The Media Column: 'Cheerleading did dominate the US networks. But it's not the whole story'

Monty Python fans know the truth about Americans. They have smaller brains. Armed with that certainty, debate about things American is simple. Terms such as "Americanised" cease to be descriptive and become condemnatory. When Greg Dyke talks of Americanisation, as he did in his speech at Goldsmiths College, in London, last Thursday, we know that he is warning us about a tsunami of stupidity that threatens to engulf us.

Dyke's stated theme concerned the US broadcast media's "unquestioning" coverage of the war in Iraq. The director general of the BBC was keen to proclaim that Britain should be very grateful that it has the organisation he runs and that the corporation is big enough to resist all pressure to behave like an American network.

Dyke's real point was that diluting or fragmenting his empire would lead inevitably to a diminution of British sophistication and render us ever more like the dreadful people who introduced Europe to large fridges. Few will blame him for blowing the trumpet for BBC News after a successful war, but the comparison on which he based his argument was false. The notion that American media coverage of the war can be lumped into a single category for instant denunciation is nonsense.

Honest appraisal reveals something less alluring to the growing "Yank = cretin" lobby, who find it comforting to believe that America is a nation in which dissident opinion is stigmatised as treason.

Consider these quotes. "Any day now you expect a power-crazed Rumsfeld to crown himself Caesar and lead his troops in an assault on Foggy Bottom... Surely President Bush can be made to see that Rummy's way is the only way to run a great empire. Then, on to France."

That was Michelle Cottle being acerbically ironic in the magazine The New Republic. Her editor, Peter Beinart, went farther. He wrote: "Rumsfeld should have trouble sleeping at night, given his role in abetting Saddam's crimes," and deems the politician most closely identified with the pro-war faction "a crass act".

TNR is a political magazine for Washington insiders. It might best be compared with our own Spectator. So, the criticism has been expressed within a tight circle who can be trusted with dangerous ideas? Hardly. This is from a recent leader in The New York Times dealing with weapons of mass destruction: "Rather than a smoking gun, inspectors may end up finding a bullet here, a barrel there and a chamber somewhere else. That makes the credibility of the people doing the inspecting even more important. And it makes President Bush's decision not to invite international inspectors to monitor the job seem even more misguided."

The Boston Globe has been in on the act, too. The columnist Derrick Z Jackson says, "America will never truly be a beacon of global freedom as long as it prays only for itself... A nation that has chosen to kill innocent Iraqis in a 'preventive' war has a lot of talking to do with God." Examples too numerous to cite leap from the pages of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and sceptical voices have been given free rein on television programmes such as Newshour with Jim Lehrer and on National Public Radio.

NPR's correspondent Anne Garrels broadcast from Baghdad throughout the invasion. She filed on an unauthorised satellite telephone, transmitting naked in the hope that her nudity would buy a few precious moments if the mukhabarat came calling. Her colleague John Burnett revealed the bombing of the village of Aziziyah by American forces, in which 31 civilians were killed as they slept.

Cheerleading did dominate the coverage of network giants such as CBS, ABC and Fox News. But that is not the whole story. Thinking Americans relied on their indigenous media to provide news coverage every bit as challenging as the service Brits are accustomed to.

Perceiving America through the opinions tolerated by network giants does little to aid understanding. Those behemoths aim at the lowest common denominator with all the enthusiasm Greg Dyke has displayed in his rejuvenation of BBC1. The American press that brought us Deep Throat (finally unmasked last week, if Professor Bill Gaines has got it right) has long provided the alternative perspective that a functioning democracy needs. Assertions to the contrary would not get past a junior copy editor in New York. The American media are regional and specialised to an extent that Britons find hard to understand. That is inevitable in a vast nation, as is the range of opinions that it has suited our own opponents of war to ignore.

timlckhrst@aol.com