HIGH-MINDED FOREIGN BLATTS
bloody abroad more edifying than home sweet home
HOW depressing to return from abroad to the provincial triviality of our media! The newspapers seem obsessed with worthless gossip and the outstanding feature of Brit- ish television is its complete absence of high seriousness. After a 20,000-mile trip through the Americas I got back on Mon- day to find London chattering about how many 0-levels John Major and Neil Kin- nock got. Can this really be the country which, as recently as the 1940s, ran an imperial commonwealth embracing a quar- ter of the globe? Or does the media not do us justice?
Not that the United States is entirely preoccupied with things that matter. It is sad to see a great country falling so heavily for the hype of Kitty Kelley's attack on Nancy Reagan and giving a reverent hear- ing to so feeble a 'satirist' as Barbara Ehrenreich. There is indeed a masochistic streak among some Americans, at any rate in the big cities, which makes them delight to see their heroes and heroines dragged into the mud. But most Americans, most of the time, still take the world seriously. They retain the instincts of a people conscious they are called to heavy if unwelcome geopolitical duties. With all their faults, papers like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, magazines like the New Republic, the National Review, Commen- tary and Foreign Affairs, and a wide spread of lesser-known publications like New Criterion and Crisis, do respond in an adult manner to the agonising dilemmas of a tragic world. Nor do Americans shrink from transcendental issues either. I was, frankly, amazed that, on a fine spring evening, four of five hundred New Yor- kers, including many who form and lead opinion were prepared to cram into an overheated room to hear me discourse on `Is there a substitute for God?' And Americans while disagreeing strenuously among themselves about how George Bush should handle the Kurdish problem, do at least debate the topic on its merits, not as an intriguing insight into their president's personality, social background and educa- tional record. In New York nowadays I am made to feel how lightweight a country Britain is becoming.
That impression is strengthened by a visit to some of the more advanced Latin- American countries. It was good, in Chile, to settle down each morning to read El Mercurio, a solid, sober, traditional news- paper, crammed with detailed political news from all over the continent and the world, presented in an old-fashioned way, with an absolute distinction between news and comment, though with all the latest technology and with some of the best colour photos I have ever seen in a daily. In Argentina there is a wide spread of heavyweight papers, such as the famous La Prensa, the bulky and prosperous La Na- cion and business dailies like Ambito Financiero. If you give an interview to one of these, you can be sure that your views will be published accurately and without distorting cuts. Even the tabloid Clarin comes out every day with a volume and variety of serious news which makes one ashamed of the downmarket tabloids here. There are, too, some impressive Revistas or weeklies, such as Noticias and Somos, and a wide spread of cable and television channels, in both Chile and Argentina, keen to carry news, interviews and debates about geopolitics. The Chileans are cur- rently obsessed with terrorism: the recent murder of the popular opposition senator Jaime Guzman makes them fear the spread of the 'Shining Path' brand which has devastated Peru (they are scared of Peru- vian cholera too). Argentina's obsession is with corruption, the hair-raising details of which dominate the morning • headlines, even in the phlegmatic English-language Buenos Aires Herald, which has an out- standing record of courageous comment on the iniquities of the powerful. The country seems to have more than its share of wicked deputies and colonels, most of them called Angel, Horatio or Oswaldo, but their iniquities are comprehensively exposed in the papers and on TV — no small virtue in a country where, not so long ago, inquisitive journalists were liable to be picked up by cars without number- plates and never seen again. At the same time there is massive and detailed cover- age, much of it excellent, of the Gulf and events in Eastern Europe. Perhaps because these countries feel themselves so far from world centres, they are all the more an- xious to cover them.
What particularly pleased me on this visit was to discover the powerful role women now play in Latin-American jour- nalism. Of the 40 or so people who interviewed me for press and television in these two countries, well over half were women. The trend was more pronounced in Chile than in Argentina, traditionally a bastion of machismo, but it was marked in both. Many of these successful career- women told me they had four, five or even six children. A particularly conscientious and well-informed interviewer in Chile had ten, ranging from eight years to 23, all but one (he was studying to be a priest) living at home. This is possible in countries where middle-class families still have ser- vants, though in rapidly diminishing num- bers. The women I met all seemed to have degrees and demanding jobs as well as families, and the younger ones were parti- cularly ambitious, though without a trace of irritating feminism. At the universities where I gave talks, the sharpest questions tended to come from girls, or 'pre-women' as you are now obliged to call them on some US campuses. When I lunched in a newspaper boardroom in Santiago, women dominated the talk on world affairs.
It is still a different matter in business. The lunches I had in banks were all-male. But the conversation, by City standards, was dauntingly high-level, not to say edify- ing: public affairs, soberly debated wihout the itch to gossip, philosophy and political theory. In these far-south latitudes, the excellent broadsheet newspapers reflect accurately the minds and tastes of well- educated readers. They buy books too, in prodigious quantities. Buenos Aires, with about the same population, has many more bookshops than London, most of them of superior quality too. The city's enormous book fair, open to the public and thronged with teenagers, attracted a million visitors this month. It's quite a culture-shock to get back to 'NO, I DID NOT THROW UP OVER VICAR'S UNDERWATER WEDDING, SAYS TV'S GAVIN.'
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