The cluelessness of the elite media never fails to astonish, as James Bowman of the New Criterion notes.

As an example of media obtuseness, the emphatic adversatives in the New York Times’s headline to Fox Butterfield’s classic story of 1997—“Crime Rates are Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling: More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime”—take some beating. The Times itself tried to top it six years later with a variation on the same theme as Mr. Butterfield resumed his sleuthing to probe the mystery of the “researchers” who had made the “surprising” discovery of a 2.6 percent annual increase in the prison population while, at the same time, “serious crime had fallen.”

Since then, those same clueless researchers must have turned their attention to foreign attitudes towards America, as they have produced a new contender for Mr. Butterfield’s crown—also, naturally enough, from one of his colleagues at the newspaper of record. On the first day of December the Times deigned to notice the following: “World Falls for American Media, Even As It Sours on America.” Correspondent Tim Arango went on to write in full paradoxical mode: “In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular”—hmm, do you suppose that’s why they call it “pop”?—“has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured.”

Gee, how weird is that? Could there be any ideas around about how to explain the mystery of enthusiastic consumers of American pop culture who have developed negative ideas about America? Well, I have one. Perhaps neither Mr. Arango nor his editors are frequent enough consumers of American pop culture to have noticed that much of it, especially the movies, has been exceeded in its display of relentless anti-Americanism only by the American news media—prominent among which, of course, is The New York Times itself. More likely than mere ignorance of this fact, however, is the pervasiveness of anti-Americanism in the media world generally and at the Times in particular. There it has become so much a part of the paper’s worldview under the Bushite tyranny that there can be few Times writers or editors who simply do not take it for granted when they encounter it in the popular culture—or anywhere else.

The easy adoption of American anti-American assumptions by certain classes of foreigners could have serious side-effects—besides, that is, on our beloved Motherland’s bad poll numbers worldwide. After the surviving Bombay terrorist the week before cited alleged American and Israeli atrocities as the cause of his own, for example, it could hardly be doubted that these carefully cultivated grievances owed something to the media’s overhyping of stories like Abu Ghraib or fabricating them, as in Newsweek’s now notorious Koran-down-the-toilet story of 2005. As Bret Stephens wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Of course, it’s always possible to fall for a well-told lie. But it’s worth wondering why a media that treats nearly every word uttered by the U.S., British or Israeli governments as inherently suspect has proved so consistently credulous when it comes to every dubious or defamatory claim made against those governments. Or, for that matter, why the media has been so intent on magnifying genuine scandals (like Abu Ghraib) to the point that they become the moral equivalent of 9/11. Some caution is in order: Terrorists, of all people, might actually believe what they read in the papers.The Times’s Mr. Arango, however, was to be found reflexively turning to the all-purpose media villain of the last eight years for an explanation of the supposed mystery: “With the curtain closing on the Bush presidency, pollsters are left to wonder about the long-term effects on America’s standing.” They just report the news, you see. It’s a sort of automatic writing. Something happens. They write it down. Don’t blame the messenger. If all the news about America happens to have been bad since 2003, well, we all know who is to blame for that.