The day after the alleged U.S. election, I caught a French journalist on television recalling that he and his colleagues had mocked the way the final result in the recent presidential race in the Ivory Coast had taken twenty-four hours to come through, but that, with hindsight, they were a model of efficiency.

I doubt whether any of the blowhards infesting CNN and the other cable channels could have drawn such a contrast. The Ivory Coast election did not receive a lot of attention in the United States, and not just when measured against the attention the U.S. election received in the Ivory Coast. In all other G7 countries, it is perfectly normal to switch on the evening news and see stories from around the globe, often from quite unimportant places—the recent coup in Fiji, say—whereas, by comparison, ABC’s “world news headquarters” in New York is a world headquarters with no branch offices. It can be argued that as citiz ...

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