Media Alert: The Shining City on a Hill - Part 1 (Media Lens)

[Medialens take a critical look at a recent three-part BBC Radio 4 series, Death to America, by  the senior BBC Washington correspondent, Justin Webb.  In his quest to understand "anti-Americanism", Webb journeyed variously to France - "where", we were informed, "it all began" - and to Venezuela and Egypt. --Ed]

MEDIA ALERT: THE SHINING CITY ON A HILL - PART 1

The BBC's Justin Webb On 'Anti-Americanism'

By Media Lens

May 08, 2007

"The shining city upon a hill" was how John Winthrop, one of the early Pilgrims, described America, his new homeland. Winthrop was making reference to the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus had addressed a large crowd:

"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." (The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14-16)

This vision of the United States as a God-ordained shining example has attained truly mythic proportions. John F. Kennedy sampled the same biblical metaphor in a speech just days before his inauguration in 1961. Ronald Reagan made it a focus of his farewell speech in 1989. ('Farewell address to the nation,' January 11, 1989; www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/farewell.asp)

The "city on a hill" was also repeatedly invoked by Justin Webb, senior BBC Washington correspondent, during his recent three-part BBC Radio 4 series, 'Death to America'. (Broadcast on April 16, 23 and 30, 2007; http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/deathamerica)

The series was billed as an examination of "anti-Americanism" - an interesting phrase to which we will return - in which Webb would question "the common perception of the United States as an international bully and a modern imperial power".

Webb began emotively, describing how his own recently departed mother had been a protester, an "energetic duffle-coated figure who wanted to ban the bomb, stop wars of all kinds and suffering anywhere". ('Death to America,' BBC Radio 4, April 16, 2007; see also Webb's article, 'Anti-Americanism examined,' BBC news online, April 12, 2007; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6547881.stm)

But as a youth, Webb began to notice a curious bias:

"The protests against nuclear weapons, for instance, concentrated on American weapons. The anti-war rallies were against American-led wars. The anti death penalty campaign focused on Texas.

"A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion - or to magnify those indiscretions - while leaving the murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched."

In his quest to understand "anti-Americanism", Webb journeyed variously to France - "where", we were informed, "it all began" - and to Venezuela and Egypt. Webb noted of Venezuela that "the nation's leader Hugo Chavez compares George W Bush to Hitler". Unmentioned was the fact that Chavez had been responding in kind to then US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who had himself likened +Chavez+ to Hitler. ('Julia Buxton responds to Times article,' www.vicuk.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=29)

In setting the scene, Webb described a strain of French thought that regards the upstart American nation with disdain:

"The kind of anti-Americanism fostered by French intellectuals down the centuries revolves around intense dislike of what America +is+ - not what it +does+." (Original emphasis)

Webb was then ready to base his task on the following assumption:

"It is time that we understood that this attitude, this contempt for what democracy can do, is at the heart of at least some of the anti-Americanism we see in the world today."

A Smokescreen Of Ignorance

Turning to the United States' neighbours to the South, Webb observed:

"Latin American dislike of the United States and its leaders is a grittier substance than the smooth and heady French cocktail... This is not metaphysical hoity-toityness. Latin America's brew contains real sweat, real tears. Tears from a past where the southerners were the servants; the northerners, the masters. This is, after all, Washington's backyard."

Note the familiar cliché of Latin America as "Washington's backyard". This homely description nestles comfortably into the establishment presumption that the region is rightfully part of the US sphere of influence: an ideology that extends back to the imperialist Monroe Doctrine of 1823. And while Webb was careful to mention "real sweat, real tears", no mention was made of the real +blood+ spilled under US-sponsored wars, tyranny and oppression. (For details see our Media Alert, 'Vision of the Damned,' June 10 and 15, 2004: www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040610_Reagan_Visions_1.HTM and www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040615_Reagan_Visions_2.HTM)

Webb continued:

"You've got to wonder if there is any end to the capacity of the rest of the world to blame the United States for its problems. Nowhere is that more the case than in Latin America, where out of roughly 500 million people, 200 million live on less than $2 a day.

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Comments

[Colin Holland]

Successive USA administrations have displayed a mindblock on such issues as Israel and Cuba, to an extent that has not helped it make or keep international friends.
Having said this the BBC and its cohorts have been on a pilgrimage for some years on hitting America. They do this by mainly disclosing facts that suit their agenda - questioning people of known like opinion or of wording one dimensional questions after a full preamble explaining their own position.
They infrequently disclose FULL facts and or balanced opinions on the USA on such items as climate change, death penalty, foreign policy, Islamism, Iraq, aid to poverty ridden countries - all part of their vested agenda.
What is more interesting is in what they do not talk about such as Gordan Brown last week promising £8.5 BILLION to African education over 10 years while our own education system is riven with problems; Afghanistan, and specifically it stays well away from the abortion issue in the USA since this will result in real retaliation.