The Battle of the Presses.(Russian media coverage and U.S. foreign policy)

The report on Russian TV last week didn't mince words or images. First, American actor Martin Sheen warned of a return to McCarthyism and an incipient "witch hunt" against anyone who dared criticize the Bush administration's war plans for Iraq. Then police were shown cracking down on university students staging a peaceful antiwar demonstration in New York. And just in case the message wasn't clear, a crawl along the bottom of the screen underscored it: Phil Donahue fired from TV for antiwar stance.

It's not quite a return to the cold war, but Russian media coverage of U.S. policy on Iraq these days is rife with misinformation. After Secretary of State Colin Powell waved a small, empty vial during his recent presentation on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the U.N. Security Council, one state-owned Russian network dramatically "revealed"--in classic Soviet fashion--that the bottle actually hadn't contained any anthrax. (Powell never claimed it had; he was merely showing how little was necessary to wreak mass devastation.) When the Russian pop duo Tatu wore T shirts bearing obscene antiwar slogans on American TV, the Russian press treated them as heroically as if they had stormed the White House. Meanwhile, a Russian publishing house recently issued a translation of Gore Vidal's "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," which one newspaper declared "banned from publication" in the United ...