Looks like Europe is becoming more important in Blogosphere –
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Schlagwort-Archive: media
Italian Press Review.
The Guardian has compiled and translated a nice collection of commentary from today’s Italian newspapers regarding Berlusconi’s loosing his cool. It’s quite interesting to see the constrasting perception of reality – compare yourself (the Guardian has more quotes):
La Repubblica (left-leaning) Editorial
“As Silvio Berlusconi drifts tragically further each day, yesterday he crashed into Europe, propelled by his lack of culture, his bravura that is so popular in Italy, flexing his muscles, for lack of competence, and incapable of responding to accusations over his howling conflict of interests. … Yesterday can be considered the official date of the beginning of the decline of Il Cavaliere. But also, the result is extremely bitter for our country, which is paying an unjust and disproportionate price for Berlusconi’s errors and personality.”
La Stampa(centre) Editorial
“A joke can ruin everything. He should not have opened the way for endless poisonous polemics with a joke that was so twisted in its irony that it was incomprehensible.”
And now, the Berlusconi Press…
Il Giornale (owned by Berlusconi family) Editorial
“Berlusconi did well to react to the insolent man who insulted him, the Italian government, its ministers, and all of us. He did excellently, in his own way, with his own style and in his own time.”
Libero (owned by former editor of Il Giornale) Editorial
“Berlusconi should not give in to the pressures that will surely come in the coming hours. Maybe Schulz is not a Kapo (concentration camp guard), but he is a villain. And villains deserve not only irony but contempt.”
Is Google God?
Thomas Friedman must have had too much sun lately. In today’s NY Times column he wonders if Google is like God citing citing Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider, who clearly had too much sun lately –
“If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too.”
How he twists that story to say something about American national security is rather impressive. But how he does that and nonetheless misses the real point that ITC is not only challenging “national security” but the very notion of “national” is even more impressive.
And The Winner Is…
Spiegel Online has all the winners of the magazine’s 2003 pupils’ magazine competition. Looking at the winners’ (semi-)professionally produced magazines and online publications makes me partly jealous and partly reminds me of the good ol’ times when desktop publishing still meant typewriter, paper, pen, glue and carpet knive. And yes, that was in 1992…
The Banality Of The Good.
Sometimes I wonder how Timothy Garton Ash finds the time to talk to people given the amount of well-written, thought-provoking stuff he publishes – in “Elf” (English As Lingua Franca), to help foster a European public sphere. Today, Eamonn Fitzgerald links to his latest piece in the New Statesman. I think he is clearly more right than wrong, but I do have some objections I will share with you tonight.
Living History. Deleting Posts.
After Blogger decided to shred two of my planned entries today I have settled for one involving only very little typing.
I was in Washington, DC, back in 1998 when the Starr-Rreport was released, and I have never in my life seen so many journalists per square-centimeter.
I only had a tiny disposable camera with me, and the reddish part in the right hand side – yeah, that’s my middle finger.
I guess Hillary Clinton will have a more interesting account of that part of her living history. Der Spiegel has some German excerpts from her biography/political re-positioning in this week’s print edition.
I am not particularly interested in this kind of books, but I did have a brief look at the excerpt. I can’t help but wonder. What does Hillary Clinton really mean when she writes about she and Bill managed to get on after, well, you know –
“The Key to understanding our marriage is certainly our common history. But to be true, our relationship is too profound to be put into words. Maybe I could express it this way: In the Spring of 1971 I began a conversation with Bill Clinton, and more than thirty later we still talk to each other.”
“We still talk to each other?” Now here I can’t help but wonder if I believe this is a positive or negative verdict about their relationship…
Note: As this is a re-translation from German, I don’t know what she actually wrote. Last week’s Wolfowitz-oil quip should be a sufficient reminder of the perils of translation.
Ausstoepfeln.
