Headline Paradox when it comes to African Lives

K. Annan was visiting the IHT's offices yesterday. He spoke, inter alia, of the need to keep up development money for Africa in times of economic crisis.

I wonder what he would make of the comparative treatment, most notably the headlines used and the length, of these two stories in today's IHT.

One concerns a black congregation church being burnt on U.S election night. That is described as 'an act of horror'(as well as being, further to my earlier post on the Spanish Royal story, two weeks behind the news curve).

A time of hope, marred by an act of horror
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/america/17land.php

A six-year-old boy being killed and his body dismembered in the east African state of Burundi, the latest in a series of attacks in the region on albinos, whose bodies are prized by witchdoctors, is headlined:

Albino boy killed and body dismembered in Burundi
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-TANZANIA-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php

Which is an act of 'horror' seems pretty self-evident from where I'm sitting, if we don't want semantic devaluation to run wild, and I'll leave you to calculate the respective word count and news hole play.

However, in fairness, Mr. Gettleman in Nairobi did write about this 'horrific' problem back in June of this year (Albinos in Tanzania face deadly threat
By Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times) SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2008) but there is something about the headlines that jars.

Don't get me wrong: burning a black church in America on the night Obama was elected is very troubling, deeply worrying, upsetting, racist and all the rest. But it's the relatively frivolous use of the word 'horror' in one story and the neutral, unemotive headline ascribed to the latest in a long line of truly 'horrific' child murders for the other story, that I don't care for.

If a murder of that nature took place in Detroit, I think we'd have an adjective, let alone an abstract noun, in the headline.

Horror is the Congo, horror is life in Iraq, horror is lots of things.

Horror/terror are words you just don't want to chuck around.

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A Royal Pain for IHT Readers - repeat stories, way behind the news curve.

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the IHT running NYT pieces, on stories that IHT editors (alert, on the ball, all good) had already picked up weeks earlier.

To give an example from today's paper, compare and contrast the following:

