Freedom Line Blog

Basel, Switzerland: Abroad for the past eight days attending to family matters, I have had plenty of time to do various and sundry chores while CNN International aired in the background. It’s awful. It’s level of anti-U.S. bias is astonishing. Again and again its reports include small (and sometimes not-so-small) digs against the United States. Much of its coverage is of third-world horrors which, I guess, are indeed news, although the overall tone of lefty crusading is rather annoying. But almost any time the United States is mentioned, the tenor of the mention is negative. Christian Amanpour is particularly obnoxious, repeatedly portraying the U.S. as a thug or bully, or at least otherwise immoral and a “bad guy” on the world stage.

Look, apart from Candy Crowley’s debate moment on Libya and John King’s misguided debate handling of the Gingrich adultery question, CNN’s U.S. election coverage this year was almost uniformly excellent, as I noted in several blog posts. Frankly, I have found CNN’s domestic coverage in the past year (Piers Morgan excepted) to be a marked improvement from some prior years and often a credit to the trade of journalism. But this international version of the network is just disgusting.  And, considering that it is one of the world’s three major sources of international news (along with the BBC and al-Jazeera), and the only one basically headquartered in the United States, its anti-U.S. bias is a horrendous detriment to American interests and of course horrendously unfair. With this trash airing worldwide, no wonder the United States is disliked in so many places across this globe of ours.

The reality is that no nation in the history of mankind has given so much blood and treasure, without hope of conquest, to save the lives and liberties of so many other people, and/or to secure the peace or to serve humanitarian interests, as has the United States of America. It is shameful that CNN International so badly distorts that reality. Harsher language deserves to be addressed CNN’s way, but this is a family-friendly website.

I have a slightly different take on last night’s debate than Quin. Like my colleague, I thought that Romney’s performance was serviceable, though I won’t go so far as to say he ‘won.’ Truth be told, I don’t think either candidate did much to improve their standing with the small slice of the electorate that still remains undecided, as that group tends to prize style over substance and the constant sniping between the two candidates probably left the swing voters cold to the political process as a whole (that tendency also worked at cross-purposes with both campaigns’ efforts to win over female voters, who are notoriously averse to that kind of incivility).

I also saw a missed opportunity last night, but it wasn’t Obamacare (where I think Romney is unavoidably uncomfortable); it was Libya, where he completely botched an opportunity to call Obama out on his administration’s meandering, thumbless response to the attack in Benghazi (damage that was compounded by moderator Candy Crowley inappropriately — and incorrectly — intervening to agree with Obama that he had framed the assault as a terrorist attack from the beginning).

After the first debate, sources inside the Romney campaign made it known that they had encouraged the candidate to speak in a natural tone — as if he were addressing a group of investors — rather than memorizing sound bites and talking points. It worked for Romney as long as the topic was the economy, where he is in his element. But I hope that the team in Boston encourages a little more thoughtful planning as we head towards Monday night’s foreign policy debate.

Romney has never shown a particularly deep interest in — or understanding of — foreign policy, a trait which I’ve noted in the past could be a potential liability (though his instincts are, of course, far preferable to Obama’s). While I think next week’s debate will easily be the least consequential of the three (both because it’s last chronologically, and because foreign policy will not be a central issue of this campaign), Romney still can’t afford to be as lost at sea as he was at the end of last night’s town hall. Time to hit the briefing books.