The mugs are at Media Watch

I HAD the rare honour of being attacked by ABC's Media Watch the other day. Evidently they've run out of right-of-centre Australians to savage, so were reduced to savaging a right-of-centre Canadian. I've never seen the show, being many thousand kilometres out of range, but I'd heard of it because a few weeks back they criticised this newspaper's estimable Janet Albrechtsen for giving "Arthur Chrenkoff's blog a prestige and credibility it did not deserve".

Chrenkoff is an Australian internet maestro who compiles a round-up of good news from Iraq that serves as a useful corrective to all the ABC and Fairfax naysayers who've been saying the country's on the brink of civil war. If so, it's well into the third year of being on the brink.

Anyway, a couple of days after Chrenkoff was hammered by Media Watch for his pitiful lack of "prestige" and "credibility", his Iraq round-up was published in The New York Times, which surely ought to be prestigious and credible enough even for the status-obsessed socially insecure chaps at Media Watch.

So this month it was my turn. Attentive readers may recall I recently did a column on this page on multiculturalism. It opened with US public servant Johnelle Bryant's vivid account of her meeting with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida the year before September 11, 2001. She was a US Department of Agriculture official in Florida and he wanted a government loan to refit a plane as the world's largest cropduster. The Media Watch gang emailed to let me know they were "currently examining your opinion piece" and demanding my response to certain points, the implication being I'd fallen for an obvious hoax.

Sure, I said, I'd be very happy to do a live interview discussing any aspect of the Bryant story down the line from either the CBS affiliate in Burlington, Vermont or the (US) ABC affiliate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Both involve a five-hour round trip for me, but we non-prestigious types know enough to understand that an accusation of factual error is a sufficiently serious business to warrant leaving the house at 3am local time to be on air at whenever Media Watch goes out.

"They don't want an interview," my assistant Chantal reported back. "They want you to write out your answers to their questions."

"They want me to give written answers? On a TV show?" I said, not quite up to speed on the concept of typing out a television appearance. "And then people tune in and read it on screen?" Even by the vicious standards of taxpayer-funded state broadcasters, that seemed a bit of an imposition on the citizenry. But who knows? Perhaps I'd misunderstood and they'd bring in Nicole Kidman with a false beard to re-enact my typing. (The "false beard", incidentally, is not a Tom Cruise reference.)

But Chantal explained that she'd checked out the show and that the Media Watch concept involves them accusing you of something, you emailing back your 15,000-word response and then they pick the infelicitously phrased seven-word throwaway subordinate clause and stick it up on screen, after which the host delivers a withering putdown. I can see why it's a great gig for Liz Jackson. Can't see what's in it for the ever rotating cast of fall-guys.

Nonetheless, Media Watch went ahead with its piece, which it called "Mark Steyn - Mug?" Sporting of them to throw in the question mark. But in the end their only point of factual disagreement boiled down to a possible discrepancy in the timeline.

As Jackson reported: "Johnelle Bryant was quite certain that she met Atta 'between the end of April and the middle of May 2000...'

"And that's where Johnelle's story came unstuck because, according to US immigration records, Atta didn't arrive in America until after those dates... We checked the report of President [George W.] Bush's 9/11 commission to see what it said about the Johnelle Bryant story - her name does not appear.

"But the report does confirm that Atta got his US visa on May 18, and then: 'On June 2, Atta travelled to the Czech Republic by bus from Germany and then flew from Prague to Newark the next day.' "

With the same exquisite timing as their Chrenkoff demolition, a couple of days after the Media Watch broadcast, the news broke that a US military data-mining operation claimed to have identified Atta as part of an al-Qa'ida cell in Brooklyn well before he "officially" landed at Newark on June 3. Since then, three of the 12 members of the team have come forward publicly and the question of when precisely Atta arrived in the US is now a topic of hot controversy. Media Watch may go all goo-goo for the bland assurances of official reports but there is simply no factual basis for the 9/11 commission's chiselling in granite of June 3 as the date of Atta's first arrival.

Here's a couple of ways he could have got here earlier: I have homes in Quebec and New Hampshire and, in the course of shuttling between one and the other, I've crossed the US-Canadian border hundreds of times, all perfectly lawfully. The US Government does not have a single record of me making any of those border crossings, nor of most of the other individuals who cross the 49th parallel every day.

How about the southern border? Well, there's a population half the size of Australia's living and working in the US, and not one of them filed any paperwork with US immigration. If 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants don't need to fill in the form, why should Atta?

Were the al-Qa'ida hijackers familiar with the Mexican illegal-immigrant network? Yes. Fact: Four of the 9/11 killers boarded the plane with ID obtained through activists for "undocumented" immigrants at a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia.

Were they familiar with the somewhat informal Canadian border? Certainly. Fact: The only Islamist terrorist captured on US soil in the period immediately before 9/11 was Ahmed Ressam, arrested en route from British Columbia to blow up Los Angeles airport by an alert official who happened to notice he was sweating a lot.

Want to bet that those incidents were the jihad's first and only experiences with illegal immigration to the US? The reality is that Bryant's timeline has more supporting witnesses than the 9/11 commission's.

What I find weird, however, is Media Watch's touching faith in officialdom. I've no idea what makes a good media watchdog, but surely an unquestioning acceptance of an "official" report ought to be an instant disqualification. Those of us who've queried the easy conclusions of the 9/11 commission since the beginning may eventually be proved wrong, but only a bunch of - what's the word? - "mugs" would suggest we shouldn't even raise matters if they're not in the official document.

Even by the lame standards of media-ethics bores, that doesn't seem much of an argument. A real Media Watch would be heaping scorn on that sort of incurious complacency.

My offer of a live interview with ABC on any aspect of Atta, Bryant and the 9/11 commission remains open. Instead, Media Watch's Jackson ended her report with a reference to "book-burning", as if those of us who reckon multiculturalism's a lot of hooey are perforce in favour of suppressing ideas we disagree with. Er, no, Liz. That would be the state media commissar who insists if it's not in the official report, it can't possibly be true.

Mark Steyn, a columnist with the British Telegraph Group, is a regular contributor to The Australian's opinion page.

Media Watch is a 15 minute long TV program broadcast each Monday night on Australia's ABC network. It sees it as its mission to expose bias and inaccuracy in the media. Many Australians find this very amusing as the show is, in fact, one of the most biased pieces of left wing propaganda within the Australian media, and it makes a lot of mistakes.

2 posted on 08/28/2005 2:36:26 PM PDT by decal ("The Republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it")

"'They want me to give written answers? On a TV show?' I said, not quite up to speed on the concept of typing out a television appearance. 'And then people tune in and read it on screen?' Even by the vicious standards of taxpayer-funded state broadcasters, that seemed a bit of an imposition on the citizenry. But who knows? Perhaps I'd misunderstood and they'd bring in Nicole Kidman with a false beard to re-enact my typing. (The "false beard", incidentally, is not a Tom Cruise reference.)"

I came THIS close to a spewage incident here. I imagine MW won't be bothering Mr Steyn in the future.

3 posted on 08/28/2005 2:43:46 PM PDT by decal ("The Republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it")

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