PONTEFICATIONS

THE TV MAKEUP MELTED IN IRAQ’S HEAT OF BATTLE, revealing the ugly face of Leftist bias that many in our media usually try to conceal. Lit up by the rockets’ red glare over Iraq, here are some snapshots you should never forget.

"It was a grand and glorious picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable TV news," said Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC about covering her first war.

"But it wasn’t journalism," the 34-year-old Banfield told 500 students at Kansas State University, "because I’m not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again – to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor."

So how did Ms. Banfield want the war reported to make it appear less courageous and terrific, and more likely to leave viewers repulsed by what American troops were doing?

"We didn’t see what happens when Marines fired M-16s," said the young reporter, fresh from her dis-embedding with our troops. "We didn’t see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?"

Hey, in the next war MSNBC should dispatch Ashleigh Banfield to where the mortars and cruise missiles are landing so that she can report these horrors up close and personal.

Who is this bespectacled, haughty reporter that MSNBC tried to turn into Gulf War II’s female "scud stud," failing when this scud siren proved more shrill than seductive. She had already failed with her own show, "Ashleigh Banfield: On Location," that aired only from July to October 2002.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in French and political studies from Queen’s University in Ontario, Banfield began work in 1988 in Canada.

Banfield was and is "an old person’s idea of a young person," writes one critic, and old people in TV management rushed to hire her to boost their appeal to younger viewers. By 2000 the haughtily-Leftist Canadian was covering both the Sydney Olympics and the Bush-Cheney campaign for MSNBC.

Like her mentor Peter Jennings, who used to date Palestinian Authority spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi (and who petulantly went out of his way to describe Iraqis cheering the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad as "a small crowd"), the French-speaking Banfield is quick to criticize Israel and its supporters. She has gone out of her way to ascribe American policy to the influence of what she calls "the Jewish Lobby."

"According to Banfield, U.S. broadcasters do not accurately inform the American public of the basic reason behind widespread Islamic distrust of the U.S.," wrote Matt Moline of the Topeka Capital-Journal of her Kansas speech, "— the American government’s continued unwillingness to treat Israelis and Palestinians as equal partners in the future of Israel."

Banfield apparently has not noticed that all sides in this matter have for years been discussing whether or when a separate Palestinian state or entity will be recognized…not whether Palestinians will be "equal partners in the future of Israel." But let’s face it. Banfield was not hired by MSNBC for her depth of knowledge or understanding.

"He’s a warmonger," said Cable News Network founder Ted Turner of his rival Rupert Murdoch, founder of the Fox News Channel. At a speech last Thursday before San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Turner said that Murdoch had "promoted" going to war with Iraq to boost ratings for Fox News.

All three American cable news channels saw their ratings jump during this war. MSNBC watched its near-zero audience increase five fold, thereby achieving the largest percentage increase of the three….especially after it began airing photos that families sent in of their loved ones in uniform.

In sheer numbers of viewers, Fox with its inclusion of pro-American voices gained vastly more new viewers than did CNN, whose coverage as the American affiliate of Al Jazeera was, as always, highly critical of the United States.

"Just because your ratings are bigger doesn’t mean you’re better," said Turner, a convert to the size-doesn’t-matter school of sour grapes.

Less than two weeks before Turner spoke, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan confessed in an April 11 New York Times Op-Ed piece that CNN concealed knowledge of torture, threats and even assassination by Iraqi officials. By keeping such information to themselves, CNN reporters became knowing transmitters of Saddam Hussein’s propaganda. This was the price of keeping their bureau open in Baghdad.

It seems never to have occurred to Ted Turner that CNN thereby helped and encouraged Hussein in oppressing the people of Iraq and threatening the world. Freud would have called Turner’s remarks about Murdoch "projection," accusing another of what you yourself have done, in the way a thief tends to assume that everybody else is a thief.

