Worlds apart
Meejit spends time Stateside and comapres the Irish and the American media.
Meejit has been spending a few days in old haunts and family homes in New York and New Jersey, where Man United is the name of a gay bar and not a national media obsession.
And just as eating in these places is a reminder of how far removed we still are in Ireland from a genuinely cosmopolitan and affordable food culture, consuming the media here reminds us how far we still have to sink into a fully degraded and idiotic press culture.
Magazines, frankly, are a pretty depressing sight anywhere in the world, but American newsstands, with the newspapers in retreat and identikit titles proliferating, are enough to turn the most cheery postmodern populist into an appalled snob. Finding a mag cover without a sexy celeb, advice on improving your "butt" for the summer, or both, was a task beyond Meejit's talents.
Crippled Times
New York is, of course, also home to the world's most overrated newspaper, the New York Times. There are some good stories in the paper, needless to say – many of them migrate to Village, after all – but such is the quantity of dross that the appearance of excellence seems almost random, a thousand-monkeys-with-typewriters phenomenon.
Many liberals are wont to defend it as a besieged institution, but Meejit says let the battlements be overrun. Here's how the alleged bastion of political correctness began a story on the front of its execrable New Jersey section the other day: "The words 'fun' and 'disabled' aren't normally thought of as going together, but in two corners of New Jersey, at least, there are people eager to change that." One's disgust at the patronising offence to people with disabilities is mitigated only by bemusement at the sheer dumb meaningless of it all. The words "at least" deserve a special place in the annals of When Sentences Go Wrong.
The limits of the paper's coverage of Iraq are no joke. Lately it seems to have decided that, since it can't send its reporters onto Iraq's streets, they can report on Iraq's media, easily accessible even in secure hotel rooms: cue successive stories about Baghdad's TV dramas and newspaper cartoonists, and how both cope with their "new freedom" amid "continuing violence". Strangely, foreign occupation and trigger-happy GIs don't seem to figure in their coping.
Oh, but the paper is prepared to analyse the "insurgency". A big piece by James Bennett plastered across the front of the Week in Review section on Sunday labelled it a "Mystery". What are these guys fighting for anyway? Again, the simple answer – an American withdrawal, desired by the vast majority of Iraqis – doesn't cut it in Bennett's story.
Instead, we get a quote from an academic expert, Anthony James Joes, who says the insurgency is just "wanton violence... And there's a name for these guys: Losers". The combination of playground abuse and wishful thinking sums up elite US "thinking" on the issue.
Even on a public-service radio station, a report about closures of military bases features worried quotes about the effect on "the war effort" – which reliable polling says half of the country wants to see abandoned anyway.
Some US journalists are still up close and personal with "the war effort", and the results are more propaganda. For example: a Los Angeles Times story last week, with the marines in western Iraq, reported (near the end) their admission that they shot up a car full of civilians, but added with a straight face that one of the survivors, a wounded woman, "Urged the Marines to re-enter New Ubaydi to fight the guerrillas, the troops said".
The reality is surely better captured in an Agence France Presse story that hasn't made the American papers: "It's all because you're here," an Iraqi policeman shouts in Arabic at US soldiers after the latest Baghdad car-bomb. "Get out of our country and there will be no more explosions."