EU-DIGEST

A Danish journalist came this close to getting shot Saturday by an elderly woman packing a pistol near President Bush's ranch here in what was easily the strangest incident I've ever witnessed covering the White House. It all started so innocently as I sat with a group of Danish journalists just down the street from Bush's ranch during a visit by Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The two leaders were having lunch on the ranch, so I was waiting at a nearby historic one-room schoolhouse with White House staff to interview Rasmussen after the meal. Then the prime minister was going to do a brief press conference with the Danish press corps.

Terkel Svensson, a writer for the Danish News Agency, could not get wireless Internet access at the schoolhouse to file a story. But Svensson could get his cell phone working so he called his editor in Copenhagen and started wandering across a quiet country road as he chatted away. Next thing you know the woman is outside, no more than a few dozen feet from the journalist, demanding that he leave. "Suddenly she comes out and she says, 'Get off my property. You're trespassing,'" recalled Svensson.

Svensson was too preoccupied to notice the pistol, and was not aware that Texas law gives homeowners leeway on using a weapon when someone is trespassing on your property. All of us journalists across the street were too far away to see the pistol at first, until a Danish photographer with a telephoto lens announced to a bunch of us that there was indeed a weapon in the elderly woman's right hand.

Labels: Denmark, EU, Press, US

Two-Thirds of Americans Believe Traditional Journalism is 'Out of Touch' - by Chris Hoqq

According to a new poll, more than two-thirds of the U.S. believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news. The survey also showed more people are turning to the Web to get their daily news fix. he survey found that the Internet outweighs TV, radio and newspapers as the most frequently used and important source for news and information. Websites were also cited as being more trustworthy than traditional sources by 32 per cent of respondents. 69 per cent believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17 per cent believe they are the right size to adequately compete.

Labels: Journalism, Press

Just when you think the US media couldn't get any worse - by dlindorff

Obama, whose oratorical skills have left the robotic and monotonous Hillary Clinton sounding like a pull-string Barbie on the stump (remember "Math is hard!"?), has had the Clinton campaign frantically casting around for a rejoinder, and the best they could come up with to date was a charge that he's "all hat and no cattle" (itself a line lifted, uncredited, from Texas populist Jim Hightower, if I recall, though I think it has an older lineage among Texans, and has been appropriately applied to President Bush on numerous occasions). Obama decided to respond using some of Patrick's lines.

Now, one could argue that Obama would have been better advised to give fair attribution to Gov. Patrick, but since when have politicians gone around putting footnotes on their public speeches? Most political speeches are excercises in cut and paste, full of regurgitated pablum and lifted quotes. If plagiarism were a political crime, 90 percent of members of Congress would be out on their ears. (For that matter, if plagiarism were a crime, Hillary Clinton herself would be behind bars. Her book, "It Takes a Village," was largely written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University journalism prof who was reportedly offered $120,000 for the job, but her name appeared nowhere in the volume, which Clinton still claims as her own work.)

Labels: Press, Sex, US elections

US Pres. Elections: Election polls show Americans are bigots- US Press controls the Public - by Tony L

If you believe what the media has been telling us about this election, African-American voters are voting a certain way, Latinos are voting another, and Women, White Men, and Older People are voting in clumps based on what they feel will be best for each of their various groups. In fact, turn on your tv right now. Go to CNN, Fox, or MSNBC... (even NPR!), and you will see that 90% of the coverage on this election is all about what percentage of a certain segregated group of the population is voting this way or that.

The TV and Radio networks are at least in part responsible for these results. The Media has this great opportunity, now more than ever, to do America a service by focusing on educating the voting population on the very important decision American voters are about to make: Who will be the next President of the United States of America? Write the networks and complain about this indecent and sensationalist reporting. Just maybe someone will have the concience to change it.

Labels: Democracy, Media, Press, US elections

Journalism war overhyped

Like any major industry, journalism is constantly undergoing a metamorphosis, regularly re-birthing itself.

