So, according to the Dominion Post and One News Helen Clark has told Britain and America they might live to regret unleashing the "law of the jungle" through their war in Iraq. But, oddly enough, she didn't. She didn't even tell the Guardian that.
My first thought on reading the Guardian story after it made the TV news last night was that she didn't appear to actually have said "law of the jungle", even though it appeared in the headline in quote marks and subsequently created all the fuss. She confirmed such to journalists this morning. So what she actually said was:
"New Zealand has always argued for the rights of small states," she said - one of her predecessors, the wartime Labour prime minister Peter Fraser, helped to write the UN's founding charter.
"We saw the UN as a fresh start for a world trying to work out its problems together rather than a return to a 19th world where the great powers carved it up ... Who wants to go back to the jungle?"
This is, of course, the same argument for multilateralism that Clark and her government have been making for more than a year, although the bit about China was arguably a bit risqué. The Guardian, a notably Clark-friendly paper, describes her "one of Tony Blair's closest foreign political allies."
Its business section also quoted her this week talking up multilateralism after she chaired an OECD meeting that delivered "a joint plan yesterday for tearing down tariff barriers on manufactured imports in an effort to reinvigorate deadlocked global trade talks and heal the transatlantic rift over Iraq."
The New Zealand Herald, to its credit, seems to have moved past the cringe phase and instead has an actual news story based on Clark's trip - claiming that we might send troops to Iraq "under a top-secret stabilisation scheme being worked out by the British." Fran O'sullivan, who appears to have some good sources, provides an interesting commentary and the paper even weighs in with an able and intelligent defence of multilateralism in its editorial column.
If you've felt a little uneasy about the style of US liberal superguy Michael Moore, your instincts are right. On Mediawatch yesterday, Steven Price delivered a good commentary on the dubious constructions of Moore's award-winning film Bowling for Columbine. I'll get that up on the Mediawatch site as soon as I can get a transcript, but in the meantime, here's the website Steven referenced. The lawyer who adeptly unpicked the editing, David Hardy, believes the whole premise of the film is fraudulent, but he's a second-amendment enthusiast, and thus inevitably at one extreme of the gun debate. This site provides a more measured reading. Whatever view you take, it seems clear that some of the editing in the film - especially that used to fit up the NRA - is strikingly cynical. Here's the usually reliable Spinsanity's take on errors of fact in Moore's hugely successful book Stupid White Men.
A couple of readers (only one of whom is Neil Morrison) are up in arms over my noting of what appears to be another form of manipulation in the London Evening Standard.
Righto. It's not the end of the world, but what it looks like to me is this: it's Saddam statue day, and as history is made in the Baghdad twilight, the Standard, a tabloid-format afternoon paper, wants to headline its April 9 late edition 'FREEDOM: Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad' but the only available picture it can get by deadline is a screen-grab from the BBC. And even that doesn't do it. Not enough thronging. So they fatten out the background with a standard technique - replicating it. That's what it looks like. (This kind of technique has been applied to at least one other Iraq war photograph, earning the lensman responsible a dismissal from the books of the Los Angeles Times.) The story might have been broken by Indymedia, but it and a subsequent update appeared at The Memory Hole, which is usually accurate. And until someone can show me that that isn't the photo that appeared on the front page of the late edition, that's what I think.
Firdus Square fascinates me because the events there were so symbolic, and because I did feel a little duped by the coverage. I woke up that morning, saw a statue fall, heard somebody mention the Berlin Wall and that was it. Only it wasn't, entirely. Reputable media commentators, like the Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson, mused along the same lines the next day. Among other things, Johnson pointed out that by the end of the big day, one US network, MSNBC, had not only begun telling its audience that Iraqis had pulled down the statue themselves, but was showing video of the statue's fall "edited into one seamless fall, rather than the herky-jerky, two-part process it had been." Thus are myths made …