Presswatch/Mysteries and Oversights

...If you intend to do that when an aggressor threatens vital interests or survival is at stake, then it's a proper job for the military...

...They meant well...

...Most countries in the world, including places like Italy, France, and Spain, have preventive detention, and it is relatively easy in those countries to find cases of individuals who have spent years in jail without ever hearing any solid evidence against them...

...statements (which are supposed to be printed by the newspapers or magazines...

...The Journal should understand that, and not vent its spleen on a man and a country that have contributed a great deal to the security and wisdom of the Western world...

...So let's listen for a moment to the way he described it to his own people...

...Allowing it to flow freely to the Soviet bloc deprives us of an important policy tool and reward...

...I also can understand the Wall Street Journal's concern that Lee Kuan Yew shows signs of undoing what might have been Asia's finest achievement...

...None of that is defensible...

...It recently received a ringing endorsement from the Financial Times of London, which is as fervent a defender of freedom of the press as one could ask for...

...With that flair for iron-clad logic for which he is so well known and respected by thoughtful persons everywhere, Kinsley proclaimed that since "nuclear war" had disappeared as an issue, AIDS could not help but follow suit...

...On the morning after the first round, you had to read several inches down to find out what had actually happened, and what a surprise it was...

...After all, wasn't nuclear war even more threatening than AIDS...

...Singapore's problems are those of a fundamentally democratic society which is still evolving, still finding its sea legs in the turbulent waters of the late twentieth century...

...In other words, don't give unattached loans to the Soviet bloc unless it cornTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 39 plies with its international agreements (such as Helsinki...

...Money to the Soviet Union Slowly but surely Congress is beginning to focus its attention on the vitally important issue of credits and loans to the Soviet Union...

...Quite right...

...That's what happens when corporate interests overwhelm geopolitical judgment...

...They also exist in Singapore, and they are just as wrong there as anywhere else...

...It was a case where the results were taken for granted, the stories written well before the event, and the editors' attention wason other matters...

...His angry sermon to his readers, announcing he would keep his weapon so long as there were killers and drug dealers on the loose, missed the point...

...So please send Michael another Safe Sex Kit for Bastille Day, to remind himof the fallibility of human judgment...

...Complaining about congressional calls for the use of the armed forces to interdict drug shipments into the United States, Summers noted that if the military actually sealed off our borders by using armed force, Congress would be the first to denounce such "wanton aggression...

...The Journal has gotten carried away by its laudable desire to protect free speech everywhere...

...They wanted Iran to become a modern state...

...Democratic rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association...

...There is the manufacturing and embroidering of quotations...

...Harry G. Summers, Jr...

...The year has passed, and the AIDS issue shows no signs of going away...

...The Los Angeles Times had a three-part series, all the networks and major media had extended interviews with Soviet soldiers, and suddenly the mujahedeen have names and faces...

...In a series of editorials, the Journal argued that since Lee Kuan Yew was intolerant of political opposition, and used preventive detention against persons who, in the Journal's view, were guilty only of criticizing the government, Singapore was to be condemned and put on the same plane as East Germany or Poland...

...We can perhaps survive the chaos we unleash, but less stable and self-confident societies might not...

...It would also produce a running conflict between the press and the regulatory authorities...

...CI 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988...

...Maybe we need more basketball players in high positions...

...I can well imagine that Lee Kuan Yew, who Henry Kissinger once called "the smartest man in the Western world," is frightened that the American contagion might reach his shores...

...Rowan—the intrepid gunman of Chevy Chase—that nobody objects to his having a gun in his home for his own protection (although having a pistol suggests either that he's an expert marksman or that he doesn't know what he's doing...

...It's hard to do it better (text from the Straits Times, June 2): Although Americans mean well, they want the world to be like them, because they believe it will make for a better world...

...They were expecting—indeed, having seen the data from the usually highly accurate political polls, they had predicted—a Socialist landslide, and when the Socialists failed to get even a majority, they didn't know what to do...

...And gut feelings, not rational democratic impulses...

...Prophecy has always been a tough profession, after all...

...A moment's reflection will suffice to explain this sudden outburst of information from an area that had been very hard to penetrate for our journalists: The Russians let them in...

...Senator Bill Bradley has given some intelligent speeches on the subject, and on May 27, Tom McMillen wrote a first-class op-ed piece in the by Michael Ledeen Baltimore Sun in which he concluded: Capital is as much a commodity as wheat or gold...

...But no mature person would equate Italy or France with Eastern Europe, and Singapore shouldn't be, either...

...They started meddling around, they meant well...

...We had better get cracking...

...In other words, Parliament will step in...

...They irritate us, they annoy us, but remember they can't really do us much harm...

...Carl Rowan Someone should explain to Mr...

...And the seriousness of AIDS...

...In Eastern Europe, such actions are the rule...

...But America can harm him, and, like most national leaders, Lee Kuan Yew has learned that Americans often don't know what they're doing...

