After landing in Chicago on Sunday night I struck up a conversation with my cab driver, hoping to practice my Arabic. He was Palestinian and told me that he wouldn’t be able to understand the Tunisian dialect, but his English was excellent and he held forth on a number of topics in that tongue.

“I don’t blame the Israelis for our problems,” he said. “Israelis, Palestinians — we’re all just trying to live our lives. We’re all being manipulated by our governments.”

Okay, I can buy that.

“Our governments lie to us. Like, there’s no such thing as 9/11, the Holocaust — these are stories the governments tell us to get us to act in a certain way.”

Wow…we’re not even on the tollway and already we have conspiracy theories on not one but two major historical events. If he denies the moon landing I may be able to complete my Taxi Driver Bingo Card.

I did not attempt to set him straight. In the first place, people who subscribe to totally irrational conspiracy theories do not listen to reason; but also, a guiding principle that has served me well is Don’t Piss Off a Strange Man with Whom You are Alone in a Car at Night.

Anyway, I find I have more tolerance for these kinds of arguments since living in Tunisia and suffering La Presse as the sole source of my daily news. The governments in Arab countries control news in a way that we Americans can’t even imagine. For example, on 9/12 I accessed the on-line version of La Presse to see how they were reporting the tragedy. The fall of the twin towers was front-page news, but there was no mention of the hijackers or Al Qaeda. It was reported like a particularly unfortunate air traffic control accident. It’s no wonder that the Tunisians or Palestinians don’t trust what the media dishes out.

Of course, we recognize that the American media are biased and, in many cases, influenced by the government, but at least the different media outlets present us with an array of different biases. If you triangulate between Fox News, CNN, and Jon Stewart you might arrive at some approximation of the truth. And we’re free to move around the country, ask questions, do research, post crazy conspiracy theories on the web, etc. without the government opening up a file on us.

Uh, right?

Anyway, we’re reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for my book club, and I had to laugh at this description of How the News is Made, Western style, where government control is less of a danger than the journalist’s desire to create a story:

Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He oveslept his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming chuches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the roadway below his window — you know.

Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.