An American World Service?

The cover story in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review is this article by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger calling for an American ‘World Service’: ” … a media institution with sufficient funding to bring the highest-quality American journalism to the global public forum.” To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the president, but nepotism is not the only reason the CJR gave such precedence, if you’ll excuse the pun, to a vapid liberal treatise that would make an Obama speechwriter blush; at every turn, Bollinger’s article perfectly encapsulates the elitist liberal academic view of the world.

After the usual Freidmanesque boilerplate about the world being interconnected/flat/insert cliché here, Bollinger explains that we must engage with it through institutions such as the university and the press, both of which, he informs us, “…are concerned with providing objective and accurate information, ideas, and analyses that we need in order to understand and act in our world” (I’ll pause here for the reader to pick himself up off the floor and rub his aching sides). But as Bollinger surveys the global mediascape, he finds it dominated by the BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and China’s CCTV. Sure, the US has CNN, but he yearns for a more authoritative – i.e. state-sponsored – American voice. Bollinger offers the “highly respected” BBC World Service as a model of what a state-funded American global broadcast operation might look like; unfortunately, his exemplification comes as the corporation is being taken to court in the UK to force it to disclose the findings of an internal report on its anti-Israeli bias.

“Many nations,” Bollinger solemnly warns us, “actively fear an independent press and see journalism more as an instrument of governmental policy than as a source of objective information and analysis” (perhaps he’s thinking of US senator John Kerry). But without quality journalism we are ” … dangerously uninformed about, for instance, what the Chinese are thinking, or what is driving young people in the Middle East and North Africa.” Well luckily, we have the aforementioned CCTV and Al Jezeera to tell us what those people are thinking; in the case of the former, it’s whatever their communist overlords want them to think, and in the case of the latter it’s apparently kill the Jews.

Today, BBC World Service radio and BBC World News are nothing more than politically-correct mouthpieces of the British left-wing intelligentsia, but at least the former has a proud history, and came into being for a good reason; beginning in 1932 as the British Empire Service, its role was to bring news from home to colonial administrators and other expats around the world; as the sun eventually set on the empire, it found a new role in helping to bind a linguistically-contiguous British Commonwealth of former colonies. In contrast, the only apparent rationale Bollinger offers for an American World Service seems to be to address a liberal internationalist laundry list of global concerns: “…the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change; the depletion of the earth’s natural resources; the degradation of the environment; the growing divide between rich and poor… . ” He also cryptically references “… the rise of violent extremism among populations threatened by modernity”; if he’s thinking of the same extremism I’m thinking of, it’s been wreaking havoc since the Battle of Badr in 624 AD, but I guess it’s always modernity somewhere.

Bollinger’s penchant for more government control of American media has previously been noted at Big Journalism, but now he’s bent on world domination, like some kind of James Bond villain – er, come to think of it, almost exactly like a James Bond villain. He’s not interested in promoting American values and principles, but rather in propagating ” … the information and ideas we need to govern effectively in an increasingly integrated world.” This is ” … the ultimate stage of a progressive shift from the local to the national to the global”. Bollinger acknowledges that the US can already broadcast to large areas of the world through Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, which serves Cuba, and Alhurra. The latter was established under the Bush administration to counter anti-American propaganda in the middle east being spewed by – you’ve got it – the same Al Jazeera so admired by Bollinger and other liberals. But we didn’t hear him advocating for an Alhurra, let alone an American world service, during the Bush years, when he was instead busy inviting Mahmoud Amadinejad to speak at Columbia, (no doubt so that we could better understand what the Iranian people were thinking). It’s only now, with a president who sees the US as just another country, that America is humble enough in Bollinger’s opinion to speak to the world, not with an authoritative, leading voice, but merely as one of many voices in an international cable news Tower of Babel.