TT: Media reflects the country's anti-Americanism

CHAIRMAN of the Media Complaints Council of Trinidad and Tobago (MCC), Michael Williams, said yesterday that any alleged anti-American impression in the Trinidad and Tobago media was a reflection of the widespread anti-American sentiment in this country.

"They (media) are anti-American to the extent that people are anti-American because of the behaviour of America. That's a fact," he added.

Williams is engaged in circular reasoning which would conceal the influence of the media on shaping popular opinion. If TTians are anti-American, and they didn't use to be, look no further than the press as the cause of this new national bias. Look not just to the local press, but also to the international press, CNN and the BBC, in particular. The proliferation of satellite dishes during the 1980s brought CNN into TT homes. Thanks to Rediffusion in the early 50s, TT has had a long history with the BBC, which because of that, has a reservoir of trust and goodwill towards them that blinds people to the defects of the modern BBC.

Furthermore, in the wake of 9/11 also, the difficulty of obtaining visas and the treatment that U.S. Immigration officials have meted out to innocuous TT tourists has made many TTians wary of travel to the U.S. This last is ironical given the strategic importance of TT to the U.S. and Maura Harty's view of how Saudis ought to be petted and cooed over by State and immigration officials. Thus, TTians read about this in the press and feel bitter because, hey, none of the 19 hijackers were TTians.

Nevertheless, the media's constant drumbeat of anti-Americanism -- case in point Rickey Singh's blatantly anti-American piece, In Saddams' sadistic footsteps, which appears in the Guyana Chronicle as well as in the Trinidad Express, are going to be read and commented over by people who are appalled that the U.S. military can behave thus, but who may not decry prison guards meteing out "body music" to prisoners in the local jails. So, it's a circle begun by the media and which now feeds the media -- as if that shark ever needed feeding.