European Document/Fleet Street Foolishness
Greer, Herb
fringe of youth-fiRed rallies last fall and wonder, "Where am 19. '' Spencer remembered the old days when Reagan used to get booed off campuses. Anyway, the media jumped on the...
...In the exit poll of ABC News, the voters broke roughly and the Sunday Times which, under Rupert Murdoch's ownership, are not exactly left-wing...
...the ambushing of large quantities of British coal that it police cars and violent assaults by ram- tional Union of Mineworkers (NUM...
...It is an unfortunate characteristic of British reportage on the election and on America generally that men like Johnson and O'Brien have only a minor effect on British public opinion...
...The poles as battering rams on "picket" (state-owned) Central Electricity The average price of British coal at the pithead is s per ton (and ranges from THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 by John Burton exfract monopoly profits...
...Import regulations against ings at policemen, pick-axe handles, practices, and political pressure to pre- coal imports have been deployed by since the Fascist marches against the vent industrial adaptation...
...Not even the crazy Americans would do such a thing...
...Events are moving too fast, and they don't know E U R O P E A N " D O C U M E N T FLEET STREET FOOLISHNESS The British like to think that Americans are stiff untamed...
...Exit polls fleshed out the phenomenon: voters 18 to 21 favored Carter by 47-41 percent in 1980, but they preferred Reagan in 1984 by 60-39 percent...
...The by mass intimidatory "picketing" and amount of private open-caste mining basic problem is that while the NCB is allowed under license...
...Buchwald said he suggested to Fred and Mira Staunchley--this is a humor column, remember--that their son Tommy was putting on a conservative act to shock them: "It's no act," Fred said...
...This is n o t an easy time for many of my friends raised in the good old liberal tradition," he confessed...
...Anyway, the media jumped on the young-folks-for-Reagan story...
...This quaint prejudice has been implicit in much British coverage of our general elections, notably the one in 1980 and this year's contest...
...John Burton is a Research Fellow at the Institute o f Economic Affairs in London...
...It among others, but as a devil to be generally endorses his sense of Com- destroyed as God cast down Lucifer...
...He was a "Hollywood Cowboy" shooting from the lip and ready if he got in to shoot from the hip, too...
...losses that exceeds even the ability to This comforting British illusion has agitators who have joined them, range tionalized" industry...
...A "public" does not have many internationally waylaying of working miners...
...in Pennsylvania, finding Reaganites in abundance at both places...
...The opacity of Mondale was reported with dismay and puzzlement, but his policies were given friendly treatment, with headlines like "Mondale's Robin Hood Gamble" and the backhanded "Mondale losing in the 'Macho' Stakes...
...although in the grip of one of the most intimidation to go to work (originally all this would allow the NCB to extort What is it all about...
...the dustry, engineered--against his own union's constitutional rules--by Mr...
...He said we were bleeding hearts and didn't understand the real world...
...Did he say where he stood on school prayer...
...opposing him with no real chance of winning was a former actor, a creature apparently of cardboard whose main qualifications as a candidate seemed to be a pleasant manner on television combined with fierce ,right-wing rhetoric...
...Since the beginning ther entrench the state monopoly...
...Even those who approve of the recovery of American morale after Reagan's policies patronize him as an the downcast years under Carter, and ex-actor and worry, for instance, that approves Reagan's fh'mness, his lack of he does not see the USSR as a nation anxiety to please the West's enemies...
...We took him to antinuclear demonstrations...
...But in Britain there are special media...
...Britain heard and read of Yankee aggressiveness, political "naivet~" overkill, failure to consult allies, etc...
...To begin with, the coal industry in Thus the NCB last fiscal year the U.K...
...Mondale's "facts" and was more persuaded by Mr...
...What is it...
...is state-owned (some small registered a deficit of s billion...
...One commentator did quote, ruefully, a Mondale supporter's remark the campaign Conor Cruise O'Brien, writing in the Observer, shrewdly analyzed the role of the man who "plays" the President...
...Ice-cold brains, one was told, were at work...
...This shows like the BBC's weekly view is particularly favored by car- "Panorama," and of much featuretoonists even in papers like the Times documentary work on ITV (commerby Herb Greer cial television) by reporters like Jonathan Dimbleby, the furiously antiAmerican John Pilger, and in current affairs magazine-shows like the leftwing "World in Action...
...united over Grenada...
...arson...
...As befits semi-savages, we are often seen on this side of the pond as gullible and maybe a little bit crazy...
...On the Left and among some international thug...
...For sure, party preference doesn't mean what it used to...
...The result of this assumption was that one, and only one, prominent British journalist predicted the 1980 landslide...