Timothy Garton-Ash’s “Unplug Yourself: Media Is Matrix” essay in German. From Sueddeutsche.de
Unplug Yourself
In the Guardian, Timothy Garton-Ash is looking at last week’s news in a somber mood – “Perhaps we live in the Matrix after all. Wherever we turn, we find a politics of manufactured reality that recalls the world of that cult film. How can we, the citizens, unplug ourselves and fight it?”
Skydiving. The Life and Death of Juergen W. Moellemann.
There are a lot of things one could say about Juergen W. Moellemann. And I am pretty sure that the German media is going to say pretty much all of them in the coming days and hours of reporting the details of the circumstances surrounding his dramatic death earlier today, when he – in what clearly looks like suicide for an experienced parachute enthusiast who often performed jumps as campaign events – jumped, then separated himself from his main parachute and did not use the spare one. Only fifteen minutes before this happened, the German Bundestag had lifted his Parliamentary immunity and police had entered several of his houses and his company’s offices with search warrants investigating several charges, especially tax related campaign funding fraud.
Despite his political record as federal minister, his self-declared role as vocal advocate of Palestinian cause, and last year’s unfortunate and eventually unsuccessful attempt to push the German Liberals even further to the non-economic right than they had gone on their own – including some forays into what many said was a verbal anti-semitism previously unheard of in post-war German politics that caused a huge stir of protest, and ultimately led to his latest political downfall, the sort-of-forced resignation from the party whose deputy leader he once was – most people will probably remember Juergen Moellemann for his abilty to crash and rebound. The teacher-turned-politician’s all-too-evident desire for public attention was certainly helpful to achieve this. And his ability to perform a good political show is hardly matched by anyone in the German political arena.
Political commentators in Germany have often dwelt upon how Moellemann’s high-risk hobby reflected his high-risk political life. Today, it seems the latter one was indeed the riskier activity. He had manoevered himself into a situation where he apparently felt that no parachute would assure a safe landing.
So he decided he did not need one anymore.
PS: Check Stefan Sharkansky’s Shark Blog for English coverage of the story.
Blogging Your Way To A Civil Society?
Papascott links to Jeff Jarvis, who believes that Salam Pax – the blogger who shared the sights and sounds of his life in Baghdad and is now writing a forthnightly column in the British Guardian – is an example of how sponsoring Iraqi blogging could create a true Iraqi Civil Society –
“What comes out of this: A hundred Salam Paxes. A thousand Salam Paxes. The intelligent, caring, involved future of Iraq will come online to share their experiences and opinions and hopes and fears and Iraq will be better for it; so will the world, for we will build bridges to Iraqis online. History has never had a better, cheaper, easier, faster means of publishing content and distributing it worldwide. Now is the time to take advantage of this for sake of democracy and freedom and nothing less than that.”
I am not too convinced that the outcome of setting up “blogspots” in Baghdad would necessarily be the creation of a happy modern all-Iraqi civil society, even assuming that enough people would care to learn how to use the technology. I suppose there is hardly anyone who would be able to tell how blogging would fit into institutionalised Iraqi patterns of societal communication.
Thinking of the almost violent way the pro-/anti-war debate evolved in the western blogosphere in the first few months this year, I would say that there is no guarantee that blogging does enhance the way any civil society works – just read my post about Rebecca Lucas below. In fact, remembering how Karl Deutsch has described long ago in “Nationalism and Social Communication” that increased communication does not per se translate into more understanding between the communicating parties, one might be tempted to think that blogging actually requires a significant amount of civil society and mutual understanding to start with in order to deal with all the Rachel Lucases around. Otherwise, it might just ignite a fire no one wanted to light.
I am not saying this would be the case in Iraq. But given the way a “modern/pseudo-socialist” authoritarian government has been superimposed on a semi-tribally-organised, ethnically and religiously diverse country I’d say that there is a certain chance for a negative development.
So while I think that the idea put forth by Mr Jarvis is clearly worth to be tested, those involved would have to be very attentive and careful not to become too hopeful about the possible positive effects of such a project.