Ted Turner also avoided addressing another obvious question: in what other evil countries has CNN traded its integrity for access? One obvious place is Fidel Castro’s Cuba, so regularly praised by CNN’s "reporters" in Havana that in much of the world the initials CNN are assumed to stand for the Castro News Network or the Communist News Network.

(At that grim ceremony where Great Britain returned Hong Kong to Communist China, Turner turned to Red Chinese officials beside him on the dais and, with live microphones nearby, proudly told them that he was "also a socialist.")

Oddly, therefore, Ted Turner (who wants all media run by socialist governments) complained to the Commonwealth Club that "There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy."

We can agree that it’s unhealthy that one of these purported five conglomerates is AOL-Time-Warner-CNN, with the Leftist likes of Ted Turner among its leaders. Time Magazine, for example, seems busy trying to destabilize Iraq and the Middle East by promoting the incendiary notion that Christian President George W. Bush, a modern crusader, might be aiming to conquer the region so that Christian missionaries will be able to convert young Muslims away from their faith. What will they speculate next? That President Bush is trying to precipitate Armageddon and the Second Coming?

Hours before Turner spoke, the Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation Greg Dyke also singled out for attack Fox News Channel, along with Clear Channel Communications. Their coverage of the war was so patriotic and so lacking in impartiality, Dyke said, that it threatened the credibility of America’s electronic media.

Bias is, of course, to some degree in the eye of the beholder and ear of the behearer. But BBC’s coverage has been so relentlessly anti-war and anti-American that, as one listener to its World Service in Africa told the London Telegraph, "I thought we were losing."

"I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering ‘significant casualties’," said Paul Adams, the BBC’s own defence correspondent in Qatar. "This simply is not true. Nor is it true to say – as the same stated – that coalition forces are fighting ‘guerrillas’. It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas."

"The BBC always takes the Iraqis’ side. It reports what they say as gospel but when it comes to us it questions and doubts everything the British and Americans are reporting," said one British sailor in the Persian Gulf. "A lot of people on board are very unhappy."

So unhappy were they that his ship, the British Navy’s flagship HMS Ark Royal, turned off its own government network BBC and replaced it with Rupert Murdoch’s free market British equivalent to Fox News Channel, Sky News.

This, of course, is precisely what Greg Dyke and his BBC dread. New legislation now before Parliament could open the British market to more competition by American media companies, and the BBC is desperate to block this pending legislation.

"We must ensure that we don’t become Americanised," said Dyke, who also accused Prime Minister Tony Blair’s pro-war government of trying to "manage public opinion" and "apply pressure" on the BBC, funded as a non-competitive monopoly by an annual tax on every television set in Great Britain.

We have our own coercively tax-supported government networks, the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, and National Public Radio, both of which are outrageously Leftist and out of step with American values. Both violate the Charter requirement of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to be fair and balanced in their discussion of public issues.

(Many major market PBS stations subsidize and broadcast programming, including Left-slanted newscasts, from BBC. Get ready for your American taxes to help pay for the newly-announced BBC drama series glorifying the idealism and goodness of spies Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, who during the Cold War betrayed their nation’s secrets to the Soviet Union. It’s coming soon to a PBS station near you.)

Both PBS and NPR should be abolished, for exactly the same reason we prohibit the Voice of America from beaming into the United States with content that is influenced directly as well as ideologically by politicians in power who could use VOA to lobby for their own re-election.

Privately-owned media has its own biases. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger has told of a recent invitation by the New York Times asking him to write an Op-Ed article. This invitation was to write an article critical of the Bush Administration, he said, and it was clearly understood that any Eagleburger article friendly to Bush policies would go unpublished.

Thanks to Fox News Channel, Secretary Eagleburger had a way to convey this evidence of bias to the American people. Imagine a world like Cuba or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq where no alternative channel of information is permitted, and where taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for their own brainwashing. That’s the monopoly media future that socialist Ted Turner wants for all of us. The pressures of the Iraq War have helped bring all the above evidence of bias to light.