A royal pain for the Spanish monarchy
By Victoria Burnett
Monday, November 17, 2008
MADRID: When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their queen's conservative views. Her comments on homosexuality, gay marriage, euthanasia and religious education have outraged liberal Spaniards and tarnished an image of discretion that she had carefully tended for decades.
In the most notorious gaffe in the book, the queen said that she respected people's different sexual tendencies but did not understand why "they should feel proud to be gay."
"That they get up on floats and parade in the streets? If all of us who are not gay were to parade in the streets, we'd halt the traffic in every city," she said. She then added that while gay people had a right to unions, they should not be permitted to call them marriages.
As well as homosexuality, the queen takes several forays into politically tricky territory, saying that she does not support euthanasia - an issue being hotly debated in Spain - and that she believes schoolchildren should be taught the origins of man from a creationist point of view.
The book is also peppered with personal tidbits about world leaders and royal travels. At one point, Sofia congratulates herself on persuading the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to wear a suit and tie, instead of his "shapeless" military garb. The late King Hassan of Morocco drove her "crazy" with his mania about food, she says, bringing a retinue of cooks and his own supplies when he visited Spain because "he didn't trust us." Former President Jimmy Carter was a good enough sort, but "behaved really badly toward the Shah of Iran" when he refused him asylum, she said.
The controversy is one of a series of incidents that have revealed cracks in the cocoon of respect that envelops the Spanish royal family. Recent attempts to stifle embarrassing cartoons or claim privacy from the news media have challenged the balance between protecting free speech and protecting Spain's royals.
"I don't think many people would be surprised to learn these were the queen's views," said Juan Díez-Nicolás, a professor of sociology whose organization, ASEP, polls the Spanish public about the monarchy. They are routinely voted the most respected public figures in the country.
"What surprises them is that she would say such things for publication," he said. And moreover, "not offering a view that is widely shared by Spaniards."
Born Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark in November 1938, the queen converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism when she married Juan Carlos, then the future king, in 1962. Elegant, circumspect and fluent in several languages, she became popular in part because of her role in helping to steer Spain toward democracy after the death of Franco in 1975.
Long considered a paragon of royal reserve, the queen emerges from the book as the 70-year-old observant Catholic that she is, rather than the sweet, demure figure that the Spanish public apparently wants her to be, people who follow the monarchy said.
Her comments on gay pride and marriage provoked indignation from the gay community, which won the right to marry in 2005, and prompted a swift apology from the royal household. In a statement read to the press late last month, a spokesman for the royal family said the queen "deeply regrets that the inaccuracy of the comments attributed to her may have caused discomfort or offense."
The statement claimed that the queen had been quoted "inexactly" and suggested that the interviewer, the journalist Pilar Urbano, had published comments intended to be private. Urbano denied this and said galleys of the book had been reviewed by the queen's office, which approved them for publication.
In an interview by telephone, Urbano said she had interviewed Sofia several times, though she did not use a tape recorder. Journalists who closely follow the royal family said that the king was incensed by the book and that those responsible for giving the green light may yet be fired.
Antonio Poveda, president of the Spanish Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said his organization accepted the palace's apology but that "there's definitely still some bad feeling among the gay community."
"The monarch has always been at pains not to comment on social or political issues," he said. "It seems they have broken with this tradition."
The publication of the book, "The Queen Up Close," follows a rash of setbacks for members of the royal family and Spanish aristocracy looking for greater protection from the press that have contributed to a sense that they are no longer untouchable. A court this month ruled against the Duchess of Alba, who was seeking to have copies of a satirical magazine whose cover featured her lying naked in pile of money removed from news stands.
Telma Ortiz, sister of Queen Sofia's daughter-in-law Princess Letizia, this month lost a court battle to obtain restraining orders against dozens of media outlets, which she accuses of hounding her and her family. The court ruled that Ortiz, an aid worker, is in the limelight by dint of her relationship with her sister and ordered her to pay around €45,000, or about $57,000, in costs, according to press reports.
While Díez, the sociology professor, said the ruckus over the book would blow over and have no impact on Sofia's popularity, other analysts said the dents in the Spanish royal family's image were part of a wider trend away from monarchy in Europe.
"Monarchy is old-fashioned by nature, and Europe is modern in its self-esteem," said Geoffrey Hindley, a historian who has written on European monarchy. "The ethos of republicanism is the style of the majority in Europe."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/europe/sofia.php

Over two weeks ago, the IHT ran the piece below on www.iht.com and an edited version in the paper.

I imagine the NYT didn't but their global edition did and it's not evident to me that two weeks later Victoria Burnett (was she on holiday at the time?) has added all that much value.

And if you're an IHT reader in Spain, you must be yawning over breakfast.


Spanish book quotes queen's disapproval of gay marriage
The Associated Press
Friday, October 31, 2008
MADRID: A Spanish journalist on Friday defended the accuracy of her book that quotes Queen Sofia criticizing gay marriage.
The book has irked the Royal Palace.
The Spanish king and queen are largely respected as figurehead representatives of the state, and rarely speak out on political or social issues.
The veteran journalist, Pilar Urbano, released the book - "La Reina muy de cerca," or "The Queen, very close up," - this week to mark the queen's 70th birthday Sunday. The journalist said it was based on 15 interviews with Queen Sofia, and that the Royal Palace approved the book's galley proofs before it was published, according to news agency Efe.
"What the queen said is what my book says," Urbano said.
The Royal Palace has challenged the comments attributed to the monarch, however, saying in a statement they "do not correspond exactly" with what she said. The palace also said the book also fails to reflect the queen's traditional neutrality on public affairs or respect for people who suffer discrimination, like homosexuals.
"I do not answer to the queen or king, or the Royal Palace. I answer to the truth," Urbano told Efe.
In the book, the queen is quoted as addressing a wide range of issues and saying she opposes abortion and euthanasia. Spain allows the former under restricted circumstances, and outlaws the latter. But the queen's alleged remarks on same-sex marriage are the main source of friction and have angered gay rights groups.
Spain legalized gay marriage in 2005, becoming one of the few countries in the world to recognize same-sex couples as having the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt children.
"If those persons want to live together, dress up as bride and groom and get married, they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not," the queen is quoted as saying in Urbano's book.
The conservative newspaper El Mundo said the queen erred by breaking with her tradition of quiet neutrality.
"As human as this burst of royal sincerity might be, certainly there were better ways to make Queen Sofia's birthday a new tool for bringing society closer to the throne," the newspaper said in an editorial.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/31/europe/01spain-fw-360944.php


