Gimlé

Another example is reporting on the EU itself. In the USA, and to some extent in England (but less so in Scotland and Northern Ireland), the EU has a reputation for being a huge, bloated bureaucratic nightmare of misrule.

Stories of strange EU regulations are lovingly repeated; the committee to standardize the radius of curvature of the banana, or the perfidious attempt to destroy the Scottish fishing fleet by banning them from catching anything.

But step outside the charmed circle of anti-EU reporting and some uncomfortable facts become clear. The EU employs fewer bureaucrats than the British government assigns to the Scottish Office in London. The banana committee is a myth.

And the stories about the Scottish trawler fleet quota are entirely true but ommit the key detail that last year’s total North Sea catch was down to 37,000 tons, from a peak of 250,000 tons in 1977 – the ban on fishing is a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the North Sea from following the Grand Banks off Newfoundland into sterile extinction.
Dewayne Mikkelson

Absolutely right on the money.

Dewayne Mikkelson notes how it seems that the schism between the US and Europe is an artificial one, created by the media and other notable parties.

It’s simply an observation, not an explanation of anything, but knowing what the problem is goes a long way towards figuring out how it came to be.

It does highlight the possibilities when it comes to the power of media manipulation.

The triple vaccine scare here in the UK comes to mind. What happened there was that the media took a very limited report and hyped it up into such a scare that drove down immunisation to almost criminal levels (kids still get killed these days by the diseases vaccinated). The report was written by a doctor who refused to publish or open up his research details or allow other people to use his samples to corroborate his report.

That was a clear case of media scaremongering endangering a whole generation of infants.

So the UK media, at least, finds it acceptable to boost viewer-ratings by risking lives.

Which could go a long way towards explaining their and their US counterparts’ behaviour.

This also highlights the fact that on the whole, you can find far better writing as well as far better news analysis in weblogs than in mainstream media (which includes the online news media).

I don’t think that ‘blogs can compete when it comes to actual reporting but even the most partial ‘blogs reveal the media news analysts to be the biased hacks that they are.

Baldur.