|
 |
U.S. TV lost focus on war, says
editor
|
| Mary E. O’Leary,
Register Topics Editor |
May 06,
2003 |
|
| NEW HAVEN — A senior editor at Newsweek,
Michael Hirsh, told a Yale audience recently that he was "fairly
appalled" by television’s coverage of the Iraqi war.
|
"This has not been the media’s finest hour," he
said.
Hirsh, who won the Overseas Press Award in 2001, said
war broadcasts from Great Britain and Canada were so different from
American broadcasts that one might have thought they were covering
two different wars.
He called American TV "self- absorbed"
and "jingoistic" and said the natural skepticism of the media was
lost after 9/11.
Hirsh was on a panel with Ernesto Zedillo,
director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and
William Wohlforth of Dartmouth College.
It was one of several
teach-ins held this spring and addressed the future of
multilateralism versus America going it alone.
He said he
disagreed with those who feel Americans and Europeans see the world
in profoundly different ways and that the European embrace of
multilateralism is an expression of its weakness.
Hirsh said
America created most of the international institutions now under
stress and he predicted a return to some multilateralism,
particularly in a strengthened role for the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.
"There is no inevitability to
anti-Americanism," Hirsh said, who did not see any major alliances
building against the United States.
All the panelists agreed
that there has never been a sovereign state that has dominated the
world as the United States does.
Wohlforth said a lot of the
world’s problems can’t be solved by the United States acting alone,
from the environment to the economy to containing
disease.
Hirsh referred to President Bush’s stab at diplomacy
"disastrously bad," while Wohlforth said, "It’s almost intended to
offend."
The Dartmouth professor, who got his doctorate at
Yale University, said he thought the "big flaw in the middle of the
imperial doughnut" was the question of America’s willingness to pay
for nation building in Iraq.
He said the United States won’t
be able to sustain its imperial strategy if it stays preoccupied
with tax cuts.
Zedillo was worried that the significant
economic and political costs of the war will translate into security
costs.
"Global problems need global solutions," observed
Zedillo, and right now, people aren’t talking.
He said an
important benchmark will be the meeting of the major Western powers
in early June.
If they are not talking about getting the
world economy moving again, "it will be very bad for the world and
certainly for the United States of America," Zedillo said.
|
| ©New Haven
Register 2003 |
|
|
.gif){kind=spacer}
