-American above-the-fold opinions about "Abu Ghraib", 211,597,233,579,902 about "Guantanamo torture" and "no WMDs" and 234,888,400,788 about "Evil Sharon's evil apartheid wall", versus 122,001 mainly below-the-fold and page 97 criticisms of religious fanatic murder-lemming attacks on innocent and pregnant civilians, head loppings, rocket attacks on schools, bigoted Islamic television, bigoted preachings, terrorist schools, terrorist sponsorship, oil-for-food, visions of fanatical Islamic imperialism etc. etc. etc.

And note Mr. Bennett's view that it was the (selfish, irresponsible, imperialistic) reaction of the US to 9/11 that caused the rift with allies.

Apparently nothing to do with nascent pan-European chest-thumping or leftist bias or jockeying for economic positioning.

No hypocrisy regarding the reaction to Iraq versus that to the Yugoslavia invasion, or regarding the long history of rapacious European imperialism, in this view.

No query of the viability of a policy of appeasement against countries that harbour terrorists.

The scary part is that the Washington Post editor like, we might assume, his journalistic colleagues, doth take these truths to be self-evident, for he rejects any notion of bias in the Post's reporting ...

... Except to the extent that it failed to devote enough critical attention to Bush ... for not, inter alia and most significantly, physically unearthing the stockpiles of WMDs necessary to expose what many (illegitimately, in the Post's "unbiased" view of course!) might cynically view as the the anti-American UN legality card, a card concocted for largely political reasons in the first place:

Yong Tang: How do you think of the roles American mainstream media play in American foreign policy?

Bennett: ...We don't have any political point of view that we are trying to advance. ... On the news side of the paper we try not to give opinions.

The government of the US is becoming much more secretive, much more hostile to the press in terms of giving us access to the information.

...it is a big thing for the Washington Post to be the first major newspaper in America to publish the pictures about the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoners abuse scandal.

Where the news gathering part of the Post failed was to be sufficiently skeptical about the administration's claims that there are weapons of mass destructions in Iraq. ... We just repeated what the government said and we did not dig hard enough to challenge those statements.

Now let's see: the opinion-engineers and policy makers at the Washington Post are admittedly anti-Bush, and these people manage, direct, edit and employ the paper's news collectors (with whom they interact on a day to day basis). Further, the starting assumptions guiding news collection (for example, regarding the relative importance of WMDs and Abu Ghraib) are in synch with the paper's opinions...but the Washington Post is not biased.

Is this for real?

When you think you are right, you can fool yourself that your position is not biased, I guess. Even when your country's leader and the majority of your fellows disagree with you.

But the claims of lack of bias don't seem to impress the canny Yong Tang:

Yong Tang: It seems that the influence of mainstream media in America is on the decline. One example is about the general elections last year. The Washington Post and almost all the other major newspapers in the country firmly sided with Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry but finally Bush still won the reelection by a wide margin.

Bennett: Yes, the influence of the mainstream media is on the decline, but I don't think it is because of the reasons you said.

Yong Tang: Does it mean that American mainstream media no longer represent mainstream views?

Bennett: ... Today American people are more conservative, nationalistic and religious and more closed off to foreign influence than the media.

Religious ... closed. The sub-text is that the smug newspaper editor is aware of real, important things, while the unwashed masses who re-elected Bush - not to mention the people dying on the front lines - are not. Their views, you see, are uninformed and based on religion, not logic.

Apparently, whether they realise it or not.

Further, taking this paradigm of denial to yet another - and possibly self-destructive - level, Mr> Bennet argues that the Post approach is in synch with cold realism and astute business sense:

Yong Tang: But basically the newspaper is a business. In order to survive as a business, you should cater to the mainstream views. How can you keep out of touch with your mainstream readers?

Bennett: I don't think we are out of touch with our mainstream readers. If we were out of touch with our mainstream readers, they would not read our newspaper. But they continue to read our newspaper and find value on it.

I wonder if one of the Post polls gleaned that last bit of information. Value is in the mind of the reader, I would say.

I wonder also whether, in financial terms, the Post could do worse than having someone like Yong Tang responsible for extracting value from the Post's news content, instead of someone as embarrasingly out of touch as Mr. Bennett.

But that's just me. Part of Mr. Bennett's religious demographic, even though I haven't seen the inside of a house of worship in years. Unaware of international realities and Bush intentions, even though I dare to imagine myself to be well-traveled, multi-lingual and well-educated - a delusion that the young staffers of the Post can evidently help me eliminate.

With their unbiased, astute, much respected reporting.