What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
An opinion piece in Berlingske asks an interesting question: Should there be room for “well-coiffed hatred and cheeky fascism” at the Popular Assembly?Esben Vest Billingsøe (Opinion), Berlingske.dk, May 20 What I’m translating as the “Popular Assembly” could also be translated as the “People’s Meeting.” It’s an annual summer event (held in the 24th week of…
Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday Night. To nobody’s surprise, they racked up the most points of any country in the history of the competition. To my own surprise, however, the Danish media have been very transparent about the fact that the Ukrainian song wasn’t very good and that this was obviously a…
Tom Jensen is the editor in chief of Berlingske Tidende, and after years of coddling the American left he seems to be waking up to the fact that something is rotten in America: I’m not “cisgendered.” I’m a man.Tom Jensen, Berlingske.dk, May 1 Jensen is apparently trying to bring his newspaper’s Danish readers up to…
Mikkel Danielsen has another big story about Trump out today, but that’s about as noteworthy as a rainy day in Denmark. He’s billed as Berlingske’s USA Correspondent, but for all practicaly purposes Danielsen is now their Trump correspondent. It gets tedious. There’s an actual American president out there right now who’s even less popular than…
This was the top story on Berlingske.dk this afternoon: Everything going on in the world, and on Easter weekend, that’s Berlinge’s big splashy headline. The headline says, “Rei is a nonbinary transsexual and has a question everyone could “benefit” by asking themselves.” I won’t bother with a spoiler alert, I’ll give you Rei’s question straight…
Remember Peter Madsen? He’s the Danish guy who took a Swedish journalist out for a tour on his home-made submarine, raped, killed, and dismembered her (although not necessarily in that order), then sank her weighted body parts down into the depths of the Sound before scuttling his submarine to eliminate the crime scene. He’s in…
Henry Higgins, call your office. Over the past few years there’s been a slow but steady drumbeat on an amorphous issue, or set of issues, that seem finally to have congealed into something covered under the rubric of “the feminization of politics” (or of culture). A single writer has finally, in a single column, pulled…
There was a story in Berlingske Tidende yesterday about something I’d caught in the English language press a week or two ago: the Scottish Ballet’s plans to “help drive anti-racism” by introducing changes to their annual production of The Nutcracker. The headline on the Berlingske story by Amalie Haun is “Famous Christmas classic being remade:…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Good news, everybody! Turns out it’s not racist to require voters to provide identification after all. Not only that, but it turns out Critical Race Theory is no big deal: it’s just about teaching kids about the history of slavery and race relations in the United States. These revelations are brought to us courtesy of…
An article published on Berlingske.dk this afternoon doesn’t have much “news value” at first glance, but I’m glad to see it because I so desperately want Denmark not to follow America down the road to hell. The headline is “American elite university drops Latin and Greek to fight racism,” and that’s a straightforward summary of…
If you believe in communism—that is, if you understand and adhere to its tenets—you’re a communist. If you believe in socialism, you’re a socialist. If you believe in capitalism, you’re a capitalist. If you believe in nudity, you’re a nudist. If you believe in race, you’re a racist. That is, if you first of all…
There’s a passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905) that I’ve cited a few times on this blog. It’s a typically playful Chestertonian spin on a bit of the Gospel, specifically John 20:29, but since most of us aren’t as fluent in scripture as Chesterton’s readers were back in the day, let’s refresh: Jesus saith unto…
