FIRST OF all, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude and apologies to all those who e-mailed me and the Sunday Editor at the Chronicle asking the reason for the absence of the column these past few months. This was due to some personal commitments, but the good news is that I have replenished my store of ideas for this column.

One of those ideas was inspired by the speech that Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi made at the recently-held UN General Assembly meeting in New York. Before I address Gaddafi’s speech directly, however, I wish to say that this was simply the extension of a general trend I’ve noticed whenever some world leaders of developing countries speak out — most notably Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez — their input into the discussion of how the world needs to better address critical global issues is met with scorn and mockery without an examination of the substance.

This phenomenon was in full swing in the reporting on Gaddafi’s speech. In my research for the transcript of the speech Online relative to what was actually reported, it was found that all the major Western networks and newspapers had one commonality in their coverage: The extensive report was not on the content of the speech, but on Gaddafi’s rambling and the fact that, at 100 minutes, he went way beyond the 15 minutes allotted by protocol to world leaders addressing the General Assembly. According to one article in the UK Guardian:

“On his first visit to the US, and in his maiden address to the UN general assembly, Gaddafi fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage. He tore up a copy of the UN charter in front of startled delegates, accused the Security Council of being an al-Qaida-like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war…”

Never mind that it was reported elsewhere that he only tore a corner of the cover of a copy of the Charter (mild compared to Russian leader, Nikita Kruschev’s banging his shoe in the 1960s), or that politicians in the US and UK have suggested some sort of trial for Bush and Blair; the fact that the Libyan President had said and done it apparently meant to the Western media that there was nothing substantial to report upon, except with ridicule.

This reported approach that was used forced me to visit Al Jazeera – the website of the Middle-Eastern news network -for a proper recap of the substance of Gadaffi’s speech, in which he says, to cite as an example: “How can I be happy about the world security if the world is controlled by four of five powers?” in reference to the five veto-holding members of the UN Security Council. It is hard to challenge the substance of Gaddafi’s criticism of the UN’s imbalance of power, or his suggestion that the body should ideally function as a democratic global parliament, and that bodies such as the Security Council should function at the dictates of the majority of members and not the other way around, as is the current position.

Another glaring example of hypocrisy in the Western media relates to Gaddafi as well. When Scotland, not Libya it should be noted, released Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and a Libyan citizen, Gaddafi was roundly condemned for welcoming him back to the country of his birth. Contrast this with the fact that not a significant word of condemnation was made by the media when Orlando Bosch, who is widely accepted as responsible for the Cubana bombing, was released without charges under the Bush administration and given refuge inside of America, even as he is wanted for terrorist crimes by several countries.

The point surrounds the fact that the very things that the Western media has prided itself upon – fairness, balance, objectivity – seem to be non-existent when a larger perspective is presented. It is interesting to note that Barack Obama’s speech, at almost half the length of Gaddafi’s, went close to three times over the allowed time!

This capacity for spin and distortion in the media is, of course, not restricted to their reporting on leaders of rogue states. During my stays overseas, I saw it firsthand: If the man in the street sees something that is black, it becomes various shades of grey by the time the media gets through with it, depending on whether the media house is sympathetic to the Liberals or the Conservatives in Canada, or Democrats or Republicans in the US.

Of course, we are not a society immune from spin in the media. We have our several talking heads and writing pens from various sides of the fence engaged in what is a necessary reality of any place that has an open political climate. We just thankfully haven’t, in my view, taken it to the level that happens in foreign territories, especially the West. The cautionary tale here is that the average person probably needs to seek alternative methods of getting at the truth behind the spin, whether the issue is local or international.

Next week, I will weigh in on the topic that everyone is talking about – the Obama Nobel Peace Prize – and I will be making the point that a strong case can be made for the decision to award him.