Foreign Policy Perception vs. Reality

According to Chuck Klosterman in his fantastic book Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs; the problem with the media is not that it is owned and operated by evil corporations who only care about money, and their problem is not that most reporters are Ivy League social liberals on the East Coast who vote Democrat. As Klosterman puts it, the media is owned by conservative corporations who want to make money, and reporters are left leaning. However, this isn't the problem. The problem the media has is in giving the public what it wants. Instead of cutting to the chase in articles and stating the underlying reality behind a story, the news media, which is paranoid of being called partisan by either of the political spectrum, will instead go out of there way to give equal footing in stories, even when the equal footing does not exist!

In my opinion, this is sadly the case in regards to U.S. Foreign Policy. The Bush Administration's foreign policy is a disaster, an unparralleled, horrible, messy disaster. But don't take my word for it. According to Foreign Policy Magazine, even the experts are in total aggreement that the Bush Administration's foreign policy is disastrous. In a recent issue, FP Mag asked 100 foreign policy experts to give their opinions on a variety of foreign policy topics. The magazine surveyed 50 conservative experts and 50 liberal experts, to give an even balance. In the survey the magazine asked whether the United States is "winning the war on terror." Of the 100 respondents, 23 conservatives said yes, 71 said no. 9 liberals said yes, 89 said no. When asked whether the War in Iraq has had a positive or negative impact on the war on terror: only 10% of the 100 experts believed the war has had a positive impat, while 87% of experts believe the impact has been negative. Public opinion, however, is much different. In surveying the general public on the same question, the magazine found that 38% of public respondents felt the Iraq War was positively affecting the War on Terror, with 44% responding the Iraq War has had a negative impact. The survey is quite detailed and is highly disturbing.

So why exactly is there such a broad disagreement between a broad sampling of both conservative and liberal experts on a topic and the public at large? How could the public be so wildly misinformed about the realities of the Iraq War? The answer lies in the media. When Vice President Dick Cheney argues to the Senate that the United States needs to torture people the same day President Bush tells the American people we don't torture people, exactly one month after it was revealed we have been torturing people abroad; we are at a pretty obvious conclusion. Yet in the name of "equal time" the news outlets will let on any hack who is willing to spout the opposing side to a story, namely that we don't torture inmates in foreign prisons, even though the United States obviously does. This is but one example. The problem the media has in portraying two sides to every story is that it confuses John Q. Public who cannot readily tell when he is listening to an actual expert speak on a subject, or just some irritating hack. To get a sense of this, tune in to CSPAN's Washington Journal every morning, it's a disgusting display when callers get on the air to voice their opinions. I was watching a month ago when John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt, two of the world's pre-eminent experts on foreign policy, were giving their analysis of the Middle East conflict. Caller after caller was telling the two experts their analysis was wrong, and one caller even attempted to refute them by quoting some book written by a conservative hack. Think about it; a sizable portion of the population can't tell the difference between an actual foreign policy expert, such as Stephen Walt, Phd and professor at Harvard, and some journalist hack in Texas with a journalism degree.

Please take a look at the Terror Index article in Foreign Policy Magazine -- the public's disconnect from expert opinion on Iraq and foreign affairs is truly disturbing.

http://web0.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2006/TI-index/index.html