...Spencer remembered the old days when Reagan used to get booed off campuses...
...This symmetry is especially swallow aggressive policies and popular on British television...
...So does the appearance of all those college kids with Reagan buttons and so does the growing national disdain for liberalism...
...Reagan, if one believed some British reports, was quite ready to blow up the world at worst, bring back the Cold War at best, and revive a Manichean approach to international politics that made Europeans shudder...
...Those un- powerful yet backward-looking union about one quarter of the work force a whacking monopoly profit from the movements in the world, the home- now rising to 30 percent) has recorded familiar with the British situation may hapless British energy consumer...
...In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies.' When she confronted him with it he just shrugged his shoulders anti said i f he was going to scratch and claw his way up the ladder he had to know what big business was doing...
...One--the minority--applauds glosses...
...presented by the Soviet Union and its Thus gullible Americans are induced to allies...
...This divide matches closely enough the Republican and Democratic dichotomy in America's national argupolicies have dominated the British ment...
...Where is Tommy now...
...ITV's Channel 4, the "serious" channel, broadcast, and repeated during the campaign, a documentary which among other things called the President a puppet, a threat to American democracy, a danger to world peace, and a passive tool of in the dark...
...Mira found this under his pillow this morning...
...Humorist Art Buchwald wrote about the agony of liberal parents confronted with a conservative coRege kid...
...But, Johnson concluded, he distrusted Mr...
...Pretty thick ice !t turned out to be...
...Reagan often sounds as if he hadn't learned that lesson, but the gap between his rhetoric and his behavior suggests that he may have...
...The "profile" was riddled with snide comments and accused the President of trying to "impose lifelong [sic] censorship on the 128,000 top administration officials...
...In a perceptive column from America, Frank Johnson of the Times noted how much Mondale resembled a British parliamentary-style politician, with a repertoire of facts and figures and the backchat skill to exploit them...
...Other fuels, such as oi], are by vast subsidies--that jack up the and autos...
...He told us there would always be poor people, and there were a lot worse things than a nuclear arms rac~ As far as the environment was concerned, he would have nothing to do with a movement that was impeding the economic growth of the United States...
...For exarnple, early in Americans contains more than the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . meretricious unguents of political snake oil...
...And he turned his back on everything you people believe in...
...It has economic Darwinism, much to the been the leading theme of reports on danger of world peace and the detri- nuclear weapons by current affairs ment of European economies...
...It sounds like this has not been one of your better weeks," I said...
...Among the contemptuous references to the President's media skill there does occasionally appear a glimmer of Z here has of course been some recognition that his appeal to serious comment...
...Reportage on the recent election maintained the generally Democratic party bias of "serious" journalism in Britain...
...Ferraro was given gentle treatment, as were hangers-on like the egregious Reverend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E M I N E NT O E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arthur Scargill, president of the Na- F o r many a long year, trade unions police protection...
...He led a boycott of California lettuce when he was in high school...
...He also dealt acerbically with the issue of foreign policy "expertise": McNamara) were held in superstitious veneration...
...Following the aware of a need to avoid hubris, and leaps Mondale-Reagan debates, "Channel 4 News" brought in a medical amateur to comment on Reagan's syntax and state confidently that it showed him "on the verge of senility...
...have been turning the British economy would prefer to purchase (because paging mobs on police stations...
...I don't know what we did wrong," Mira said...
...Thetactics deployed by some racketeering normally associated in industries have a capacity for making Britain with the operation of a "na- of the strikers, and far-left political part...
...The President's candidacy, in contrast, was greeted with a long "profile" in the Observer by Robert Chesshyre, who has been consistently There was a time...
...Bill Peterson of the Washington Post went to Ohio State University and uncovered the same...
...This sort of thing kept coming from Fishlock long after the Times had changed its editorial mind and acclaimed the "rescue" of Grenada...
...It accounts for his 9 moderate journalists there was and is popularity by reference to "com- a persistent attempt to portray Reagan munication" (read: 9 and his electorate as a danger to skill on television, backed by a sinister clique "peace" fully equivalent to any threat of experts in media manipulation...
...discriminated against by taxation...
...How could an advanced country with a population in the hundreds Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright riving in England...
...Journalists of right and left almost 27 even in their party identification, which amounted to a 30 percent jump for the Republicans since 1980...
...Then he gave us 10 minutes on having a Supreme Court that would not always come down on the side of the criminal...
...Many here are convinced, for instance, that Reagan appeals purely to materialism in the young, and that once-visionary students have abandoned their idealism to follow and vote for him...
