You see a similar situation in a lot of the US media in relation to Europe – it really is quite frustrating to meet otherwise intelligent people who believe, say, that Europe is fast turning into Eurabia because of the threat from islamic extremists, or that the EU is on the brink of collapse, when nothing of the kind is actually happening. They think this because rather than bog down/weaken their stories with statistics, journalists reporting on Europe find it a lot easier to paint with a broad brush. The same of course is true of a lot of European reporting on America.

This kind of laziness becomes particularly odious when you come to examples such as the use of torture by US and UK forces and their allies in the war on terror – now fully documented and convincingly proved. Getting any newspapers to actually use words like ‘torture’ without giving them the quotation-marks treatment took a long time, although I’m glad that the UK media has finally started to do so – but the mainstream US media has not. The language used to describe our opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan is also instructive – ‘guerilla’ was quickly done away with, ‘partisan’ never seemed to be used more than peripherally, ‘terrorist’ was a bit out of place when those being described were engaged in open combat – somehow the media settled on the term ‘insurgent’ as a catch-all. The labelling of detainees as ‘terrorist suspects’ seems to totally negate the second word and turn those imprisoned into a class of people indistinguishable from terrorists themselves, when many of those are nothing of the kind.