Deciding Not to Shake Hands

20th November 2008 Charles J. Brown
12:22 pm

Deciding Not to Shake Hands

So a video clip from the G-20 meeting last weeking is making the rounds on the progosphere this morning:

Some are suggesting that world leaders were unwilling to shake Bush’s hand. I don’t think that’s true: it is Bush who is refusing to shake others’ hands. Watch it again — he makes no effort at all. Contrast that with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who follows him.

Contrary to what the CNN anchor suggests, Bush doesn’t look like the most unpopular kid in his class but rather an angry loner unwilling to engage with others. I expect such antisocial behavior from a World of Warcraft-playing, thrash metal-listening 16-year-old, but not from the putative leader of the free world.

One other thing: I find CNN mocking Bush a bit disingenous. They are, after all, the same network that spent the past eight years uncritically repeating Bush Administration’s lies line on everything from Iraq to torture.

It’s times like this that I start thinking that CNN is worse than Fox New: no matter what you might think of them, you can’t accuse Fox of inconsistency: they adhere to a conservative line no matter who is in power. CNN, in contrast, sucks up to whichever party is in power. That’s self-censorship, not journalism.

UPDATE: Thanks to Undip reader Ross, who points out that somehow I managed to mistake President Lula of Brazil for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. I have no idea why — it’s not like they even remotely resemble one another.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under American foreign policy, media. It is tagged under George W. Bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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1 On November 20th, 2008, Ross Hammersley said:
That was the sense I got from the video as well. He is just disinterested, at best, as he makes his way up there for the photo.

I think you’re right to be disappointed in CNN too. Aside from some of Anderson Cooper’s work (on Katrina, etc.) and the occasional commentary I see from Jeffrey Toobin, David Gergen & Donna Brazile, I’ve found the network almost completely unwatchable of late. For me, it is due, at least in large part, to what seems to be a predominance of journalism-as-stenography. One of their folks who is almost uniformly guilty of this practice is Wolf Blitzer; I literally cannot even stand to watch him at all, and almost always changed the channel any time I wandered over to CNN during election coverage and he turned up for more than 10 seconds.

Some of their (amazingly huge) political panels during the primaries and post-debate coverage were interesting, insofar as they provided a large number of views (not that they tended to differ too much amongst themselves), but they continue to give this kind of false equivalency to the competing sides of many issues (Campbell Brown being an exception), or simply serve as a platform for people (like Palin) to spout their positions without any intellectual challenge or incisive questioning of the interviewee’s statements. Perhaps they think they are walking some fine line between what they perceive as a right-leaning bias at Fox & a left-leaning bias at MSNBC, but if that is the case, I don’t think they are successfully upholding the unbiased, journalistic “center” so much as they are merely turning into a rented podium for all comers to shout their wares while a well-funded intelligentsia makes periodic remarks from the peanut gallery. Now, admittedly, I don’t watch any of their daytime programming, so since my opinion is based on evening programming-only, perhaps that is unrepresentative of the whole. But I don’t really suspect that that is the case.

[Also, I believe it is President Lula of Brazil behind Pres. Bush during the short walk (& Chancellor Merkel behind him on the podium).]