How REAL journalists behave

I want to recommend an outstanding article from a publication I have never encountered before. Seema Sirohi has written "Grade-B liar: If only Bush was in Blair's shoes" which was published in Outlook India. Here's a sample:

Living in the land of mushy news conferences, staged town hall meetings and opinion-less editorials, it is hair-raising to read accounts of Tony Blair's election campaign. The British people and the press have grilled "B Liar" on every issue, domestic and international, showing what real watchdogs can do. He has been raked over the coals for lying about the Iraq war, asked to check out life on minimum wage and shown toothless gums by a patient unable to find a dentist in Blair's Britain.. It is a daily mauling by tough audiences of real people and real reporters.

Britons have openly asked Blair to resign because he misled them about Iraq and deliberately acted against his attorney general Lord Goldsmith's advice. "If you weren't fraudulent, you were grossly negligent and for that you should be resigning anyway," a woman in a BBC studio audience told him last week. On another bruising television showdown, a nurse asked the prime minister if he would like to clean patients' bottoms for minimum wage. A Sky News reporter asked Blair bluntly: "Are you a liability?"

From here, Britain certainly looks like a country where real people and real journalists reside. Where hard-nosed questioning is still fashionable and
where prime ministers must account for their actions, at least at election time. Blair takes more grilling in a day than American politicians do in a year.
...
If Bush were subjected to even one-tenth the Blair treatment by his people and the press, it might change the course of events. Take last week's press conference where the president answered easy questions about fixing social security, runaway gas prices, the falling dollar and Iraq, declaring that "really good progress" was being made there. By the time his musings appeared in print, car bombings and attacks on the Iraqi police had delivered a death toll of more than 50. None of the subjects was easy but at Bush's designer news conferences the questions always are. The clubby White House correspondents know they must throw soft balls if they want to survive. In a world with countless crises, the White House correspondent of the esteemed New York Times finds time to explore such weighty topics as the state of horticulture at the White House.

When I lived in Ireland I sometimes found myself watching three news programs in a single day: one Irish, one British and one American. I was amazed by how different they were and the experience prompted me to become very suspicious of news that I get from only one source. I also got used to the British style of journalists grilling politicians - a style I believe is a great service to the people. The American tradition of pandering caused me to lose a basic level of respect for our press a long time ago.