Points of View - Third Superpower

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Points of View

Authored by Michael Pate on July 25th, 2003 at 8:18 AM

Anne Applebaum has examined the Cass Sunstein question. I found most interesting:

During the Iraq war, a few Americans and Europeans, at least, began to notice how tiny that village actually is. It wasn’t hard to see that the war as broadcast by the BBC or Deutsche Welle was quite different from the war as broadcast by NBC or CNN. Fewer understood that this is not only a Euro-American problem: A German friend visited Poland during the war and was surprised by how much less blood seemed to appear on the Polish evening news. And the differences run much deeper than a disagreement over Iraq, or portrayals of a single event. It isn’t just that Europeans have different opinions from Americans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, they actually learn different facts and read about different events, and therefore they reach different conclusions. When George Tenet fell on his sword earlier this month over that now infamous piece of British intelligence that made it into the president’s State of the Union speech, the story played here as “White House Dumps on CIA.” In Britain, it played as “White House Dumps on Britain.”

It is one thing for two people to reach different conclusions from the same facts. It is something altogether different when they don’t have the same facts to choose from. But I don’t think any solution, no matter how well intentioned, is going to be able to be put in place.

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