Eye On America |Liberal media looking in wrong places

Ross Weingarten Opinions Editor

Okay Vassar students, it’s time to take a survey. Raise your hand if you think The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the best half-hour on television. Hands down. Now raise your hand if you think FOX News is just slightly below Satan and Stalin on the list of things that make you cringe.

I am guessing that a lot of hands went up on this campus. And that is understandable. Jon Stewart and his protégé Stephen Colbert (whose weeknight show follows Stewart’s on Comedy Central) are both witty, engaging personalities that provide great entertainment. FOX News has consistently shown conservative bias, which greatly detracts from its ability to provide bipartisian news to the public.

But The Daily Show and The Colbert Report illustrate a troubling trend among the liberal media outlets.

These shows are funny because they highlight the mishaps of politicians, especially Republicans. It is easy to laugh when President Bush makes a linguistic gaffe, or when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld continues to highlight a fact about Iraq that simply is not true. But doing this doesn’t accomplish anything. Instead, it fits into the conservative view that liberals are whiners, not actors.

It is not enough to point out the lies and mistakes that have plagued the Bush administration since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Hindsight is 20/20, and even the uncompromising Donald Rumsfeld recently admitted in a CNN interview that no one predicted the strength of the insurgency in Iraq, and that other mistakes were made. Criticizing past events makes liberal journalists look as if they are jumping on a bandwagon that has already left. “Where were these critiques when these decisions were made?” ask conservative politicians and media outlets, and this critique has merit.

Instead of harping on the infighting of the administration, or worse, making another joke about Vice President Dick Cheney shooting a friend while hunting, the liberal media needs to be prescriptive, offering explanations on how to ameliorate the situation that the current party in power has muddled.

As I said, Stewart and Colbert are mere entertainers, and one might ask what responsibility they have to offer solutions to complicated political situations. But the fact is that they possess a lot of influence, especially over young, liberal viewers. It does nothing to point out how inept Bush and his colleagues are; to truly have an effect, the liberal media must have an answer.

Even more “respected” journalists like opinions columist Frank Rich of The New York Times continually point out all that has gone wrong in the past six years, and they do so eloquently. However, these points have been repeated over and over again. Everyone knows that the United States engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan based on faulty intelligence, and everyone has realized how badly the situation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was handled. Liberal journalists are armed to the teeth with facts like these; what they don’t have are answers. The left can never separate itself from the conservative right if it merely criticizes past policy and does nothing to offer a change of course.

Despite my critiques of the liberal media, I fall into that category myself, and as a result it would be completely hypocritical if I did not offer some sort of plan for the future, so here it goes: The U.S. military cannot simply leave Iraq and “cut and run,” as Republicans love to say. Instead, the focus should shift to training more Iraqi troops, and to training them better. A date of departure does not need to be set, but more time and effort should go into bolstering the Iraqi military. While committing more troops to training the Iraqi defense force might create a period of lessened military presence on the ground in Iraq, this will soon be offset by an Iraqi military that finally has the capability to gain control of the country.

In Lebanon, the U.S. should arm the Lebanese government. It is not Israel that will ultimately destroy Hizbullah, but the Lebanese themselves, and to do so, they need military backing. Lebanon’s president, Emile Lahoud is correct in asserting that there was nothing he could do to stop Hizbullah from bombing Israel. With American armaments, he would be able to gain control of his country.

These are daunting tasks, and there are certainly more to tackle, making it easy to feel overwhelmed when looking at the global political situation. My advice if you ever feel this way? Turn on Jon Stewart. At the very least, you’ll get a laugh.