Posts Tagged ‘Journliasm’
The slanted media
The other day, I read this commentary I found on the current conflict in Georgia. It is a different, non-Western perspective from a former Indian ambassador, sort of thing that’s not easy to find in mainstream media. I wanted to hear a different perspective which I may have missed, but which wasn’t some sophomoric rant of a barely disguised Russian nationalist.
Well, a different perspective it certainly is. What it doesn’t appear to be, is to be in touch with reality. Aside from including some statements as fact which have not been independently verified, the author’s analysis just makes no sense.
Several commentators have observed that Washington may have encouraged Georgia to behave rashly by creating a sense that the U.S. would support Georgia militarily in any conflict with Russia. That most people, at least in the West, did not think that this was ever a realistic possibility is beside the point. Even these people do not believe that Washington ever had, or would have thought they had, any reason to want such a conflict to arise in Georgia.
More to the point, Ambassador Bhadrakumar contends that this is all a grand scheme by Washington to get Georgia into NATO. This is patently absurd. As many Western commentator have already pointed out, this conflict is actually more likely to turn many European nations away from accepting Georgian accession to NATO.
Nobody in NATO wants to get dragged into a potential conflict with Russia. Many of the NATO members are paper tigers, with small militaries and almost no expeditionary forces to speak of. The U.S., Britain, and France are the only countries with a demonstrated capability in that department, and they are already overstretched. Even if they wanted to get in the middle of this fight, existing NATO members realise that to do so will be a military mistake.
It seems to me that far too many critics of this uni-polar perspective often miss the point of their criticism. The uniformity of opinion is only a symptom of the real problem, not the actual problem itself. The real problem is the poor standard of what passes for journalism these days.
Journalists are people too and they will inevitably have opinions. But good journalists are aware of their own biases and try to present all sides of the story, along with critiques of them all. Simply having access to bad arguments from different perspectives does not help us become better informed.
And for what it’s worth, the most “balanced” commentary I’ve read so far on the current conflict has been by a Republican former political operative, from the Nixon White House, no less.