...He said we were a nation under God and there was nothing wrong with children praying before they started their classes...
...norance o f the conventions o f Majority opinion in the British media American political rhetoric, ~ leading to clings to the 1980 caricature of Reagan a willingness here to take that rhetoric as a missile-monger and simpleminded literally...
...Reagan's simple truths...
...For nine successive British governments to furmonths, the main area of worker equally long time, many Britons have in the early 1930s...
...A mere 14 percent of the voters nationally conf'uted to ABC that the party affiliation of a candidate made a hoot of difference to them...
...It was tacitly assumed that no mature nation in its right mind could elect such a man, and certainly not decisively...
...tripwires to bring down mounted Generating Board is forced to take Jackson...
...Not only that...
...Our dream was someday he would be arrested for protesting a toxic waste dump...
...Grenada's wild welcome to American troops smothered this Outcry into an embarrassed sulkiness, with ITV reporters scouring the island for a supporter of the New Jewel Movement who would complain on camera...
...We taught him to have concern for the poor and the disenfranchised...
...The Sun, for instance, did one piece at the University of Maryland and another at Lehigh University...
...And in ABC's poll in Texas, voters actually showed a slight preference for the GOP, which is astonishing in such an overwhelmingly Democratic state...
...This extraordinary view suggests that in the British disdain of Yankee gullibility there is more than a touch of the sooty pot insisting that a bright new kettle is black...
...fringe of youth-fiRed rallies last fall and wonder, "Where am 19...
...munism as a serious threat to the values This assumption is sustained by an igand integrity of the Western world...
...They registered their approval--temporary approval, you could argue--of a political philosophy, [] too...
...For an Jews organized by Sir Oswald Moseley and Molotov cocktails...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 of millions throw up such a pair of alternativesg, On balance most British commentators preferred the oaf, since Reagan was clearly not a person or a politician they could take seriously...
...On another Sunday O'Brien made a point that is extremely rare in the British press, and almost nonexistent on British television: that his man came over like "a cross between a Presbyterian minister and a tree...
...stoning of their houses production...
...He's upstairs watching Louis Rukeyser's 'Wall Street Week.'" Almost as unanticipated as the conservatism of young voters was the dramatic increase in the percentage of voters who were willing to identify themselves with the Republicans, the party of Watergate...
...It means that, regardless of what you read or saw on TV, the voters endorsed more than just Reagan...
...resistance to the union-imposed strike, sustained themselves against this im- of the strike in February, a group An American innocent of state the Nottinghamshire coal field, has poverishing force with the idea that, representing miners who have braved ownership in industry might think that often resembled a battleground...
...During the past two years roughly two views of American politics and what's happening to them...
...We had such high hopes for him...
...Xvhen foreign policy experts (like McGeorge Bundy and Robert and virulently hostile to Reagan...
...But a sudden jump to the GOP, no matter how shallow the commitment to the party is, means something...
...and he was a gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster of the Daily Mail...
...threats corporation, the National Coal Board competitive pits, it also has a tail of of rape and death against their wives highly unproducti~,e pits--kept going (NCB), has a statutory monopoly of and families...
...the use into an industrial museum through Nothing like this mob Violence and in- cheaper) from elsewhere (including of nail-guns, catapults to fLre ball bear- monopolistic wage demands, restrictive timidation has been seen in Britain America...
...During the Reagan-Carter election plenty of the reportage in Britain carried an undertone of baffled amazement: Journalists and commentators saw what to them were two incredible candidates for the highest office of the world's most powerful nation--one a sincerely Christian oaf, an ex-peanutfarmer whose handling of the presidency had been, to say the least, provincial...
...Hostile reporters like Trevor Fishlock of the Times sniped sullenly a t 'the "charm school" friendliness of GIs in 9 Grenada, and sneered pathetically at the presence of crates of Coca-Cola...
...As it grown variety was at least markedly less over 5,000_ acts of intimidation and be unaware of the fiscal and regulatory turns out, however, many nationalized violent than its American counter- violence...
...People who have lived through a long slice of the twentieth century are likely to be media manipulators...
...the use of telegraph general price of its coal substantially...
...The media audience seems on the whole to prefer the gross simplistics of hostile reporters and cartoonists in the press and on the other media...
...Carter at the very least had decent aims: He wanted peace and worked for human rights...
...28 lines...
...THE BRITISH LENIN now been irreparably damaged, if not through the attempt to suspend the destroyed, by the extensive campaign of operation of coal mines and steel mills violence that has accompanied the partial strike inthe British coal-mining in- rioting (by up to 20,000 men...
Vol. 18 • January 1985 • No. 1
