What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
I could go to any number of Danish or American articles for this, but let’s take one NPR article as our crash test dummy because it’s the one that caught my eye: Stanford Apologizes After Vaccine Allocation Leaves Out Nearly All Medical Residents, Laurel Wamsley, NPR.org, 18 December It’s a simple story: the leadership of…
The headline is the story: Two years ago Denmark had 900 inpatients during the worst flu epidemic in a long time, but the system didn’t collapse, Signe Stoumann Fosgrau, Berlingske.dk, 18 December Remarkable! Not the information itself, but the fact that we’re first hearing this from the press a full nine months into the pandemic….
A few recent and unrelated stories in the Danish and American news are worth considering together: Bodega owner fined for offering free shots to women, Christian Krabbe Barfoed, TV2.dk, 16 December Cornell offers ‘person of color’ exemption for flu vaccine requirement, Benjamin Zeisloft, CampusReform.org, 7 December Tulsi Gabbard introduces bill that ties Title IX protections…
A specter is haunting Europe. Europe in meltdown as Covid death tolls soar and progress unravels, Emma Reynolds, CNN.com, 11 Dec Europe’s Deadly Second Wave: How Did It Happen Again?, Josh Holder, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Allison McCann, New York Times, 4 Dec …it’s not the specter of covid, but the specter of broken journalism. From…
Pretty much everyone knows Aesop’s fable of the ants and the grasshopper: the grasshopper frolics the summer away while the ants work hard to set aside enough provisions to survive the winter. Come autumn, the sick and starving grasshopper begs the ants for food. “You made music all summer,” the ants say, “now dance!” And…
Most Danes are familiar with Statens Serum Institut. It maintains the COVID-19 Dashboard that many of us use to keep track of the pandemic in Denmark. The dashboard looks like this (as of 13:45 on Saturday, 28 November): It’s a lot of data. I’ve gotten to checking it once a day after its 14:00 update…
There’s an old joke about the liberal slant of New York Times news coverage encapsulated in a single representative headline: “World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.” TV2 is clearly trying to keep up with the Times. I can’t fault them entirely: they’re just following the lead of the United Nations, whose Secretary General António…
“Don’t speak ill of the dead” used to be a thing. So did “Black lives matter.” Not at Berlingske, however. Not anymore, at least: “Kendt Trump-støtte fornægtede farligheden i coronavirus. Så slog den ham ihjel.” The “så” is a nice touch: is it the adverbial form meaning “then,” or is it being used as a…