Each time a new medium was announced, others were predicted to die. Radio was going to kill newspapers, television was going to kill radio, the Internet was going to kill them all, and so on and so forth. Right now the current supposed battle has pitted all traditional news sources (print, radio and TV) against the Internet. If anyone knows how this battle should play out on the American Continent of the woods it’s Charles Campbell. The award-winning journalist has worked for such publications as the Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight and The Tyee as both a reporter and editor.A Google search of “Death of Newspapers” gets around 1.4 million hits. Stories in publications covering a wide variety of spectrums such as The Economist, Adbusters and Slate.com dating as far back as the late 1990s foretell the death of hard print. Campbell said the newspaper and magazines, aren’t dead or dying, in fact the battle is much more complex. Major dailies in metropolis areas stand to lose the most to the Internet, and paid publications – from physical magazines to online news sites – might also suffer. However some dailies and major magazine such as the New York Times and Vanity Fair have embraced the Internet, offering online-only content, treating the Internet not as a threat, but another medium for their product.

Note EU-Digest: "In this respect electronic news publications like EU-Digest at http://www.eu-digest.com and Turkish Digest at http://www.turkishdigest.com are perfect examples of the synergy that can be created between the written press and the blogosphere."

Labels: Freedom of the Press, Press

US Elections: The Press should stop pimping prejudice

"Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?", that was the headline of a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times. Big media is perverting the US democratic process. The sexist coverage of Clinton's tears was prejudicial and beyond the pale. The Press must be told to knock it off. Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire was incredible. The performance of the press corps in the last couple of days, unfortunately, was not. Journalists have been replaced by a punditocracy that makes its living (and gets its kicks) by perverting the US democratic process. The misogyny that was unleashed by the media's feeding frenzy on the video of an exhausted Clinton tearing up at a small New Hampshire round-table of voters was just the tip of the iceberg.

Whether we agree or not with Clinton on the issues, the assault on her candidacy based on gender is unacceptable. So too is biased and uninformed commentary on the minority status of other candidates (Obama's ethnicity, Romney's religion, or McCain's age, to name just three). To be clear, we are not endorsing any candidate. This is not about who the US Citizens choose for president, but rather how they choose their next leader. Voting based on sexist logic propagated by corporate media monopolies is no way to select a candidate. The US is at a critical juncture. A sober citizenry must make informed decisions about who will lead the US in addressing more crises than any previous generation has faced: global warming, unending war in Iraq, and multiple constitutional crises.

Labels: Elections, Press, US

World 'divided' on press freedom - by Torin Douglas

World opinion is divided on the importance of having a free press, according to a poll conducted for the BBC World Service.The strongest endorsement came from North America and Western Europe, where up to 70% put freedom first, followed by Venezuela, Kenya and South Africa, with over 60%.

Labels: Press

Europe: Press Freedom under threat

The Belgian writer Thomas Gunzig considers the European Press Freedom Day celebrated this week. "One tends to assume that the press is terrorized in Erythrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan. ... But, the good old methods of violence and intimation are back on home turf too. A few days ago Mehmet Koksal's excellent blog 'Humeur Allochtone' finally drew to a close. And yet this was good investigative journalism, tenacious, courageous, intelligent, free. Nothing but qualities...or defects, according to differing points of view. Mehmet Koksal spoke about everything and everyone, in other words he bothered more than a few, from all political backgrounds, shedding light on double-talk, hypocrisy and cynicism. ... He had followed the recent demonstrations of young Turkish extremists. This cost him a few punches and kicks in front of the American embassy in Europe's capital."

Labels: EU, Press

First Maltese coffee shop chain to hit Europe - by Kurt Farrugia

In just under ten years three entrepreneurial Gozitan brothers, Alex, Mario and Anthony Scicluna have managed to set up one of the most trendy coffee-shops in Gozo, move to open another two outlets in Malta and are now ready to hit Europe by making their brand a franchise and selling it to Eastern European Countries.

Labels: Britain, EU, France, Germany, Press, Sarkozy, US, US. Political