President Hu Jintao
President
People's Republic of China

Dear Sir:

I understand that you and the people of China are angry at the biased reporting of the Western press, especially CNN.

You feel the press is biased against China with its one-sided reporting.

Actually, you should feel great satisfaction at all the negative press attention.

It means you and China have made the big leagues.

You see, the press is made up of small people who hate anyone and everyone who becomes big and successful.

Reporters belong to unions, so they naturally hate big business and criticize freely. The press campaigns for the environmentalists, helping them prevent oil drilling in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and California. They then attack the same oil companies for making big profits as oil becomes scarce.

Reporters feel they are underpaid, so they naturally hate the rich. (Unless the rich give their money away to worthy charitable causes, like Bill Gates does.)

But most of all, the press hates powerful, successful governments at all levels and in all countries.

The late, great Richard J. Daley made Chicago into "the city that works." He welded together a great coalition of manufacturing, construction, real estate, unions and government interests to create a beautiful, spacious city. His reward? The press hounded him, constantly nipping at his heels. The press investigated him for 20 years in search of corrupt practices. But in all that time, they never found a dime.

Richard Nixon was the American President who opened the way to cooperation between your country and mine. But the Washington Post went after him like a barracuda once news of the Watergate burglary came out. While he did cover up the burglary, he was treated like an arch-criminal in the press, which ignored his great success in foreign affairs, something our current President has no competence in.

The Watergate affair pushed the press to a new level of governmental hatred. Prior to Watergate, stinging one-sided criticism was sufficient, now every reporter in the country wants to take down a leader. They all want to win a Pulitzer by hanging a scalp on their belts. Do you remember how Dan Rather of CBS attempted to take down George Bush with the help of an obviously false document, which was exposed by bloggers and not the press?

The press also has mastered the art of bias-by-picture. When the Chinese lady in the wheelchair courageously defended the torch from riotous goons, the press concentrated its pictures on the Chinese guards using strongarm tactics to protect her and the Olympic torch. That's when CNN's Jack Cafferty decided to call the guards "goons" while giving the thieving rioters a free pass.

During the second "New York blackout," when electricity failed and darkness enveloped the city, the press had a super field day of indulgence in bias. The city was peaceful and the citizens of New York took the problem in stride. Restaurants put tables on the sidewalks, lighted candles and served cold dishes. People were in a party mood. People like myself directed traffic at key intersections because the traffic lights were out. We all partied until the wee hours.

But the next morning we started getting alarmed phone calls from friends and relatives. They had seen New York burning in massive fires set all over New York. They worried for our health and safety.

It turns out that the TV reporters had instructed their camera crews to hone in on two small fires set in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The cameras were pushed far into the flames to magnify a small fire into a raging inferno. I'm surprised the lenses didn't melt or crack. In Hollywood, this technique is called a "special effect." But in the press, it's called "getting a good picture."

During the Vietnam War, the press turned its hatred on the troops who were bleeding and dying in the jungles and heat of that far-off country. When brave survivors returned home, the press whipped the public into a frenzy of hatred and called our soldiers "baby killers." The actions of the press were all the more contemptible since the bulk of the soldiers were drafted into the army and were forced to fight a war they neither wanted nor understood.

When President George Bush (the father) skillfully put together a coalition to knock Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the press turned on him by showing a highway containing bodies of defeated Iraqi soldiers. In one short day, the press turned a great, and mostly bloodless, victory into a moral defeat. Many writers accused the United States of being a bully because it won.

In the brilliant play Inherit The Wind, the reporter famously said, "I am here to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Thus, a moral tone was appended to press bias and hatred.

Chicago once enjoyed the sarcastic, witty commentary of Mike Royko, a man who attacked everybody with great fervor. Naturally, angry citizens wrote nasty letters to him, accusing Mr. Royko of being a communist, or a socialist, or a republican, or a democrat, or a nihilist, and many other things.

One day Royko printed a sample of letters containing various accusations. At the bottom of his column, he wrote, "I am not a socialist, a communist, a republican, a democrat or a nihilist. I detest them all equally."

I could go on and on with examples of press hatred and bias against those who are successful.

Instead, let me summarize by saying one thing:

You should be pleased by all the biased press China is getting. By the barometer of press bias, China has reached superpower status.

They hate you almost as much as they hate the United States of America.

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