December 21, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Greenwich Village feels the U.S. is Provincial part 5,483
This links you to the audio of a panel discussion held at the New School including journalists from the Weekly Standard, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Harper's. In it you will find Al Jazeera and New York Times journalists bemoaning the ignorance of Americans, objecting to the use of the flag, etc., and calling it "censorship". You will also hear the Greenwich Village audience clapping enthusiastically for Al Jazeera's representative Hafez Al-Mirazi, then clapping sort of furtively when John Podhoretz calls out Al-Mirazi for running the "Mossad did the WTC" story and being horribly anti-semitic. For his part, the Al Jazeera reporter claims they qualified the Mossad story as a rumour and ran their own editorial condemning the rumour-mongers. Apparently it is necessary to report ridiculous and unfounded rumours in order to be objective - as if they were statistics from an independent source. The audience hoots scornfully at the "hidden message" argument about the Bin Laden tapes, but applauds thoughtfully when it is suggested that showing an American Flag in WTC coverage is jingoistic. If 4,000 Jordanians were killed, and CNN covered the event, would it be jingoistic to put the Jordanian flag in a cover graphic? I can't relate.
The questions at the end are precious (and predictably left-leaning and long-winded), the best one being the irate Northern European-sounding man who asks "why is the American Left so utterly useless?!?" Before anyone else can answer, John Podhoretz injects "Because you're wrong."
Listen as you blog. You will find yourself wishing Mark Steyn was there instead of Podhoretz.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 21, 2001 11:51 AM | Technorati inbound links