[Howard Kurtz, Host:] Broken mirror. As the president visits Canada, the media view of George Bush and America is very different up north. Journalists facing jail. Why should they get special privileges to protect sources anyway? Plus, Tom Brokaw's farewell and the feverish sweepstakes over who will be the next Dan Rather.
[Kurtz:] Welcome to RELIABLE SOURCES, where today we turn our critical lens on a tale of two countries and their very different media cultures. I'm Howard Kurtz. When President Bush visited Canada this week, he got the usual U.S. coverage about trying to mend fences with a traditionally friendly country that opposed the Iraq War.
[Unidentified Male:] This week, President Bush goes to Canada, where the war in Iraq has not had many backers. He's trying to build diplomatic support for the work that still needs to be done and improve his image among the Canadian public.
[Kurtz:] But in the Canadian press, the emphasis was on criticism of the U.S. president and why Bush offered nothing on any Canadian issue, including trade disputes.
[Unidentified Male:] Four years, three weeks and two days since first being elected U.S. president, and George Bush said hello to Canada, beginning his first official visit here.
[Unidentified Female:] Bush is here for one reason and that is to make war. He's here to build fortresses. He's here to co-opt Canada further into his illegal, immoral and barbaric war on terror.
[Kurtz:] As viewed through the American media lens, Canada is the land of national health insurance, same-sex marriage, medical marijuana and a polite citizenry, a sort of blue state paradise with maple and moose. To much of the Canadian press, America is the big, bad, bruising neighbor to the south, cultural imperialist, foreign policy bullies, ruled by red-staters, that barely notices Canada at all. Of course, Canada does provide some important exports to the United States, from beef to the media meat market. ABC's Peter Jennings hails from Canada, and when Texan Dan Rather steps down, CBS might replace him with a Canadian, John Roberts. That should help the trade balance. Joining me now in Washington, Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of "National Review Online." And in Ottawa, Andrew Cohen, columnist for CanWest Newspapers and a journalism professor at Carlton University. Welcome. Andrew Cohen, does much of the American media, in your view, seem to enjoy smacking Canada around?
[Andrew Cohen, Columnist, Canwest Newspapers:] Well, Howard, it depends who you ask. I mean, your friends at "CROSSFIRE," Tucker and the gang, surely had a good time last week ganging up on old Canada. And Bill O'Reilly can be relied on regularly to bash Canada. I'm sure your colleague, Jonah Goldberg, will weigh in as well. But if you read other elements of the American media, if you read "The New York Times" this week and "The Washington Post," both of which did which covered the visit, it was very straight. If you watched ABC News or NBC or CBS, maybe because of the Canadians there, I don't know, but their reporting was quite straight. I think I think the cable news channels seem to like to have a go at Canada. And maybe it's good entertainment. We're happy to hear it.
[Kurtz:] Well, he set you up, Jonah Goldberg. You wrote a "National Review" cover story about Canada, entitled "Wimps," in which you said, among other things, it was not a normal country. So I guess you'd say that Canadians deserve to be smacked around by ugly Americans such as yourself.
[Jonah Goldberg, Editor At Large, National Review Online:] I do, and thank you for calling me an ugly American. I think look, I do think Canadian political culture is largely dysfunctional. I think it makes particularly the conservative American media has every good reason to criticize a lot of the things that Canada does. Canada has basically in my view picked up a EU and U.N. sensibility. They're riven with anti-Americanism, it's soaked to the bone in Canada, and it's often reflexive and knee-jerk.
[Goldberg:] That said, I have to disagree with a little bit of your opening thing. I think that the Canadian press was actually far more responsible and favorable to Bush than the American press was. The American press was obsessed with very small protests that turned out in Canada against Bush, much smaller than all the predictions. The American press kept emphasized how this was a a fence- mending mission and all that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the Canadian press gave Bush a second chance, I thought.
[Kurtz:] Andrew Cohen, would you agree with that assessment of the Canadian coverage of President Bush's visit?
[Cohen:] Well, I think Jonah shows great wisdom. I'm kind of surprised to hear him say so many nice things about the Canadian media. I think he's right. I think that they played it straight. Look, our interests are obviously different from your interests. The White House corps covering President Bush would probably be interested in whether the president was test-driving a speech that he'll give in Western Europe, perhaps early in his second term. They put it in a larger context, perfectly understandable. Canadian the Canadian media probably is more interested in what Mr. Bush could do for Canada, what how he might have addressed our bigger issues. I mean, things like closing the border to our cattle, which is may sound like nothing to you, but it's billions and billions of dollars lost to Canadian cattlemen.
[Kurtz:] If I could jump in here...
[Cohen:] Other elements...
[Kurtz:] Andrew Cohen, if I could jump in here, one Canadian columnist in the "National Post," Don Martin, wrote that Bush probably uttered the word "Canada" more in the 27 hours of his visit than in the first four years of his term. So that gives me the impression that in the eyes of the Canadian media, you feel kind of ignored by a huge country with a huge media establishment.
