The war, brought to you by the White House

When Fox star Bill O'Reilly interviewed retired generals before the 
attack on Baghdad, he airily dismissed their caution and told his 
viewers that the US should go in and "splatter" the Iraqis.  

By John Willis

Friday June 20, 2003: (The Guardian) During my year as a television 
executive in the United States, I was continuously struck by the 
difference between the two countries. Oregano is not a herb, but an 
erb. The former head of the FBI was J Edgar Oover and Bill Clinton 
was married to Illary. In religion, society, politics and culture, 
the differences are starker.  

Yet we are both glued together in a world where what happens in 
Yemen or Yugoslavia affects lives in Boston or Bristol. A global 
economy is fed and powered by a worldwide information system, and 
cultural trends - reality TV, Harry Potter, rap music - slip 
seamlessly across the Atlantic.  

There is much to admire on American television. It is hard to imagine a 
long-running British network series as literate as The West Wing or as 
brilliant and enduring as The Simpsons. But these are a tiny number of 
programmes at the top of a food chain that is long, bland and tasteless, 
like the endless fast-food restaurants on the edges of American towns, 
where Arby's and Denny's, McDonald's and Taco Bell compete for neon 
attention.  

Hours of cloned entertainment jostle with lame comedies and drama-by-
numbers. Every hour is crammed full of commercials, encouraging a 
form of television attention deficit disorder. In this environment, 
Americans watch anything. An eating contest, The Chicken Wing Bowl, 
attracted 20,000 stadium spectators. Never one to miss a trick, Fox 
has run a televised food-guzzling contest, The Glutton Bowl.  

But it is on news and current affairs that American TV is shown at its 
most dispiriting. No nation needs independent and impartial media more 
than the US, a sprawling and diverse democracy in which only 16% of 
people hold passports.  

Yet during the Iraq conflict the problem wasn't just the US flag 
fluttering in the corner of the screens or the loose language from 
embedded reporters using "we"; it was also that much of the coverage, 
particularly on the cable channels, could have been written and produced 
by the White House.  

When Fox star Bill O'Reilly interviewed retired generals before 
the attack on Baghdad, he airily dismissed their caution and told 
his viewers that the US should go in and "splatter" the Iraqis.  

Interviews with military superhawks were balanced by regular strength 
hawks, dissenters reduced to soundbites at protest rallies and 
described as "the usual protesters" or even "the great
unwashed".  

Chillingly, the media consulting firm Frank Magid Associates warned 
that covering war protests might be harmful to a station's bottom line. 
Another consultant group urged radio stations to make listeners "cry, 
salute, get cold chills!" Go for the emotions, and air the national 
anthem each day.  

Fox News led the way as the military cheerleader, apparently giving 
both viewers and politicians what they wanted. Contra scandal star 
Oliver North reported on the ground for Fox. The channel's proud slogan 
is "Real Journalism, Fair and Balanced", but as columnist Tom Shales 
put it: "The only word with any truth in it is 'and'."  

The success of Fox has pushed other stations to the right. MSNBC 
recently hired Michael Savage, whose radio programme Savage Nation 
makes Fox News look like the Guardian. On radio, Savage gave his 
solution to the Middle East conflict: "We are the good ones and 
they, the Arabs, are the evil ones. They must be snuffed out from 
the planet and not in a court of law."  

There was little or no debate. America's leaders remained unchallenged. 
Any lack of patriotism was punished with McCarthyite vigour, even in 
the television industry, where CBS's Ed Gernon was summarily 
dismissed for a mild case of expressing his opinion.  

For all the warts on British television, a year in America taught me just 
how lucky we are to have not just the BBC but also a range of diversely 
funded channels with different layers of public service ambitions and 
obligations. The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs 
are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government 
what it wants.  

This swamp of political cravenness was a timely reminder of the values 
and obligations of public television. Its birthmarks - independence, 
universality, diversity of opinion and quality - should be especially 
visible at times of war. Now, as I return home, it looks as if the 
giants of American media might be following me. I am being stalked 
by Viacom and Disney.  

We have to hope that Ofcom makes a better fist of regulation than the 
US Federal Communications Commission, which has overseen a dramatic 
reduction in the diversity of ownership in US radio and recently 
voted to allow media consolidation in television. But defending the 
independence, quality and range of British television culture against 
the muscularity of the US media giants is a tall order for a start-up 
regulator.  

Media consolidation is a careless risk that should never have been 
contemplated - we are playing with matches when we don't need to 
start a fire. American majors will defend their bottom line with 
all the political influence, commercial muscle and legal firepower 
they can muster.  

If the government has its way over the next few weeks, we have to 
hope that Ofcom rises to the task and that in 10 years' time American 
television's influence here still represents the distinctiveness of 
The Sopranos, not the wasteland that is the rest of US television.  

I will leave the final word to a friend named Bill, who runs a small 
New England restaurant. He said to me: "British television, now that's 
a nice piece of cheese. I heard on the radio that our guys might be 
moving in there. John, for heaven's sake, stop it - by the time they 
finish there'll be no cheese at all."  

* John Willis is the BBC director of factual and learning, and former 
vice president in charge of national programmes at WGBH in Boston. This 
is an edited extract from a speech given at the Royal Television Society 
this week  

(c) Copyright 2003 Guardian Unlimited  

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Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3852.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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