Gone are the days when our favorite newspaper – with all its prejudices; they were after all generally ours as well reflected in which paper we chose to read – was a screen of world events. The New York Times, for example, has no longer any claim to being the newspaper of record but rather a repository of left-of-center screed and The Daily Telegraph cannot make up its mind if it is still old Tory or making money for its Scottish owners with what used to be called tabloid trash.

Now happenings tumble toward us with only the inadequate search engine on our computer which throws up everything, whatever its importance, in equal proportion until our minds become saturated with trivia competing with what history may judge as the more important happenings of the day. Paris Hilton, a celebrity because she wants to be a celebrity with no achievements in any direction except capturing media attention, equates with the rare exposure of an honor killing in Pakistan where a poor wretch is stoned to death at the instance of her next of kin because she has dared to flirt with a neighbor from a different caste.

Nowhere is the differentiation between American events and those happening in a great part of the rest of the world more acute than in the treatment of the political scene. A corrupt American official exposed by the U.S. media receives the kind of attention that similar accusations or convictions – in foreign media as well as in North America – would never receive. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, for example, has been repeatedly indicted in Switzerland as well as in her native Pakistan for corruption and malfeasance. Even granting that there were political overtones to the accusations leveled at her in Pakistani courts under a new regime, the different media treatment is spectacular. Yet one is hard pressed to find that mentioned in the speculative stories about her recent not so secret meeting with Pres. Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Dubai, or during her frequent visits to the salons in Georgetown or New York or the West End Nor do her notoriously frequent facelifts get any attention . That that would have been the case were she an American politician is reflected in the daylong brouhaha over one photograph of what some thought was Hillary Clinton’s tasteless décolleté at a political rally.

That is not to say that local news is ignored, or does not take precedence in some of the Asian media. Every activity of Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt, jailed for his connections to the 1993 Mumbai [Bombay] terrorist bombings, does get play, not only in his native India but in the Pakistani and media throughout the Hindi-Urdu film world from Manila to Casablanca. But he has a hard time competing against one of what used to be called Hollywood starlets such as Cameron Diaz who has hardly reached the lower rung of Dutt’s climb to cinematic fame by any objective standard.

But where the domination of the media by American events creates problems beyond the scope of the media themselves – one can no longer simply blame it on the ownership of the media by U.S. interests – is in the pervasive double standard. Applied to American events or U.S. actions overseas, it too often results in hysterical anti-Americanism, pure and simple. That is an unbalanced and irrational condemnation of American policy or action without regard to facts and context. And that, in turn, has policy as well as propaganda significance. Such world media giants as the BBC, even Al Jazeera – trying now desperately to shake off its early promotion of the Islamofascists as it attempts a world English-language service to compete with the big boys – reflects this bias.

Tomes have quite rightly been written and will continue to be written about the phenomenon of anti-Americanism, its origins, and its effect on politics inside the U.S. and abroad. The reasons are that it arises from so many obvious and equally obscure reasons that it is as hard to analyze as it is to describe. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was certainly correct to ascribe one brand of it as a vestigial reaction of would-be young and not so young radicals to their own country. But their criticism almost instantly falls into the hands of foreign critics who use it as proof of the certainty of their criticism of Washington’s domestic and foreign policies. Senator Patrick Moynihan was equally correct in seeing a new class character to the American media operative in the post-Korean War era, one who saw his role as a member of guiding suburban elite rather than as a member of “the working press” with working class origins and sympathies.

Those of us who have lived in the former European colonial appendages know a special kind of anti-Americanism of a narrow feudal elite now enthroned which borrows from their former European masters: the kind of London Bloomsbury snobbery which is formulated on a hypothesis that the British are the Greeks to American Romans in the modern era [ah! if only the Brits were Greeks!] That translates into using any misadventure of perceived fault of the Americans as evidence that they are, after all, only poor imitations of their European betters. Nowhere is this more profound, curiously enough, than in the Anglo-Argentine, Anglo- Brazilian, and Anglo-Chilean communities which have had so much to do with those countries recent history. They do, in fact, carry anti-Americanism on both shoulders – the old feud between the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds and the borrowed disdain of the pseudo-sophisticates in the West End.

At a time when the U.S. must, for better or for worse, carry much of the burden of trying to direct world stability and progress – what with the inadequacies and corruption of the vaunted international organizations grouped around the UN and the retreat into “the good life” of a psychologically exhausted European continent, victim of two civil wars within less than a century – this anti-Americanism becomes a potent weapon. It is no accident, as the Communists used to say, that the Islamofascists trot out tired old leftwing Stalinist European and American fellow-traveling arguments about imperialism, “Orientalism”, etc., etc., as much as they use Koranic verses and hadith arguments to condemn the U.S. in its war on terror.

Unfortunately, the constraints of its own media – reared as is necessary in a democracy to be adversarial and with mainstream print media in a downward changeover spiral desperately seeking a profitable role with its new digital competition -- play into this worldwide distortion. No anti-American voice abroad is reluctant and inadept at picking up any criticism, subtracted from its U.S. context to be put out by megaphone to the local audience.

The Bush Administration, making war in a peacetime environment, has not been able to take on the most important task of meeting the ideological threat of the Islamofascists. Infuriatingly, that challenge is all the more difficult to answer because of its nihilistic and ridiculous nature. Whether one is to counteract the appeal of 30 virgins in heaven that await so-called martyrs of the Islamicists, vicious killers who attack innocents, or to answer the absurd conspiracy theories, such as Jews were alerted to the 9/11 Twin Towers bombing and escaped it, requires a propaganda expertise. It was, after all, Hitler’s Josef Goebbels who reckoned that the bigger a lie, the easier to sell it to an opposing ethos.

No institution of the U.S. government is equipped to do this; handling the Capital Press Corps is a difficult and demanding task but has little to recommend it in creating a vast and potent black and white propaganda campaign against the menace of Islamicist radicalism. So far no semi-governmental machinery such as the Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, has arrived for the task.

And that is how and why anti-Americanism, whether in the cocktail parties in Dubai or in the leftwing Japanese press or among the hypocritical Bengali Communist landlords turned capitalists, serves to reinforce the power of the terrorists in the present conflict. It is a part of what will undoubtedly be a long and hard-fought contest for world domination and influence that Washington must learn to live with at the same time it answers its worst aspects.