Krugman's column
is only moderately dishonest by his own low standards. He starts off wondering why Europe and the US see things differently on the war. He concludes it is the difference in the media:
I'm not mainly talking about the print media. There are differences, but the major national newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K. at least seem to be describing the same reality.
Most people, though, get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday's antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.
What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as "the usual protesters" or "serial protesters." CNN wasn't quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network's Web site read "Antiwar rallies delight Iraq," and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.
There are two little diversionary tricks in there. He moans that most people get their news from TV and segues into the cable TV news channels. But of course, most people do NOT get their news from FoxNews or CNN; their combined audience is dwarfed by CBS, NBC and ABC News. And second, while supposedly griping about how the cable TV news channels handled the protests, he cites CNN's
Website.
