Double standards.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Republican media figures denounce US-Bosnia peace mission - Pundit Watch - Column

Is Bosnia Worth Dying For?" demanded the cover of Time magazine in huge, screaming letters. John McLaughlin bellowed the same question to us on Sunday morning. Well, gee, when you put it that way.

On Thanksgiving weekend, the talk shows addressed this question and, true to form, none featured any real experts on the region or on the history and politics of the war itself. Certainly there was no one from the actual countries involved (they have funny accents and unpronounceable names).

Instead, we got to hear Phil Gramm on This Week With David Brinkley blow off about nonintervention, all the while knowing that if this were Reagan or Bush calling for troop deployment, Gramm and his buddies would be rattling their sabers the loudest. Gramm's hypocrisies were set against Anthony Lake's bland bureaubabble assuring us that the United States wouldn't get "bogged down." This is supposed to pass for information.

Over on The McLaughlin Group we got to hear smug arch-conservative Linda Chavez--who, I venture to say, knows as much about Bosnia as Vanna White--guide our thinking through this complicated issue. Her observations? U.S. soldiers could come home in body bags, and the Muslims are the "least bad" of everyone there. Fred Barnes enlightened us by opining that one possible outcome of the peace agreement was that "the whole thing could fall apart" and another was that the "fragile framework could work." Is it really too much to ask for an analysis of the situation by someone who actually knows something about it?

Polls show most Americans are opposed to sending troops to Bosnia, despite Clinton's speech, but focus groups and more in-depth interviews with people reveal a deep ambivalence about what America's role should be. Such ambivalence is hardly surprising, given the nature of the news coverage, which has promoted a sense of amoral resignation among viewers. It is important to remember that the news media have the greatest capacity to shape people's opinions when the topic being covered is more remote from most people's knowledge and experience.

This has certainly been true of the former Yugoslavia, about which most Americans know nothing. What we got to see on TV, after the war broke out, were sensational, graphic images of brutality, torture, and rape. What we didn't get was an overview of the political, economic, and cultural contexts that had produced such images. We were urged to react emotionally. But more importantly, our ethnocentric...