...We are in a similar predicament, but without the clear voice of our own FT, and without a Press Council...

...Judge not, Carl .. . Singapore I love Singapore (and was happy to see the Washington Post's fine food editor, Phyllis Richman, give Singapore credit for having perhaps the best food in the world), and was disturbed to see its exceptional prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, get so irritated with the Asian Wall Street Journal that he banned all but a token number of copies from the country...

...You heard what happened in Iran...

...The FT has figured this out, even if our own media mavens haven't: Statutory regulation would almost certainly lead to the suppression of some stories that ought to be published...

...Mysteries •You may have noticed that in the past two months the press coverage of the Red Army withdrawing from Afghanistan has been quite extraordinary...

...The phenomenon in Italy is so well known, in fact, that one of the very best Italian movies—A Citizen Above Any Suspicion, starring Alberto Sordi—was about a former Italian citizen who, after years of living in Sweden, takes his Swedish wife and children on a return trip to Italy...

...Remember that last line, please: "None of that is defensible...

...And then, when an American diplomat was found to have encouraged opposition politicians, the roof fell in: the poor Foreign Service officer was expelled, and there was a full-scale brouhaha, which currently (mid-June) stands at an impasse, with Singapore calling for an international commission to investigate the matter...

...He did two things wrong: he didn't register, and he lectured the world on how wrong it was for it to have guns...

...No one begrudges him the right to defend himself, his family, and his property...

...News & World Report (and who in the June American Spectator penned an eloquent piece on conservatives and containment...

...As the FT editorialists note, if this institution, with its calls for voluntary standards of conduct, cannot be strengthened, then "the case against statutory action will begin to lapse...

...Then come the paragraphs in question: Congress . . . should understand the fundamental nature of military forces—to kill and destroy in the name of the American people...

...Lee made a mistake when he threw out the Journal, and he as much as admitted it by early June when he said in a parliamentary address that "we can denounce stupid newspapermen, the offshore press...

...Flora Lewis later wrote darkly about the need for an official investigation into the pollsters (for what—being wrong...

...Two paragraphs are particularly noteworthy for their down-to-earth reminder of what is real and what is fantasy...

...On April 27, the Financial Times lead editorial ("The Conduct of Newspapers") put it beautifully: Some of the failings of the press hardly need to be rehearsed...

...Such phenomena do exist, even in long-established societies...

...So they egged on opposition groups and the Shah...

...He is arrested at the border, thrown from one prison to the next, and never does find out why...

...We only ask that he apply the same standards to everyone, and abide by the law...

...But it is not particularly effective, and the press generally ignores it whenever possible...

...If you listen closely to Capitol Hill, you will hear the sound of paper shuffling . . . First Anniversary of The Safe Sex for Michael Kinsley Packet Lest we forget, it was just one year ago when that modern seer, the oracle of the New Republic, Michael Kinsley, announced to the world that within one year AIDS would disappear as a major issue in the American media...

...All the major newspapers were shocked by the results of the French parliamentary elections...

...President Jimmy Carter came along with the human rights campaign, the Shah got confused and bewildered...

...but she should have worried more about reportage...

...There is the intrusion into privacy, which is resented by those at the top of society as well as those less elevated...

...The customer of any lending institution must state what he will use the funds for: we should ask no less of Soviet-bloc borrowers...

...Colonel Summers wrote a fine column on American drug policy in early June (I read it in the June 2 Washington Times) in which he lamented the lack of seriousness in our government...

...The Ayatollah came back...

...Whole faculties were starting up, all kinds of esoteric subjects . . . you name it, the Americans will deliver...

...A word of tribute is due to Harry G. Summers, Jr., the celebrated former Army colonel who writes for US...

...What was missing...

...The British have something called the Press Council, to which aggrieved parties can appeal, and which issues Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C...

...Its leaders make mistakes, but however disturbing, those are exceptional, not part of the basic pattern of life...

...And if you don't change your ways, you guys in the media, the legislature is going to get you...

...We must be careful, because some of their best-intentioned schemes turn out to be naive and unwise, and end up disastrously...

...Indeed, we are now in some danger of being drowned in the press coverage of the disease, and even retired admirals are issuing pronunciamentos...

...Now, 40 odd million Iranians have gone back to the Dark Ages .. . So we have to use our own judgment .. . That's the way it is if you're governing a country with good relations with the United States, but which does not meet American standards of democracy...

...Nonetheless, it was with a real shock that I found Journal editorialists comparing Singaporean restrictions on freedom of speech with those of Eastern Europe...

...But if you don't have the resolve to stand by an indictment, or the backbone to carry through your threat to confiscate property, why would anyone believe you'd actually use military power to kill drug smugglers and destroy their boats, planes, and paraphernalia...

...Not least, there is the use of money to persuade individuals to supply their story to one particular paper...

...Yet the pressure for regulation is mounting...