We're living in a world of untruth - no wonder we don't know what the fuck is going on or what to do about the world

1. Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped – by William Pfaff/The Observer

For Americans, Iraq has ceased to be a video game running along the edge of public consciousness. The midterm congressional elections demonstrate that the US public wants to get out of Iraq almost as much as the British, as does the attention suddenly given to the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was actually set up months ago.

But how is exit to be accomplished? Clearly the White House does not know, nor does the US army. The Baker-Hamilton Commission is unlikely to know, as its members were chosen because they represent the higher reaches of the conventional wisdom.

Yet the impression the Bush administration now gives is that the whole matter has been put into the hands of Baker's group - which is ridiculous, especially as the President continues to declare that inviting Iran and Syria to help stabilise Iraq is unacceptable; he is against talking to them, and says he still expects 'victory'. If so, what is the purpose of the commission?

So this is the situation in which both the administration and most of the Democratic opposition find themselves. The existing policy is a failure, yet nothing can be changed because no one can imagine a valid alternative. American intentions and actions have, it is held, been correct, their goals irreproachable.

If anyone is to blame it is the Iraqis, who failed to seize the wonderful opportunity the United States offered them. Neocons are now saying that the Iraqis did not deserve our help. Some suggest they are an inferior breed.

I don't include Britain in this accusation because, whatever Tony Blair's mesmerised submission to the charms of George Bush, the British government, its people and forces have not been living in this condition of denied reality.

In America, it's as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it's time to shut down the player.

This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.

The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan's formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors.

We are the tranquil Elephant (as another American academic, Michael Mandelbaum, has proposed) which by its very presence guards the smaller beasts of the savanna from carnivorous predators.

This is what we exist to do. We are the leading nation, the most moral, born with the redemptive mission to create what the Puritan preacher Jonathan Winthrop called the 'City on the Hill', the democracy 'of the people and by the people' that originated the modern world with our repudiation of monarchy and inherited privilege, establishing the greatest of republics, saving the Four Freedoms for the world by winning (alone!) both First and Second World Wars, then the Cold War, and now confronting the ultimate test of the 'long war' against Evil itself, incarnate as Terror.

Today this is the language of government, journalism, politics and foreign policy in the US, spoken in the policy discussions at Washington think-tanks and on the editorial pages of newspapers.

Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists?

It is not Orwellian in that the neocon ideologues, George Bush and Tony Blair, certainly believe all this. They are not being manipulated.

It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq.

We have passed from 1984 to 2006, into a post-Orwellian condition in which Big Brother has become a part of his creation. He is now imposing it on others by acting as though it were real, at whatever expense to others.

This is our problem today. In some measure we have all been drawn into this virtual world. How do we leave?

(William Pfaff is a senior American commentator on international affairs and American foreign policy)


2. America's Media Bubble -- by Lawrence Pintak/ Boston Globe

CAIRO -- The United States no longer controls the script. That's a reality Democratic congressional leaders must digest as they seek to recast America's relationship with the world.

There used to be a time when the US media wrote the global narrative. The world saw itself through a largely American camera lens. No more. This week's launch of al-Jazeera International, the English speaking cousin to the channel the Bush administration loves to hate, is just the latest reminder of that.

US foreign policy is being reflected through a blinding array of prisms. Yet America continues to pursue an analogue communications strategy in a digital age.

Just look at the satellite landscape. Here in the Middle East, we can watch more than 300 channels, from Hezbollah's al-Manar (labeled a terrorist organization by the United States) to Fox News (which, to borrow Fox's favorite line, "some people say" is the moral equivalent). Turkey, India, Singapore -- wherever you look overseas, all-news satellite channels are de rigueur. Tri lingual France 24 launches in a few weeks to bring "French values" to global coverage. China has a channel. Russia Today will soon broadcast in Arabic. Latin America now has a continent-wide all-news channel. Africans are also talking about one. And then, of course, there's the Internet.

The perspective of these channels is different. So is the spin. The American election was a big story here in the Middle East, but cheering Democrats shared the screen with gut-wrenching images of blood-drenched Palestinian children torn to shreds by Israel tank shells as they lay asleep in their beds. More of those "birth pangs of a new Middle East" that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked about last summer. Americans may be talking change, but Arabs, watching those scenes repeat endlessly through the day, saw business as usual.

Journalistic bias? Like terrorism, it's in the eye of the beholder. After five years of Sturm and Drang from the Bush administration about the evils of the Arab media, American officials still don't really get it. The genie is out of the lamp. News people abroad -- whether Arabs, Irish, or Zimbabweans -- do see the world, and US policy, differently than their American counterparts. Their news organizations will report differently. It's a fact.

Even more important , every statement, every offhand comment is reported instantly. Live. 24/7. There is no place to hide. No such thing as Davos rules. Just ask the pope. Like politics, all policy is local. It's no longer just about how it plays in Peoria. There's also Peshawar and Pretoria.

American officials can no longer say one thing and do another. TV footage of babies killed with US ordinance has far more influence on perceptions of policy than all the feel-good speeches aimed at the heartland. Ditto images of the president in front of a huge cross at a gathering of evangelical groups. Who says it's not a Christian war on Islam?

Don't underestimate the audience. They are media-savvy. Take the Thai cleric who said the Saddam Hussein verdict was timed to affect US "domestic politics." And he's 2,000 miles from the Middle East. Imagine what Arabs were thinking.

Yet American officials who should know better still don't get it. A US public diplomacy official involved in communicating with the Muslim world recently asked me if there were Arab blogs. Only hundreds -- and they are changing the face of Arab politics. That's what happens when critical positions are seeded with True Believers instead of diplomatic pros.

