YOU TALKIN' ABOUT ME?
WHY DID JOURNALISTS AT THE DUBLIN WORLD ASSOCIATION
OF NEWSPAPERS CONFERENCE WALK OUT ON CONRAD BLACK?
Was he talking about them?
The Irish Times reported today that some of the journalists attending
the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Dublin walked out
of a speech by Lord Conrad Black, owner of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday
Telegraph, the Chicago Sun Times, the Jerusalem Post and the Spectator
magazine.
Lord Black "launched a scathing attack on the European media, accusing
them of endlessly disparaging the United States and 'mindlessly pandering
to the emotion of envy'."...
"Lord Black said European journalists did not write about real
Americans, but caricatures.... 'Americans are presented as lumpen
proletariat, firearm fanatics, with addictions to violent films and
unhealthy food,' he said."
Mark Little confessed that this was a "dirty little secret" of European
journalists covering the US in his book on his stint in the US for RTE,
"Turn Left at Greenland".
Black further infuriated the tech-infatuated Irish by telling them that
facing their "media distortions of the United States" was more important
than the "cant and charlatanism" about "newspapers in the new economy" on
which the event's organizers wanted him to pontificate.
"'There seems to be a broad consensus that the US or the current
administration is objectively bad,' he said. He cited a recent story run
on the BBC which suggested that if American troops had reached a certain
area in time, mass killings of civilians by Saddam Hussein's troops could
have been prevented.
"This was perverse, propagandist treatment of the news and we have
a right to expect better from the BBC," he said...."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. But someone did. Check out
Ireland's Case Against
America.
But my friend Seamus Dooley of the Irish National Union of Journalists,
stood four square for the journalist's duty to "investigate and report independently." Has he mentioned this to Fintan O'Toole? (See
our "SOMETHING
TO TALK ABOUT".)
Black singled out the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Mirror, John Pilger and
Robert Fisk as particular offenders. Fisk, the promoter of the
"BIG LIE"
(see our section on Fisk) also spoke to the conference.
BRAN
(Posted on **, 2003)
_________________
_____________
Return to home page.