[Cohen:] Well, Canadians have, like many small countries living next to big ones, have an inferiority complex. It comes with a mouse living beside an elephant. And sometimes, if you're in the same bed, the elephant rolls over. It doesn't leave you a lot of a lot of prospects. I think that probably Canada has been ignored by the United States. Here's what happened, Howard. After September the 11th, Canadians took in 33,000 Americans when all the planes were diverted. They fed and housed them for five days in eastern Canada. And when the president got up in Congress on September the 20th, when he gave that speech, he thanked everybody in the world but Canada. It was a small thing, but it introduced himself early in his term to Canadians in a way which wasn't particularly ingratiating.
[Kurtz:] OK.
[Cohen:] That having been said, when President when President Bush addressed Canadians on Wednesday in Halifax, what he was actually charming in many ways. He said, "How does a person thank a nation, well, that's something a president can do." And thereupon, he did, and he talked very glowingly of Canada's contribution in a number of areas which perhaps Jonah may not recognize, like Afghanistan. We've lost people doing hard work, nation building, that your country is not doing.
[Kurtz:] Let me jump in.
[Cohen:] So I think the president recognized that.
[Kurtz:] Let me jump in here. Jonah Goldberg, you seem to judge whether the Canadian media were fair or not, whether the American media were fair or not, as how supportive they are of President Bush. That's a conservative standard, but it's not necessarily the only standard.
[Goldberg:] No, but I think that when anti-Bush, anti-President Bush protests turn out to be much smaller than anticipated, when...
[Kurtz:] They were comparing him to Hitler. That's pretty vociferous stuff.
[Goldberg:] Yes, but it was. But Howard... ... George Bush can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a goatee who's comparing him to Hitler. Everyone's comparing Bush to Hitler. It's idiotic. It happens a lot in Canada. I think I think Canadian press, the Canadian left has this outrageous inferiority complex. I think they're taking a lot of cheap shots at the United States of America. But the mainstream Canadian press did focus with on Bush's magnanimity. They focused a lot more on these issues. And supposedly the American press is always concerned about issues in all these things. They're the ones that retread the exact same story line of Bush is unpopular abroad. Well, that story wasn't the real story.
[Kurtz:] Andrew Cohen, you mentioned earlier in this segment CNN's Tucker Carlson. I want to play a little sound for you from a recent edition of "CROSSFIRE."
[Tucker Carlson, Co-host, "crossfire":] Doesn't that tell you something about the sort of limpid, flaccid nature of Canadian society, that people with ambition come here? What does that tell you about Canada?
[Kurtz:] So how does it feel to have your country be besmirched by people like Tucker and Jonah?
[Cohen:] Well, you know, Howard, I had the great pleasure of of chatting with Tucker the other day. And after introducing himself to me and telling me I didn't look like a Canadian, I asked him what a Canadian looks like. I didn't know if he looked like an American in a bowtie. Our former prime minister used to wear bowties all the time. No, look, when you live in the Republic of Hyperbole, when exaggeration is your currency, when that kind of chatter seems to sell on the cable news channels, that's fine. But is it reality? Is it real? Absolutely not.
[Kurtz:] I want I want you to respond... Sorry to break in here in an American fashion. I want you to respond to Jonah's point about anti-Americanism. Is there, in the Canadian media coverage of the United States, an element of cultural superiority or downright anti-Americanism?
[Cohen:] Look, if you want to be brutally honest and frank about Canada, yes, there is a current of anti-Americanism in Canada. Is it reflected in the mainstream media? I would say probably not. I mean, most of our papers, I think, play it quite straight. We have Washington correspondents. I was one. We make a big effort to cover America, to understand America. If you're saying is there a Canadian take on America, yes. But you know, there's anti I mean, my God, to say a Canadian compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler, you don't think there are a few Americans who don't do that? I mean, 48 percent of that of your country voted for John Kerry. I think a lot of Americans have real doubts about George Bush. And I think that the sentiment in Canada in many ways is no different from much of Europe and the United States itself. I don't think it's that different.
[Goldberg:] I think the problem we're getting back to this inferiority complex. When American journalists the most reaction I've ever gotten from a cover story of "National Review" was when I wrote this piece about Canada, but it was all about the 49th parallel. They went nuts up there. When Steven Pearlstein, the "Washington Post" correspondent in Canada, wrote a piece about Canadian identity and the lack thereof, the Canadian elite press went nuts about this. Front page stories, thumb sucking, all sorts of things...
[Kurtz:] You're saying America doesn't care.
[Goldberg:] And when and every single day there are Canadians who say the most idiotic things about America. And we don't care.
[Kurtz:] Jonah Jonah...
[Cohen:] There...
[Kurtz:] Just briefly, Andrew.
[Cohen:] There's now doubt there's an obsession in Canada about what Americans think of us. That's absolutely true. But it can be overstated in the American press.
[Kurtz:] All right. Well, there are also Americans who say idiotic things every day, sometimes on television. Jonah Goldberg, Andrew Cohen in Ottawa, thanks very much. Jonah, stay with us. When we come back, journalists under siege. Should they be forced to reveal confidential sources to avoid jail time? We'll talk about that next.