The reality of the new digital world means that Americans may not like what they see. These channels will show the often yawning gap between words and deeds. "We are not there to be diplomatically correct," al-Jazeera chief Wadah Khanfar recently told me. "We are there to practice journalism."

Yes, some of the coverage -- whether on al-Jazeera or other channels -- will be biased, distorted, and sensational. Deal with it. American officials must engage, not demonize. They must find a way to communicate, not preach. But most of all, they must be aware that their every word and deed is being viewed real-time, often in a split screen showing the reality for folks at the receiving end of US policy.

As Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Western broadcasters last week, "To have a lack of communication between cultures at a time of such technological development is very sad and contradictory." The talk was carried live on satellite TV. The question is, was anyone in Washington watching?

(Lawrence Pintak is director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo. His most recent book is " Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas .")


3. The Truth is Out There ... Somewhere -- by Will Hutton/Guardian

Information is everywhere. A couple of clicks of your mouse and via Google or Wikipedia, you can check out anything pretty much instantaneously. Last week, even the Chinese government gave up its futile blocking of the Wikipedia website, while British citizens can now watch an English-language version of al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV station. If you want a counterweight to the West's view of Islam, terrorism, Iran and the Middle East conflict, here it is.

Thus the paradox. So much information seems to mean its degradation. As the websites, podcasts and narrowcast television channels multiply, it becomes easier to find information that suits your prejudices or, at least, is cast in a context that suits your prejudices. If you want proof that rising carbon in the atmosphere does not cause climate change, the CIA and Israel were behind 9/11 or The da Vinci Code is true, you can now find it. Truth always was in eye of the beholder. Now the beholder can create the truth he or she wants.

Nobody can be sure where this trend will lead. Optimists say that the democratisation of information is vastly empowering, against which not even the last bastion of thought control, the Chinese Communist party, can hold out. The capacity to abuse and spin information on twisted websites or biased television will be short-lived because it will be challenged by true information. Good information ultimately chases out the bad.

Pessimists say that we are living in an era in which objectivity is collapsing, in which the avalanche of information becomes the excuse not to seek after the truth, but, rather, to seek for what you want to be true. The greater this appetite and the greater the capacity to meet it, the more powerful have become those whose trade is fashioning information to meet our demands - the media - with little or no accompanying rise in their accountability. Against the charge that they are compromising truth and objectivity, the media's comforting reply is that they are only responding to popular demand.

And thus a vicious downward spiral, with the casualty being impartiality. This has been the direction of travel for the last 20 years, reinforced by a postmodern conviction that there can be no truth because everything depends on context. Objectivity is an impossible dream. This, for example, was the argument used by the American right in 1987 to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine that, since 1929, had obliged American broadcasters to try to report fairly and impartially. The doctrine was based on bad philosophy, Reaganites argued; impartiality was just a cloak for liberals to present their particular point of view as objective. The best objectivity was to allow a multiplicity of opinions and views and let the viewer and listener choose.

This opened the floodgates to the right-wing 'shock jocks' of American radio, to the establishment of Fox News, cheerleader for the Republican party, and to reporting where the aim has been to prove the preconceived prejudices of news editors and, above all, to entertain.

The University of California's John Zaller claims that on American television by the mid 1990s, the number of human-interest stories had doubled while the ratio of hard news stories collapsed to a third of what they were. The culture has crossed the Atlantic. A survey by the British Film Institute a few years ago reported that 52 per cent of those working in television news and current affairs felt the need to distort contributors' views to make programmes more exciting and watchable. Objectivity could go hang.

The impact on Britain's public discourse is hard to deny. For example, no account of the dangerous decline in vaccination against mumps, measles and rubella is complete without the way the media hyped Dr Andrew Wakefield's infamous, and wrong, study linking the MMR vaccine with autism. Facts are distorted to create an alternative 'truth'.

This culture impacts on politics, most calamitously in the way the American media and, to a degree, our own, colluded in President Bush's portrayal of Saddam Hussein as a supporter of international terrorism and a world menace. The collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and the desire to serve up what American media consumers wanted - patriotic support of their President at a time of national peril - meant a virtual suspension of American journalism. There was faint criticism of Bush's case, little scrutiny of the claims made about WMD and no bite, until recently, in assessing policy after the war.

The pessimists are right except in one respect - they underestimate the ability of individuals collectively to want to understand, notwithstanding their prejudices and beliefs, and, thus, ultimately the power of truth to win out.

Tomorrow sees the launch of Oxford University's Reuters Institute of Journalism, with an opening lecture by Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, on why the American media so neglected their responsibilities over Iraq, the Bush administration's attempt at information control and the disastrous consequences. Like Polis, its newly established counterpart at the London School of Economics, the institute's aim is to ask hard questions about the practice of journalism.

The two institutes are part of a wider process in which the quest for fairness and an accurate depiction of reality, win out - and to which al-Jazeera also contributes. For, despite postmodernism and the temptation to distort, truths remain. The MMR scare turned out to be a scare; climate-change deniers have to explain why world temperatures are rising; Israeli intransigence towards Palestine is self-defeating.

I have been a pessimist in the way the media have developed over the last few decades but paradoxically, the freedom to express this pessimism is one of the very forces that may create some self-correction. The Chinese could not resist Wikipedia. The Western media, in the last resort, cannot resist the demand that we should be able to trust them - as long as there are honest voices prepared to be self-critical and media leaders prepared to hear. The battle, at least, has begun. And the ammunition is information.