Last week Condoleeza Rice rethorically asked how “France [among others] could think that American power is more dangerous than Iraq”. Well, being the brilliant international relations scholar that she was/is, she clearly knew the answer…
Now Thomas Friedman attempts to answer her question for the wider public – the readership of the NY Times, more precisely – with “A Theory Of Everything”. More about that later.
It is plainly embarrassing to see how most journalists are reporting the relationship of GWB and Gerhard Schroeder in an “oh-my-God-George-W-Bush-still-does-not-love-
his-prodigal-son” kind of way.
Read the Economist’s ( premium link | 2) and Die Zeit’s (Africa’s First World War) current coverage of the genocidal slaughtering occurring in Congo almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. How many deaths in a single instance does it need to wake the West up that something is going on in Africa, Die Zeit asks a German diplomat in Burundi.
His reply – “500 plus, in my experience”. Tragically – that even bodes well for Congo, where 966 people died in a recent massacre.
Dirk Engelhardt und Goetz Hamann worry in Die Zeit that outsourcing is threatening the quality of the German press. I’d say yes and no.
Yes, replacing permanent contracts with temporary contracts on a massive scale (what outsourcing actually is) does reduce the journalists independence and is likely to increase the worlkload for many of them. There are areas in which this could possibly lead to weaker journalism.
But on the other hand, it could well turn out that the public is quite content with the cheaper version in many cases and that some people were having a cheap lunch before. I mean, there are quality newspapers in this country which seem to rely to large extent on unpaid interns for their local pages – without a significant reduction in quality, it seems.
The annual Eurovision Song Contest is over. And Turkey is taking the cup to Ankara. As usual, however hyped, there’s no reason to watch the entire event if you are able to catch the replays intended to remind the voting public of earlier entrants. These ten minutes are usually not only sufficient but at times as much as is possible to bear. The real reason to watch is not the music, it’s the voting procedure that is happening afterwards – and this time, the European Broadcasting Union even offered an animated scoreboard. If your country doesn’t get points from other European television viewers (or Juries, for those countries without a stable telephone infrastructure (Russia, Bosnia-Hercegovina), you can follow its label on the screen moving downwards…
That is if the label has been up somewhere at some point. In light of the UK’s results tonight, the BBC News Online’s Caroline Westbrook was a little bit more than prophetic when she said –
“This year Jemini have taken the UK’s hopes to Riga, and while their song Cry Baby is perfectly pleasant it’s not thought to be strong enough to see off the likes of Spain, Iceland, Turkey or the much-hyped Russian entry from Tatu. … It’s fair to say that if we do want to win again, we should come up with a better song…”
Well, I the song is probably a part of the explanation for the fact that the UK did not get even a single point from any of the twenty-six nations involved. But it was not worse than most of the other songs, nor was, in my opinion, the performance – as far as I can judge from the replays…
Looking at the results it is pretty evident that voters all over Europe rewarded musical diversity. And a huge part of the songs performed in Riga tonight simply were hard to mentally separate from each other, in fact, watching the replays was like watching one ten minute medley. The British song was no exception to that rule. Like the song, the British performance was as dull as any other medley-song performance. So Caroline Westbrook had probably a reason to predict they would not win – but being just like the others is clearly not helping to explain why Britain did not get a single point this year.
And I don’t understand it either. I don’t think it was about the British stance in the war on Iraq – despite the fact that it was a telephone vote in most countries. So it might just have bad luck. The BBCi is reporting the result remarkedly calm so far –
“The UK’s entry Jemini – duo Chris Crosbey, 21, and Jemma Abbey, 20 – had the ignominy of being the only entry to score no points. It is the worst performance in the UK’s Eurovision history. The UK’s previous lowest performance was in 2000, when it was placed 16th.”
Maybe it’s too early for comments. Maybe they just don’t care. But I can’t wait to read The Sun tomorrow.
My sister is doing a masters degree in journalism these days. You know, masters programmes are the hype at German universities these days. It doesn’t matter that there have never been any other degrees offered by German universities, except for the name, of course. The programme she’s doing has been taught since 1993 and was previously described as an “journalistic add-on” programme. Surely, it sound a lot better to bet teaching and studying a “masters” programme, especially as pretty much no human resources department in Germany is able to tell the difference between one kind of masters or the other. Yup, it’s all about bullshitting these days, long gone the days when people strove to follow the idea of “mehr sein als schein” – to be more than one appears to be.
Well, her programme is not that bad, to be fair. It might be a tad bit boring for people with some media experience, as far as I can tell, but for others it compiles an interesting range of common sense knowledge about publishing that would nonetheless take quite a while to acquire left on one’s one devices.
So I had dinner with my sister tonight and she told me about this online publishing project she’s doing and asked for a hand with the coding bit.
While I have continuously followed the internet’s development since I saw the first hypertext pages in a gopher-browser, and then Mosaic 1.0, back in 1994 and even do have some knowledge of web coding, I would never dare to call myself an “expert” in any meaningful sense of that word – knowing that a lot of people are not as cautious when it comes to slef-ascribing said status.
And one of the latter group of people might well be the person teaching online publishing for my sister’s class. On the assignment paper the person unmistakably wrote that she would, until the next class, “check if the server [on which the project is going to be published] supports Cascading Style Sheets”.
Did I miss something?
that increased scrutiny of media control issues is one of the major policy lessons of the Iraq war [see my recent post]. In addition, his current NYTimes column, “The China Syndrome“, adds an interesting analysis of corporate regulative bargaining with governments. Whatever your opinion regarding the “biased BBC” – or for that matter, biased German tv – discussion, there is only one possible stand concerning the biased “Fox News” debate. And that alone is quite telling in my book.
The issue is of utmost general importance, but today’s Krugman column has been triggered by yesterday’s presentation by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission of a US bill to relax regulations on media ownership –
“… that will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people…”.
So if Krugman is indeed right in his assessment that
“[w]e don’t have censorship in [the USA]; it’s still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.”
Well, if Krugman is right here, and if it weren’t for the Internet, I guess Gleichschaltung could become a concept more and more people might not just identify with partisan news reporting in the Third Reich.
Seems like the “Land Of The Free” could need some more brave publicists these days when even a Larry Flynt is wasting his time chasing an obscure skin-flick allegedly featuring Barbara Bush (the daughter – not the mother…).
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Chait has written an article critizising liberals for the fact that they are allegedly blinded by Bush-hatred –
“Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war — at home, anyway — is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I’m against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie.”
But that’s not the interesting bit about his article, which is being published in a newspaper that – just a few weeks ago – told those of its readers who disagreed with the hawkish oped-line to shut up. The interesting bit is the following –
“[i]t’s entirely appropriate to question the honesty of Bush’s stated rationale for fighting. After all, the arguments he uses to justify his domestic agenda are shot through with deceit. (Consider his shifting, implausible and contradictory justifications for cutting taxes.) And it’s also true that a few elements of the administration’s evidence against Iraq have turned out to be overstatements or outright hoaxes. So Bush’s claims should never be taken at face value.”
How is that different from the above – “If Bush says it, it must be a lie”? Anyone?
The American/Egyptian/Israeli media entrepreneur Haim Saban, who decided to take control of roughly 20% of the German tv-market – the majority of the main business of the bankcrupt former Kirchmedia empire – for roughly 2bn Euros is allegedly having second thoughts as other investors do not seem to share his enthusiasm for the deal. (from manager-magazin/Spiegel Online).
JD’s new media musings point to an interesting article regarding the consequences of digitalised production environments for the relationship of publishers and journalists in the LA Times –
“Convergence may be good for media companies, but it’s bad for journalism”.
