Books in Brief
Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think by Jed Babbin (Regnery, 196 pp., $27.95). A deputy undersecretary in the first Bush administration, Jed Babbin is no isolationist–but nowadays even internationalists see an enemy in the United Nations. Like many polemics, Babbin’s Inside the Asylum sometimes lurches into character assassination when the real problem is almost purely structural. Under the U.N. Charter, criminal tyrannies enjoy the same privileges as the greatest democracies. This perversion, long an embarrassment to principled diplomats, has now become dangerous for international security.
Dictatorships and rogue states today make up a large majority of the General Assembly and, outside of the Security Council, essentially run the entire show. The consequences include Libya’s farcical presidency of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Less comical are the brazen corruption of the Iraq Oil-for-Food Program; the shield the U.N. provides for any state that wants nuclear weapons; and the U.N.’s open support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Worst of all, the U.N. has proven inimical to its own purposes. The “unique legitimacy” that Kofi Annan claims on behalf of the Security Council should follow from unique obligations. But as a legal matter, the Security Council has no obligations at all, and naturally does nearly nothing. America has had no choice but to fill the vacuum, taking upon itself the onerous responsibility of preventing threats to world peace and enforcing international law, while the U.N. emerges as an increasingly dangerous obstacle to both. Given the swarm of petty interests vested in the current system, reform is inconceivable. Woodrow Wilson would almost certainly urge us, as Babbin does, to abandon the failed experiment–and try again.
–Mario Loyola
Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media by L. Brent Bozell III (Crown Forum, 265 pp., $25.95). In August 1999, the national media became obsessed with rumors that George W. Bush had used cocaine in his youth, while they essentially ignored admissions of Al Gore’s long-term marijuana use. When Bush’s daughter Jenna was cited for underage drinking, the media were on top of it–but where were the media when the Gore children had their own similar and equally newsworthy brushes with the law?
This is no coincidence, says L. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center–the largest organization in America devoted to documenting liberal tendencies in the mainstream press. In Weapons of Mass Distortion, Bozell cites example after example of double standards and deception. Here’s one: Americans are increasingly moving toward the pro-life position in the debate over abortion, and a 2003 survey conducted by the Center for the Advancement of Women found a majority of American women are now pro-life. The major networks–ABC, NBC, and CBS–chose not to cover this story at all.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich accepted a $4.5 million advance from publisher HarperCollins, which is owned by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the conservative Fox News Channel. The deal immediately became a scandal, and the media called for Gingrich to surrender the advance.
But when Hillary Clinton accepted her $8 million advance for her book, there was no outrage, even though her publisher, Simon & Schuster, is an arm of Viacom, which owns CBS–the network that bashed Gingrich the hardest.
If these examples don’t madden you, read Bozell’s chapter on the 2000 election, which explores the networks’ botched handling of the closing of polls in the Florida panhandle. It is perhaps the most devastating example in the book of media gone awry, and reason enough to hope that Bozell’s prophecy–that the liberal media’s days are numbered–comes true.
–Erin Montgomery
