On American Media

From Journalism.co.uk:

US public turns to Europe for news

Posted: 21 February 2003 By: Elizabeth Croad
Email: elizabeth@journalism.co.uk

The threat of war in Iraq is driving increasing numbers of Americans to British and international news web sites in search of the broader picture.

According to the internet audience management and analysis company, Nielsen NetRatings, traffic to the UK's biggest news sites, BBC News Online and Guardian Unlimited, has increased dramatically over the past year. Many of these new users are from the US.

Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: "We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media."

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

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"France's Stance on War Hardly Warrants Bashing"

Published on Thursday, February 20, 2003 by the Chicago Tribune

"France's Stance on War Hardly Warrants Bashing"
by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- As our coaches used to say, "OK, people, settle down and listen up." We have been enjoying a lovely little spate of French-bashing here lately. Jonah Goldberg of The National Review, who admits that French-bashing is "shtick" -- as it is to many American comedians -- has popularized the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" to describe the French. It gets a lot less attractive than that.

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been
tried." That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.

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Molly Ivins is a syndicated columnist based in Austin, Texas

The Inimitable Gwynne Dyer on the War

"A 20-minute empire," by Gwynne Dyer
Just over 2 000 years ago, when the Roman republic turned itself into an empire and extended the Pax Romana over most of the known world - western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, plus the great reservoir of barbarian tribes in eastern Europe and central Asia - Rome exercised direct control over about half the total population, and was able to tax them and raise troops from them. So the Roman empire lasted over 400 years.

Many people in Washington now talk openly of turning the American republic into an imperial power that enforces a Pax Americana around the planet, but the United States has only four percent of the planet's population and its people are equally averse to high taxes and U.S. casualties. The demand for U.S. troops and money will rapidly outrun the supply, so the American empire will last about 20 minutes - but it may be a hectic and painful 20 minutes.

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• Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.