The Media Market

[First of all - I know I should be keeping up this blogging business, but my deadlines are keeping me from adding to the news flow in my own little way. I promise my frequent readers to be back with more soon. In the meantime - please enjoy this little piece.]

Back to Lisa Carlsson again - yep, we're heading back to the funny farm at Swedish Television, the network which so proudly hails itself as an "independent objective media outlet" in the sacred name of public service (now, with a new CEO who has been hand-picked from the darker corners of the Social Democratic party with a long career behind him as a cabinet member - no doubt this will lead to a new era of independent journalism).

If Americans ever wonder "why they [as in Europeans] hate us so much" look no further than to Mrs Carlsson. My meeting with her and her blatant bias has been discussed on this blog in November.

In a recent post, The Spectator, tears her latest piece apart, with the help from columnist Roland Poirier Martinsson.

From the blog:

Given the resistant strain of anti-Americanism that thrives in SVT
production labs, the epidemic seems set to spread. Roland Poirier Martinsson
finds fresh groundsfor concern while viewing SVT’s Kulturnyheterna. The programme’s reporter
Lisa Carlsson lays out the following arguments:
-The USA is undergoing a library crisis
-The three libraries in the town of Salinas are to be closed down
-More than 250 American libraries have been closed down in the last two
years
-All the above is to be expected in a country where the president boasts
that he doesn’t read

One to three are demonstrably false, while the last is an outright lie. And even if they were all true - the main focus on the story is the fact that three libraries are going to close in Steinbeck's old hometown Salinas - a city with 130 000 citizens (on the opposite side of the globe in Swedish eyes). One can only imagine the heated discussion that this must have unravelled at the morning meeting: "Three libraries are closing in Bush's America - talk about a cultural dusk! Let's do a thing on that!"

And more... on cultural differences, also referred to by Spectator:
One of my favorite American correspondents, Bruce Bawer, who works out of Oslo has a great story in THe New York Times on the cultural clashes and economic reality.