Lies and the Lying Right-Wing American Liars Who Tell Them

[morgan_dhu]

I think I start to understand how many Americans must feel watching their news media.

This week, the CBC newsmagazine program the fifth estate is airing a report on the state of the American media from a Canadain news perspective. The report is called Sticks and Stones, and is described thusly by the network: The United States is in the midst of a very un-civil war. It's a war of words that's pitting conservative against liberal, that's already divided the country into red and blue. The new gladiators are commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter and their forum is the television studios of networks like Fox. It's loud, it's raucous, but does it have anything to do with the truth?

Some of the material covered was familiar to me from my faithful viewing of the only U.S. "news programming" my ex-pat American partner will allow on the T.V. in his presence, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

What brought it all home to me was an interview with American right-wing pundit Ann Coulter. The reporter, CBC journalist Bob McKeown (who has also worked for U.S. networks CBS and NBC), initiated a discussion about her on-air comments concerning Canada spoken on an American T.V. newsmagazine program Hannity and Colmes: they need us...they are lucky we don't roll over one night and crush them....they are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent.

Part of Coulter's response was a lecture on how Canada had been such a stalwart ally of the U.S. until now, and that our disloyalty (in declining to join the U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq, not that she described it in those words) is fair justification for anti-Canadian sentiment. To bolster her argument, she listed all of the wars Canada had supposedly "supported" the U.S. in, beginning with WWII (how could we have supported U.S. involvement when we were there several years before the U.S., supporting Britain?), Korea (we were there as part of a U.N. action, not as support for the U.S.) and Vietnam.

McKeown politely informed Coulter that Canada had not sent military forces to Vietnam. She told him that it had. He replied that no, we really had not been involved in Vietnam. She insisted that he was wrong, and said that she would send him the proof after the interview was completed. He basically shrugged and moved on. Of course, McKeown noted following that segment of the report that neither Coulter nor her staff ever got back to the CBC with their supposed proof - and that Canada had not sent troops to Vietnam.

But it hit hard. If this woman could take part in an interview for a Canadian audience and shamelessly insist that she was right and the Canadian reporter (who is actually of an age to remember the war, having been a pro football player in the early 70s) correcting her about his own country is wrong... then she could lie to anyone about anything.

But I guess that's really not so remarkable after all. It's just a shock to see it, rather than hear or read about it.

Comments

Re: C eh N eh D eh

[victoriacatlady.livejournal.com]

- Canada is an Atlantic country. Time and again I heard Canadian officials and media make comments that simply forgot that Western Canada existed.

That, unfortunately, is a chronic complaint of Western Canada. Actually, I suspect that the Maritimes (which actually are Atlantic Canada) may have the same complaint. Much of the time both the federal government and the media tend to think of Canada as consisting of Ontario and Quebec (and even Quebec gets forgotten to some extent in the English media, because it's primarily French-speaking).

I never saw any evidence of Canadian politeness.

It largely consists of saying Please and Thank you to strangers, where Americans wouldn't bother.

- For all the talk about contributing to UN peacekeeping, Canada had just 239 peacekeepers on the job in 2004; Australia had more than 2,000.

Now, that's a shocker. I don't mean that I'm shocked that Australia had more; I never thought to compare the two countries. But I'm shocked that Canada had only 239 peacekeepers; I would have guessed it was in the thousands at least, if not the tens of thousands. Sheesh.

Re: C eh N eh D eh

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

But I'm shocked that Canada had only 239 peacekeepers; I would have guessed it was in the thousands at least, if not the tens of thousands. Sheesh.

To be fair, we did also have about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan under NATO command throughout 2004. It's not UN peacekeeping, but it is peacekeeping of a sort.

Re: C eh N eh D eh

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

And we have more than 2,000 in Iraq and the surrounding region. There's not peacekeepers though.

Re: C eh N eh D eh

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I'm not disputing that Australia has more troops deployed on all operations around the world at the moment - it's really not possible to make an effective comparison becasue I don't know what we could muster up right now if we were to commit troops to a war effort anywhere just now.

According to our government, we have just over 1,500 troops on overseas missions, UN, NATO and otherwise, right now.

Not exactly a shining commitment to peacekeeping and humanitarian aid.