When I hear Scott Simon on NPR, I often find myself asking “how does this guy know all this shit?” Whether he’s effortlessly reciting an Arabic poem from memory in Baghdad or swooning over the musicality of an obscure Motown bass man back in the USA, he follows up with the depth of thought that proves he’s no sycophant, not just a quick study, he really knows all this stuff. It is a joy to hear his offhand comments.
Compare that with this observation by Krugman in today’s column, The China Syndrome.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
Neil Cavuto. I remember him from his early days on the old Financial News Network. He was a smart ass then, but not as bad as now. Shortly after 9/11, I saw his smart ass chiding of CNN’s decision not to allow American flag props on the set. What, America’s not good enough for you. This is, of course, blatant jingoism, evoking memories of Dennis Miller, back when he was a comedian, satirizing the news on SNL. What we have now instead of news is a parody of a parody – or, as one astute commenter on The Smirking Chimp noted with brevity, “Fox = TASS!” Back to Krugman.
A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.
I’m listening to the BBC right now. In a prescient move, our NPR station (WUNC) started broadcasting the BBC overnight feed a few months before 9/11. I’ve come to depend on it for genuine news – no rumors reported without confirmation, no insinuations, hard interviews deftly executed, and all quotations attributed to real accountable humans (not “officials say”). I think of the BBC as our domestic Radio Free America. You can’t completely avoid the propaganda the Murdoch Boys emit to curry favor with government deregulators, but the truth is out there.
2:39:23 AM 
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