Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight,"
said Ted Koppel, the senior American news anchor as he introduced
Arundhati Roy, the Indian novelist, activist and critic of US foreign
policy, to his show shortly after September 11. "You don't have to listen.
But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange
packages..."

The introduction, such as it was, told us less about Roy than it did
about both Koppel and the mindset that has dominated the American media
since the collapse of the twin towers. It reflects at best a reluctance,
and at worst a downright refusal, to engage with views and voices
opposed to George Bush's foreign policy. It illustrates a tendency to
dismiss rather than discuss, and deride rather than debate - to circle the
wagons around nationhood, leaving questions about what is being done in
the nation's name and why, on the outside.

"This nation is now at war," said Peter Beinart, the editor of the
liberal magazine New Republic. "And in such an environment, domestic
political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national
solidarity, a choosing of sides."

As such, American journalism has been embedded not only militarily but
politically as well. At a press conference in March, a journalist
offered the following searching inquiry: "Mr President, as the nation is at
odds over war, how is your faith guiding you?"

Dissident voices do exist. While you will rarely hear them on
television, most big newspapers have at least one columnist who was opposed to
the war, and several magazines have published articles that are critical
or revelatory. The problem is not so much that such views are
unavailable as that they have been effectively marginalised. Only those
sympathetic to them might seek them out, while others looking to form opinions
are unlikely to stumble across them. Presumably Sean Penn would not
have paid around $125,000 (£76,000) to take out a full-page ad in the New
York Times on Friday to write an essay against Bush if he thought he
could read it elsewhere.

In short, views that offer an informed critical analysis of the Bush
administration's foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle
East, are not part of the national conversation in the United States.
And until Americans can have that conversation with themselves they will
not be equipped to converse with the rest of the world about the
relative legitimacy or otherwise of their government's actions but will
instead continue to retreat into a combination of belligerence, bemusement,
defensiveness and demagogy.

Under these circumstances the brouhaha that has consumed the American
media over the past three weeks about the transgressions of a few
reporters at the New York Times seem particularly to have been blown out of
all proportion. The Times, one of the nation's most respected
newspapers, fired a reporter, Jayson Blair, last month after it discovered that
he had fabricated and plagiarised several stories. Last week one the
paper's star writers, the Pulitzer prize-winning Rick Bragg, resigned
after a story that carried his name turned out to have been reported
largely by a freelancer.

True, both stories raise important, if very different, issues about
journalistic integrity and editorial checks and balances. It's true too
that both tales are engaging - Bragg because of his status, Blair because
of his self-destructive personality traits and his apparent inability
to stop digging now that he is in a hole. "I fooled some of the most
brilliant people in journalism," he boasted recently.

But neither amount to a national crisis in journalism. And while more
revelations might claim senior scalps at the Times, they hardly point to
an implosion of values there either. Any schadenfreude from this side
of the Atlantic is particularly misplaced as, where factual accuracy and
accountability is concerned, American newspapers are far superior to
their British counterparts.

But where diversity of opinion and willingness to challenge their
political establishment is concerned, they are currently lacking. To what
extent this is just the American media reflecting the preoccupations and
values of their readers is a moot point. Most Americans did support the
war. Today, polls show, 55% approve of Bush's handling of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two-thirds believe the war on Iraq has helped
the war on terrorism. The three words most likely to be associated with
Bush are "honest", "good" and "leadership".

And yet there is a sizable minority, just too small to be considered
mainstream but far too large to be regarded as fringe, who disagree.
Coming a close fourth on words to describe Bush was "arrogant". About a
quarter of Americans believe efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going
badly and more than a third believe the Bush administration
overestimated Iraqi weapons, most believing it did so to build support for the
war. Such views may not be reflected on a national scale, but they are
dominating heated local conversations throughout the country.

America is not exceptional in this regard. The last place you would
look for incisive coverage of Northern Ireland would be the British media
and similar criticisms could be made of French journalism during the
Algerian war. Political establishments in powerful nations rarely tell
the truth about power and their media are often only too happy to
collude. "Only when lions get to write history," says the African proverb,
"will hunters cease to be heroes."

Where America does differ is in the nature of industry and the war it
is engaged in. The American media industry is dominated by just a few
companies. AOL Time Warner, to name but one example, owns among many
other things, Time magazine, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, CNN, Comedy
Central, Warner Brothers Pictures and Black Entertainment Television.
With the head of the Federal Communications Commission, under Michael
Powell (son of secretary of state Colin Powell), set to relax ownership
rules later this month this consolidation and the lack of choice that
goes with it will get worse before it gets better. And with a war that is
endless against a foe that is stateless (terror has no nationality),
invisible (it could be anyone) and ubiquitous (they could be anywhere),
the potential for these media distortions to become both pervasive and
permanent is very real indeed.

Fearing the contamination of the pool of domestic information, many
Americans have voted with their remote controls and browsers. American
audience figures for BBC World news leapt 28% in the first few weeks of
the war, elevating its Baghdad correspondent, Rageh Omaar, to sex symbol
status. Meanwhile, American visitors to the websites of the BBC and
progressive news organisations such as the Guardian have risen
exponentially since September 11.

The problem for the American media is not so much whether dissent comes
in strange packages as whether it comes at all. "I will not march to
stop the war while Saddam is standing, for that would strengthen his
tyranny at home," argued Michael Walzer, co-editor of a liberal magazine
that claims to "welcome the clash of strong opinions" earlier this year.
Its name? Dissent.