THESE are bewildering times and I, for one, blame the media. A curious confession admittedly for someone in my line of work but a recent trip to Singapore and its aftermath really had me wondering.
There I was happily ensconced in the Land of the Rattan Cane, hanging out with happening young people, being briefed on what makes Singapore tick by all those who seem to count, and really, really believing that I was gaining a full, frank and unbiased opinion on the place, when along came CNN and spoiled it all.
Day after day, as I dived into my hotel room for a brief break from the humidity, Larry King and company assured me from Atlanta that they knew best. If it was an insight into Michael Fay and his counterparts that I wanted, they had it. My own insights were flawed, pitiful even, compared with the views of the panel they had assembled to discuss capital punishment, Singaporean law and even the feeling on the street (Orchard Road that is - not Turner Boulevard). After a time, I began to dispute the need to even leave the hotel room, such was the depth of the insight to which I and millions of other viewers were being treated. Such was the overpowering nature of an opinion propounded through the wonders of cable.
Then, Richard Nixon died and I began to have my doubts. Of course it wasn't just CNN, but that particular station's coverage can't have strayed too far from the mass media norm in terms of the tributes to the late president. I think it came some time between his former press secretary's comments, those from Henry Kissinger and the hockey results read by the funny-voiced South African fellow, but a little corner of my brain started to rebel.
No, it said, I can't write off the 'darker' side of Nixon's career as a 'mistake' just like that. I can't be brainwashed into believing, as the British under Thatcher did, that gung ho back-slapping foreign policy can be allowed to drown out other historical facts. Facts like the shooting deaths in 1970 of four Kent State University students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard, the secret war in Cambodia, the 'enemies list' or the war Nixon waged on constitutional democracy. It is a fact that after Nixon was gone, President Gerald Ford announced 'our long national nightmare is over'.
It is also a fact that when asked to comment on Nixon's death by an obituary writer last week, a young American man born in the late 1960s said: 'He ended the Vietnam War.' An entire generation's socio-political perceptions are being built not in the history class but by the mass media, and that generation is in real danger of becoming yet another mass media invention.