Some weeks ago, Mark Little of RTÉ made the point that after the initial sympathy for the US in the wake of September 11th, it was not long before entrenched positions were reasserted. It was a debate "in which there was no grey, just black and white; you were either anti-American or an apologist for American brutality," writes Breda O'Brien.
Speaking at the 9th Cleraun Media Conference, "Coverage of Conflict", he made a plea for a space where more reasoned and nuanced debate could take place.
If I am being fair to Little's thesis, he was not taking issue with much of the informed criticism of America, but was very critical of the "lazy assumptions about the American psyche and a tendency to think about life in the US in cartoon images."
He pointed out that five years in America had left him deeply sceptical of American politics but an admirer of the US and its people. This alone, he noted wryly, was sufficient to warrant accusations of "having bought the burger", of having in some way sold out.
He said that to take Bush's "dead or alive" declarations in the early weeks about Osama bin Laden as indicative of an American bloodlust was to miss the kind of soul-searching which went on among ordinary American citizens.
This was a growing awareness that the fate of the world's most powerful nation was inextricably linked with the fate of the world's poorest.
Little made many valid points, including that Europe often sets standards for America which it is unwilling to live up to itself. He cited the sorry state of Afghanistan, where 70 per cent of its population were malnourished and a million people were at risk of starvation after 20 years of war and three of drought. Yet the world, including the EU, averted its gaze until America attacked.
Suddenly, all these facts became relevant as handy clubs with which to beat America about the head.
There is a great deal of reflex anti-American feeling in Ireland. Perhaps when confronted with an enormous, wealthy society of such far-reaching influence, it was some comfort to believe that our American cousins were still only naive eejits who had lost the native cunning of those who had stayed in the old country.
To that was added a degree of trendy condemnation of America's foreign policy, which was often neither particularly well-informed nor profound.
Around the time Ronald Reagan was due to visit Ireland in the 1980s, I remember overhearing an animated conversation. There was a great deal of pontificating about Reagan's policies in Central America.
One member of the group had been listening without comment for some time, and then with devastating effect, asked slowly," I take it that all of you could name the Central American countries?" There was an embarrassed silence as the degree of collective ignorance was revealed.
Little's plea for less black-and-white stances in public debate is an important one. However, it is not easy to create such a space. There are faults on both sides. On the one hand there are those Americans who find it impossible to hear any criticism of what America is doing.
We are now six months on from September 11th. The war in Afghanistan was conducted with more restraint than might have initially been expected, which should be acknowledged, but the degree of success is also less than has been trumpeted.
OSAMA bin Laden has not been captured. Afghanistan may have been subdued but could hardly be described as stable. It is arguable that images such as those of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay which played so well with the American public may have fuelled terrorism elsewhere.
Is that an expression of anti-Americanism, or a legitimate reading of the facts?
Supporters of American policy point with some justification to the monolithic nature of coverage of America in Irish media. The irony is that American culture about which we Irish are so disparaging has much more lively debate about the direction in which America is going, and this is reflected in the diversity of editorial positions. At the risk of sounding like David Trimble, this is not true of Irish media.
Take for example, the coverage of the last US presidential election. There is a huge pro-Democrat bias in Irish media. Clinton was revered, and not just because of his contribution to the peace process.
Personally, I disliked Clinton intensely. I am not much fonder of Bush. But the portrayal of Bush as the village idiot completely missed the point that many Americans were sick of Clinton's slick amorality.
But even given that anti-Republican, anti-Bush stance in the Irish media, there are still valid criticisms of the Bush administration. To characterise as some Americans do, those who make such criticisms as gutless wimps unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of military action is unfair.
The small but influential Irish lobby groups who oppose American policy are not simply fuelled by knee jerk anti-Americanism. For example, those lobby groups who opposed US intervention in Afghanistan are the same ones who were striving to alert an indifferent world to Afghanistan's plight long before America attacked. Similarly, a threat of a nuclear option against the axis of evil as defined by Bush has terrifying implications for all of us.
The real failure of those who oppose military action is the failure to articulate a coherent and practical alternative which acknowledges the full horror of international terrorism.
It is of course, a more difficult case to argue, given public appetite for instant solutions. Arguing for structural change, for justice for developing countries, for resources to be pumped into peace-making and conflict resolution is a great deal less sexy than images of war.
Yet even even given all that, there is a huge onus on such groups to show that their approach is capable of being realised in a world which will always be skewed and unjust. Their task is crucial. At some stage in every conflict, peace has to be made. Eliminating terrorism using military means alone is like trying to keep a thousand bobbing corks underwater using a baseball bat.
To point this out is not appeasement, or utopianism. It is fact.
The more balanced debate which Mark Little is calling for might start with acceptance of that reality.