Restore the Line Between Hype and Good News

The Fourth Estate should head into 1998 by way of serious self-criticism. Here are two instances of hype ruling the headlines in 1997 and badly misleading the public. The first concerns Madeleine Albright, America’s envoy to the world. From the moment of her nomination as secretary of state, she was hopelessly oversold. When she succeeded the wanly drab Warren Christopher in early 1997, she won tremendous acclamation in the press. Newsweek gave her a cover, “Mad About Madeleine.”

Such accolades were viewed with much cynicism by diplomats who had dealt with her in her previous job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, many of whom had regarded her as one of the laziest and most ill-informed envoys to the U.N. in memory.

Firing off scripted one-liners, Albright sped from one photo-op to the next. At the DMZ in Korea, she peered into the North with narrowed eyes. If she’d turned around and taken a look at the real threat to U.S. national security, namely the parlous condition of the banks in Seoul, she would have done more to earn her keep.

It wasn’t long before Albright took her first eager steps toward diplomatic debacle. She inherited a speech designed by its authors to make former National Security Council chairman Tony Lake look tough. He needed to look tough because he was hoping to combat a reputation for knock-kneed liberalism, a baseless slur that was eroding his chances for becoming director of the CIA. But Lake had to withdraw his nomination before he could deliver the speech, so Albright used it instead.

In her address at Georgetown, Albright announced that no matter what Saddam Hussein did in the way of dismantling his arsenal, the U.S. would continue the embargo on Iraqi oil sales, imposed through the agency of the U.N., as long as he stayed in power. It was the sort of square-jaw talk that the Washington press corps adored. To Saddam, it said simply that he had nothing to lose. A few months later he reached out from Baghdad, took hold of Uncle Sam’s nose and gave it a solid tweak, saying that he would no longer countenance U.S. weapons inspectors on the U.N. team deployed in Iraq.

Bellows of affront and injured dignity arose from Albright and the White House, followed by threats that had not the slightest effect. By now egg was dripping from Albright’s face, as she tottered from one humiliation to the next. On the schedule of the Oslo accord, Israel was meant to quit substantial portions of the West Bank. But Israel did nothing of the sort and Albright sped toughly toward the Middle East, to be met once again with resounding failure. Her big moment was to be the regional conference at Doha, in Qatar, the most servile to U.S. interests of all the Gulf emirates. The regional powers stayed away in droves and Albright abruptly left ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, Iran, one of the “rogue states” targeted by U.S. diplomacy, held an extremely successful economic conference, with no less than 28 nations attending, many of them not shy in taking positions of public support for two other “rogue states,” Iraq and Libya.

If a male secretary of state had been responsible for these reverses, he would have been savaged in the press. But Albright continues to lead a charmed life.

The “Asian tigers” enjoyed the same fervent support in the U.S. press as was extended to Albright, and their downfall has been even more vertiginous. Today, from Seoul to Jakarta, Bangkok to Tokyo, the collapse is fearsome.

Year after year the business pages and editorial columns of U.S. newspapers have rung with praises for the Asian model. The message was clear enough: Bracing “free market” disciplines, low wages, no unions and grinding toil from dawn till dusk point the way forward. Meanwhile, what was actually unfolding was a saga of crony capitalism, in which the Asian tycoons doled out money to each other in unsecured loans and bogus stock offerings. It was not beyond the wit or pertinacity of a good journalist to figure this out.

But the mainstream reporters understand very well that an article that does not assert the triumph of “free markets” (i.e., unregulated pillage) will never see print, and so they carefully avert their gaze from reality, whether in Mexico, Asia or the former Soviet Union.

It would be unfair to blame the press entirely for the failure to report the true economic situation in Asia. Last summer, the International Monetary Fund issued a ringing endorsement of the Indonesian economy moments before it began to crumble under the weight of its own corruption. But if the press doesn’t try to tell the true story of what’s going on in the Far East or Mexico or the former Soviet Union, it is missing the biggest story of our time.