What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
A business article in today’s Berlingske Tidende examines what the spending bill passed by the U.S. Congress means for Denmark. The facts presented by the article are more or less accurate, but they’re served to the reader in a way that raises some interesting questions. When the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, made a surprise…
Mikkel Danielsen strikes again—with a headline that shouts: “Duck!” The Republicans have Hunter Biden’s dirty hard drive. Now they’re throwing it at the presidentMikke Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, November 18 (The story was published Friday, but it was a busy weekend.) Before I dig into Danielsen’s gaslight-a-palooza, I should state clearly that I’m going to be neutral…
This post is mostly (but not entirely) about small things. Trivial, even. I subscribe to the “Morning Briefing” email of the New York Times. It hits my inbox at around 7:00 weekday mornings, which I find impressive—that’s 1:00 in the morning, New York time. That’s the only impressive thing about it. Otherwise, its only real…
This morning—not much more than 24 hours before polling places open in America—Berlingske published a signed editorial entitled “Berlingske believes: The USA is in a death-spiral of mistrust.” There’s plenty of empirical data to support that premise. I touched on a lot of it yesterday and on Friday. Berlingske’s lede states things pretty plainly: The United…
AUDIO NOTE: It’s a long post, today, and therefore a long audio. To save myself some time I did most of it in one take. It’s therefore bubbling over with mispronunciations, self-corrections, improvised riffs, and random musings that aren’t found in the text below. So it’s messy but fun. All you lurkers who come around…
Joe Biden’s still out there telling Americans that Republicans are a threat to democracy. President Joe Biden warned in a speech on Wednesday that the country’s democracy was dangerously close to crumbling, painting the closing stretch of the midterm elections in stark terms. “In our bones,” the president declared at one point, “we know democracy is…
I’ve written a lot about taxpayer-funded DR’s ace US correspondent Steffen Kretz over the past couple of years—about his writing, I should say. About his coverage of America. I have nothing against him as a person. His personhood is to me a matter of absolute indifference, as interesting and relevant as tomorrow’s weather report for…
I’d meant to post this Thursday, but the day got out of hand. The same thing happened Friday. Turns out that’s not such a bad thing, because the story ripened a little with age. We begin on Wednesday evening, when DR’s website featured the following headline at the top of their website: In English: Expert…
Berlingske ran an unusually confusing piece yesterday: The Republican Party’s Showdown with its Putin Wing Finally BeginsKristian Mouritzen, Berlingske.dk, Mar 20 Mouritzen’s signed editorial is mostly an expression of his relief that the “moderates” of the Republican and Democratic parties have wrested control of their parties away from the extremists in their midst: the “Putinists”…
Let’s play the game by the same set of rules being used by Joe Biden. Any tactic he’s allowed to use, we’re allowed to use. Whatever heights of hyperbole he soars to, we’ll fly right alongside him. Whatever depths of mud and slime he’s willing plumb, we’ll wallow in it. You’ve been warned. Joe Biden…
Ladies and gentleman, the balanced Danish media: Do you remember the pictures? A year ago wild and angry Trump supporters stormed the American capitolAngelica Schou-Petersen, DR.dk, Jan 6 One year after the attack on America’s democracy: what’s happened since the storming of the capitol?Lillian Gjerulf Kretz, DR.dk, Jan 6 Trump’s people have put a large-scale…
The headline of Kalinka Aaman Agger’s Monday piece in Berlingske has the sound of a horror movie tagline: After the election it was the scenario they feared. Now it’s happened. Yes, it’s happened. In a world gone mad, a vote that Democrats hoped would go 50-50 appears fated to go 51-49 against them. Democracy is…
Earlier this year I wrote about the Boomerang Principle: what you do to your adversaries today, they will do to you tomorrow. It may be novel to bring a gun to a knife fight—but only once. After that, every knife fight’s gonna be a gun fight. This principle obviously isn’t limited to physical combat: it…
Berlingske published a Mikkel Danielsen piece today entitled “Analysis: Joe Biden risks becoming a mediocre president. He has to save his reputation this week.” I could easily spin off a thousand words on the absurdity of the headline alone (he risks becoming a mediocre president?). Joe Biden was a mediocre senator and a mediocre vice…
The view of America from Danish media is almost invariably wrong. Coverage isn’t just unintentionally inaccurate or incomplete—notice I said just—but also often wildly misleading. Whether that’s because they source so much of their American material from partisan sources or because Danish journalists and editors are themselves all wildly partisan is irrelevant: the end product…
