Seeker Blog

Australian historian Keith Windschuttle wrote this essay for The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 10, June 2005. Windschuttle tackles a question that continues to puzzle me: how have so many journalists, particularly European journalists, come to support terrorists like bin Laden and despots like Saddam Hussein?

Windschuttle finds that some, like Robert Fisk,

are hankering after the trappings of aristocracy, or anything that smacks of aristocracy [which] is behind much of the anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment that now emanates from the European news media, especially in the writings of European leftists such as Fisk.

Many others, like John Pilger, continue to wish for the socialist utopia and to hope for the defeat of any capitalist society:

He claims America is an imperial power that represents “the iron fist of rampant capital” and is a force of “geopolitical fascism.”

Windschuttle finds that

Between them, Pilger and Fisk represent the nadir of Western journalism in our time. They take us back to those apologists of the Soviet era in the 1930s, such as Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, who lavished praise on Stalin and the USSR at a time when hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians were dying of starvation or perishing before the regime’s firing squads. In his day, Duranty, who won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, was as celebrated as Pilger and Fisk are now, but what stuck in the long run was the epithet another Moscow correspondent, Malcolm Muggeridge, later gave him: “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.” Duranty and his successors betrayed their profession.

Windschutttle then moves from such depressing accounts of poor journalism to the good examples: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and Victor Davis Hanson’s essays:

For a second nomination as one of the great pieces of journalism to come out of this war, I would like to propose a series of essays originally published online, but which have since been collected in book form under the title An Autumn of War.

The author, Victor Davis Hanson, is a classical scholar and a military historian who, on the conservative website National Review Online between September 11 and December 22, 2001, published no less than thirty-eight essays about the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington and the war in Afghanistan. In that brief time, the Taliban was defeated and a new government of reconciliation formed in Kabul. At a time when the shock of September 11 had disoriented everyone and it was very hard to think straight, Hanson’s essays rose above ordinary commentary. He told those of us in the West who we were, why we were being attacked, and why we would eventually prevail.

Hanson was not a journalistic bystander and made no pretense at being dispassionate. He supported the Bush administration’s immediate use of military force in Afghanistan. Indeed, he was an advocate of such a response and gave personal advice to that effect to Vice President Cheney. On September 12, 2001 he wrote:

Osama Bin Laden has made a fatal miscalculation. Like everybody who scoffs at the perceived laxity of Western democracies, these murderers have woken an enormous power from its slumber, and retribution will shortly be both decisive and terrible… . In the months to come, American ground and air forces, with better weapons, better supplies, better discipline and more imaginative commanders—audited constantly by an elected Congress and President, criticized by a free press—will shatter the very foundations of Islamic fundamentalism… . The Taliban and other hosts of murderers at bases in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria may find reprieve from Western clergy and academics, but they shall not from the American military. America is not only the inheritor of the European military tradition, but in many ways also its most powerful incarnation… . These are intimidating assets when we turn, as we shall shortly, from the arts of production to those of destruction. The world, much less the blinkered fundamentalists, has not seen a United States unleashed for a long time and so has forgotten all this.

Many of the other thirty-seven articles continued in the same theme. Some were straight pieces but others were satires, such as his imaginary re-run of responses to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and America’s retaliatory raid in April 1942, by current celebrity commentators such as Stanley Fish, Jesse Jackson, Oliver Stone, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said.

Fish: There can be no independent standard for determining which of the many rival interpretations of the raid is the true one. What we must not do is to fall back on some absurd notion of absolute and enduring values like truth, freedom and democracy … Sontag: I cannot accept the moral equivalence of an attack on our soldiers at Pearl Harbor with a desperate lashing out against Tokyo. The blood of Japanese women and children is on our hands. Who is the real April fool? Said: Among many Western colonialists there is a deep and abiding—may I say fear and hatred?—of what they have construed the Other into as the “Oriental.” Jackson: Stop the guns and save our sons. Keep peace alive and don’t let the planes dive. Don’t be in fearo of the Zero or Emperor Hiro. Let our planes drop more for the poor, and make less of a mess.

This longish essay is highly recommended - the closing paragraph:

From these examples of politically opinionated war reporting, it is not difficult to decide which is the real journalism. The choice is not between political left and political right but between sophistry and scholarship. One betrays the great tradition of Western journalism; the other fulfills it.

(ht: Media Blog)