American dissenters feel the backlash

2.45 pm - By ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - American television host Bill Maher has made a career of speaking his mind, no matter how far removed from the mainstream, and he didn't think that should change in the wake of the devastation at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

In fact, at a time when democratic freedoms were perceived to have come under attack, he felt freedom of speech was more important than ever.

"I do not relinquish, nor should any of you, the right to criticise, even as we support our government," he said as his regular nightly show, the aptly titled Politically Incorrect, returned to the air six days after the attacks. "This is still a democracy, and they're still politicians."

Clearly, Mr Maher did not appreciate quite how controversial that statement could be. In the 10 days since that initial show aired, Politically Incorrect has been boycotted by two key advertisers and pulled off the air on seven affiliates of ABC, its host station.

Michael Eisner, the chief executive of Disney and ABC's corporate overlord, has rebuked Mr Maher in public and forced him to issue an apology. Even the White House has jumped into the fray, ominously warning that all Americans "need to watch what they do".

It was not Mr Maher's opening remarks that sparked the controversy, so much as something that stemmed directly from them. In an exchange with one of his guests, the foreign policy analyst Dinesh D'Souza, Mr Maher contrasted the supposed "cowardice" of the suicide hijackers with the recent US policy of conducting aerial wars with little or no risk to American lives.

"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away," Mr Maher said. "That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Mr Maher is hardly the first person to make such a point. The eminent essayist Susan Sontag said exactly the same thing in a piece for the New Yorker, and even President Bush has indirectly criticised his predecessor's military policies, telling aides he was not interested in lobbing a "$US2 million cruise missile into a $US10 empty tent".

No matter. Mr Maher was on television, with a wide audience, at a time when the country - both the government and the people - is shrinking away from critical thought and dissenting viewpoints. The first person to take offence was a right-wing talk-radio host in Texas, Dan Patrick, who urged his listeners to bombard ABC and Politically Incorrect's advertisers with phone calls protesting against the show's "unpatriotic" agenda.

Within 24 hours, Federal Express had withdrawn its sponsorship, and department store chain Sears quickly followed suit.

By the middle of this week, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, had joined the bandwagon, calling Mr Maher's sentiments "a terrible thing to say" and adding: "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is."

Mr Maher is hardly alone in feeling the backlash against free speech. ABC's news anchor, Peter Jennings, was deluged with more than 10,000 angry e-mails and phone calls after he opined, very early on in the crisis: "The country looks to the president on occasions like this to be reassuring to the nation. Some presidents do it well, some presidents don't."

Even worse attended the Los Angeles Times' television critic, Howard Rosenberg, after he wrote that President Bush "lacked size in front of the camera when he should have been commanding and filling the screen with a formidable presence". The 1000-odd responses he received included death threats, racist jibes alluding to his Jewishness, and suggestions he leave the country and "go live with the Arabs".

Even Mr Bush's use of the word "crusade" to describe the new war on terrorism - later retracted following protests from Middle Eastern governments - attracted remarkably little opprobrium domestically.

When the Massachussetts congressman Martin Meehan openly questioned whether Air Force One, the presidential plane, had been a target on September 11, as the White House asserted, he received so many threatening phone calls that he called in the police to guard his constituency office. To calm the growing storm, Mr Meehan said his views had been misrepresented and he went out of his way to praise the president. It now appears, however, that he was right. White House officials have told CBS news and the Associated Press that Air Force One was not in fact a target, and reports to that effect were the result of misinterpreted information. Critics like Mr Meehan - before he was silenced - suspected the White House of inventing the threat as a way of justifying President Bush's long cross-country detour on September 11 before returning to Washington.

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