What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
DR’s entire foreign news division should be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. Trump’s investigation of FBI and Russia is still running — and there’s a there there.Jakob Busk Olsen, DR.dk, Nov 5 The article is of course about the arrest of Igor Danchenko. It doesn’t get much play on DR’s website: it’s a smallish feature…
Danish news media don’t appear to be coping very well with yesterday’s shellacking of the Democratic party. Phrases like “five-alarm fire” and “bloodbath” are being used even by leftist commentators in America to describe the results of Tuesday’s elections. But as far as I can tell to this point, the major Danish news outlets have…
The Danish media ignored a lot of American stories this week. With an opening like that I could go on for days, but let’s stick to the really big American developments they ought to have covered: the bellwether gubernatorial race in Virginia, and the dirty tricks being played by the Clintonite McAuliffe’s campaign and supporters;…
There was a depressingly predictable headline in the New York Post yesterday: “Massachusetts school district ditches Halloween to be more inclusive, will celebrate fall instead.” It’s about what you’d expect: one Julie Kukenberger, Superintendent of Melrose Public Schools, issued a letter to parents last Friday. “Over the past several years, MPS has worked to deemphasize…
Batya Ungar-Sargon has an article in the October 18 edition of The Spectator that provides a lucid and well-documented timeline of how the New York Times has reached the sorry state they’re in as a news organization and touches on some of the related questions about the state of American media more generally. It’s a…
On September 29th, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden requesting, in its own words (and capitalization), “Federal Assistance to Stop Threats and Acts of Violence Against Public Schoolchildren, Public School Board Members, and Other Public School District Officials and Educators.” In that letter, signed by NSBA President Viola Garcia…
Enes Canter currently plays center for the Boston Celtics basketball team. He’s also a Turkish Muslim. He says he learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants and Jersey Shore. He has dated a Rockefeller. He’s been outspoken against Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, at some personal cost. (His own account of having to flee Indonesia while his team…
“Cato used to say,” Cicero writes in The Nature of the Gods, “that he wondered how one soothsayer could keep a straight face when he met another.” It’s easy to wonder the same about American pollsters. Hold that thought. Americans right now have a more favorable opinion of Donald Trump than they do of Joe…
Now that the Taliban are running the show, things are going… predictably: Afghanistan’s economy is in free fall after the Taliban: ”we need food and money”Lasse Berg Sørensen, DR.dk, Oct 20 The article opens with a word portrait of Omid, an Afghan who is selling old pots and pans, clothes, carpets, linens, a vacuum hose,…
By lunchtime today, Berlingske had published three articles by journalist Kalinka Aaman Agge. The first was about exploding vagina-scented candles. The second was about an archaeological find decorated with penises. The third was about Joe Biden (a twofer!—he’s a boob and an ass). But let’s move on from Agge’s organ grinding and go straight to the story…
My first career was in politics. My jobs involved a lot of writing: memoranda, speeches, whitepapers, presentations, letters, reports, talking points, even monographs. I’d studied classical rhetoric in college and had a lot of preconceptions about effective political communication; these quickly fell by the wayside as I was forced by bosses, clients, and circumstances—that is,…
Now we’re getting somewhere. Mikkel Danielsen appears to be waking up to reality over at Berlingske: Joe Biden is struck by a big downturn: “it’s alarming”Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, Oct 13 There’s no real news in this long article: Biden’s poll numbers have been declining since early August, his Afghanistan fiasco was two months ago, there’s…
One of the top stories on DR’s homepage this morning was the one I wrote about Monday: Bretman Rock’s appearance on the cover of Playboy. DR’s headline proclaimed, ” ‘Huge’ with a homosexual man on the cover of Playboy.” The image accompanying the headline featured a heavily made-up and mostly bare-chested Rock against a wall…
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour yesterday. Frederiksen was in New Delhi on a state visit to India; Amanpour was back in CNN’s Atlanta studio. The 13-minute interview was ostensibly about the climate, and most of it was. Berlingske chose to focus on Amanpour’s having ambushed Frederiksen with an immigration question:…
Big stories tend to get covered simultaneously by major media outlets around the world, but smaller stories sometimes take a while to percolate their way around the world, and they can change along the way, sometimes significantly. So when I see a European headline about a story I’d seen covered days or weeks earlier by…
There hasn’t been much news about America in the Danish media this week, which reflects the Danish media’s conviction that when Democrats are in power, bad news is no news. Joe Biden’s job approval is down to 40% in the Quinnipiac poll (53% disapproval), 43% in Rasmussen (55% disapproval), and 44% in Economist/YouGov (49% disapproval). …
The western world invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago largely to eliminate the Taliban, a primitive and barbaric political movement that had taken control of most of that country and was believed to be harboring Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for the September 11 attacks on America. In the vacuum of our recent departure, the…
I never heard of Durek Verrett until I stumbled over this article today: He’s the boyfriend of the Norwegian princess and a self-described shaman. Now he’s outed himself as a reptileLiv Almer, Berlingske.dk, Oct 6 Before we dive into the crazy mixed-up world of Durek (né Derek) Verrett, here’s a quick Wikipedia summary of his royal girlfriend:…
A project at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has been looking into the polarization of American culture and politics in the hopes of finding an antidote. In their own words, they hope to “use innovative polling and data analytics to identify America’s political fissures, and explain ways to foster compromise.” That’s fancy talk…
