The uproar over Bob Woodward's new book has intensified the media focus on a basic controversy that's summed up this way: Is Iraq a quagmire? Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong – because the...
The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is "A Date With a Dangerous Mind." The big-type subhead...
The USA's mass media constantly tell us how Americans see the "war on terror." But the same outlets rarely tell us much about how the rest of the world sees it. Five years after 9/11, the gap between perceptions is enormous. Countless polls confirm the overall chasm....
This month began with 140,000 American troops in Iraq – 13,000 more than in late July. Almost 30 months have passed since Time magazine's mid-April 2004 cover story, "No Easy Options," reported that "foreign policy luminaries from both parties say...
When Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invited President Bush to engage in a "direct television debate" a few days ago, the White House predictably responded by calling the offer "a diversion." But even though this debate will never happen,...
Nearly five years into the "war on terror," it's still at the core of American media and politics. Yeah, I've seen the recent polls showing a drop in public support for President Bush's "war on terror" claims. And I've read a spate of commentaries...
Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen...
Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government. "Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness," he wrote. "For...
The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer. "The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, describing what...
Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But so...
