Everybody in the media went into a tizzy this weekend because Gov. George W. Bush botched a “pop quiz” on the names of world leaders, sprung on him by a Boston reporter. Asked to name the leaders of North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Chechnya, Bush could only get the name of North Korean leader Lee Teng-Hui, and got noticeably flustered and testy with the reporter. As usual, the media missed the real story.
The reporter in question made a good point — perhaps someone with Bush’s ambitions should be well-versed on the details of these global hotspots. Still, we reluctantly find ourselves in agreement with Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes, who told KXAN-TV, “For the American people, the relevant question is not how many names a candidate has memorized, but does he have the strategic vision to lead and can he protect American interests?” Heck, given the same test, even Noam Chomsky might have missed one. (Well, okay, maybe not.)
However, what few reporters bothered to note was Bush’s appalling comment about Pakistani military leader Pervaiz Musharraf, the general who recently wrested control away from that country’s democratically elected government. Although Bush didn’t know Musharraf by name, he said, “It appears he’s going to bring stability to the country, and I think that’s good news for the Subcontinent.”
Like Karen Hughes, we are quite concerned about the kind of vision Bush will bring to America’s foreign policy. His statement would seem to herald a return to the shameful policies of his father and Ronald Reagan. (Actually, a reinforcement of them — Bill Clinton hasn’t exactly rejected them.)
Would the foreign policy of George W. Bush include CIA distribution of manuals explaining the most effective ways of torturing political dissidents (as in Central America)? Will the CIA help overthrow other democratically elected governments (as in Chile and Guatemala)? Will we assist genocidal invasions by sending the invaders more weapons (as in Indonesia and East Timor)? Will we carry out a another devastating war on behalf of wealthy, self-serving oil companies and cynically portray it as a war of “liberation” (as in the Persian Gulf)?
ABC’s World News Tonight noted Bush’s apparent favorable disposition toward dictators, as did an editorial in Monday’s Austin American-Statesman, but both were brief mentions at best. Mostly, there has been a deafening silence.
I would like Bush to face a different pop quiz: Ask him to name the dictators that his father supported, and see if he knows how many people they murdered.
But the supposedly liberal media never asked those questions the first time around; we certainly shouldn’t expect them to do so now.
It’s All Black and White
This past summer we needled the Austin American-Statesman because the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review gave the local daily a “Dart,” a badge of shame awarded for individual incidents of questionable or bad journalism. We would be remiss if we didn’t also point out praise received as well — in a CJR poll of newspaper editors, the Statesman was ranked as the 24th best paper in the nation, not bad considering that Austin only ranks about 50th in size among media markets.
Also, the magazine listed the Statesman as one of its “Five to Watch,” meaning “newspapers that were particularly imaginative in their approaches.” The Statesman, according to CJR, is “Conscientious and tough-minded — focused on news. Making its voice heard in the community. Innovative, but not gimmicky or fluffy. Steadily improving.”
“Media Clips” begs to differ, especially with that last part. The Statesman showed marked improvement with the addition of editor Rich Oppel four years ago, dropping the fluffy human interest stories that had dominated the front page every day for several years, and finally covering some local issues that the majority of Austinites care about. But in the past year the paper began sliding backward — while not as bad as in previous years, the Statesman seemed to stall out at mediocrity.
We particularly call into question the paper’s recent attempts to reopen the environmentalist/ developer wars with inaccurate and misleading editorials lambasting citizens for actually expecting that government decisions should involve public scrutiny and public process.
Is the Statesman the 24th best paper in the nation? Perhaps. The paper has reporters who are doing good work. But the ranking can also just as easily be viewed as a commentary on the state of American journalism. And in a city as literate and political as Austin, maybe we should have a paper ranked even higher. (The top five papers, by the way, were The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News. Only the top 21 papers are listed in CJR’s November/December issue; the rest of the report is available online at http://www.cjr.org). 
Media tips: lnichols@auschron.com
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.