The American Spectator

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FREEDOM WATCH: Congrats to the "Washington Times," for publishing about the only headline and story that did not reflect the value-neutral moral equivalence that has characterized coverage of President Bush's visit to South Korea. The paper's subhead read: "Calls North a 'prison' on visit to DMZ." The first paragraph noted how Bush "sternly told North Korea that 'no nation should be a prison for its own people.'"

The "New York Times," by contrast, said Bush "Acts To Soothe Fears" that the U.S. is planning an attack on North Korea. You had to go way past the jump to here anything negative about North Korea at all, and that was in Bush's remark that "I will not change my opinion on Kim Jong Il until he frees his people...." Much later, the Times's report did provide its idea of context: "Mr. Bush's prepared remarks cast the division between North and South [Korea] in black-and-white terms of imprisonment and freedom, of Communism and capitalism." Black-and-white is Times speak for simplistic.

The Cold War may be over, but old habits take on new life when the focus is on one of its staging grounds. On Tuesday PBS's "NewsHour" -- though without Jim Lehrer, who had extended his long weekend --- showed how it's done. "[M]any South Koreans have been alarmed by what they argue is the Bush administration's bellicose rhetoric toward their communist neighbor," Simon Marks reported from Seoul. He recalled President Clinton's "engagement" of North Korea, and Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang "for talks with the country's reclusive leader." Things were so promising, "the North agreed to allow family visits." But that was before President Bush raised tensions, most recently by including North Korea in the "axis of evil." In all this, not a word as to why Bush might have done that. The only problem was that he had.

When was it that our knowing media stopped asking: What kind of regime allows or doesn't allow family reunification? In a sophisticated world, that's a question relegated to the black-and-white file.

topics:
Sports, Law, Russia, North Korea, Communism