REVISED: WEDNESDAY 19TH NOVEMBER, 2008

Just so you know I'm not imagining this problem as being regular, as opposed to infrequent, compare and contrast today's story about fighting in the Congo threatening gorillas (by Gettleman) with the same story from Reuters run in the IHT and on www.iht.com on November 10th, 2008, on the same subject.

Once again, wire service well ahead of the curve, and not a hell of a lot of added value from the NYT correspondent.

It's this type of absurd allocation of precious foreign correspondent resource which is why newspapers seem so damn irrelevant and it seems their own memories of what they've already run are really pretty poor.

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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
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'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
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‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times


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Hoaxes and Non-existence: When is Richard Pérez-Peña going to start writing about the future of the NYT Company?

Richard Pérez-Peña, the New York Times senior media writer, does a stand up job of covering the American media scene, most recently A senior fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence By Richard Pérez-Peña and coverage of the hoax NYT edition (covered by this blog before the NYT).

The IHT is happy to run corporate press releases concerning good news stories - appointments of new editors, opening of print sites, publishing partnerships etc.

But there seems to be a resounding silence from the NYT and the IHT's media writers about the future of their employee.

Normally, I am against in-house media writers covering their own paper, and don't like the above mentioned examples of corporate puff pieces - there is a credibility problem.

But if the senior editors will run these puff pieces, isn't it time for some serious reporting about the rather dire straights of the NYT Company. It is, presumably, a two way street, and of some interest to IHT readers (at least judged by emails and traffic to this blog).

Time, I think, with NYT time stock trading below $8 and the blogosphere awash with NYT stories, for either Pfanner or Doreen C. to be tasked this story, because it sure ain't coming from Richard.

They even managed to run a piece about how companies were turning to blogging to report layoffs (especially in media sector) to be ahead of the blogosphere. Perhaps someone might re-read that story and see whether they can see any relevance in it to the NYT itself.

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'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times



For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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Black Monday and the story you should already have read.

I'll go out on a limb here and post this. You'll have to take my word for it that I haven't seen or heard any news of the Asian markets overnight, nor the European openings. I am going to post this, and then I am going to go and have a look.

Below you will find what I wrote on my blog A Place in the Auvergne just now making my daily alternative narrative for Sunday 26th October 2008.

Normally I don't write myself, I just let the news tell the story, and it's all about story, something the newspaper industry has lost sight of.

I have never written, in the course of doing the Auvergne blog since January 1st, 2008, anything about the day to come, in this case Monday, 27th October.

I hope I'm wrong and only the Warren Buffet like patriotism of American investors can prevent it when the NYSE opens later today.

What has this got to do with the International Herald Tribune?

If you read the IHT carefully, none of what is going to happen today should come as a surprise.

If you are surprised, then the way the story has been told to you since January 1st, 2008 has been wrong.

The traditional news hierarchies of newspapers, which A Place in the Auvergne ignores, clearly aren't working.

IW: Last Friday, in the markets, it was bad. I haven't given a moment's thought to them until now, but this was a tipping point weekend out there in The Shop. The talk has moved from meltdown to panic.
At the time of writing (Monday 27th October 2008) I haven't checked the Asian markets overnight, nor the European opening prices. I haven't looked at any news save the daily article index of the IHT for Monday - that is to say, news from over the weekend. I haven't listend to a radio, we don't own a television to turn on. I don't feel I need to. I know.
I would say the markets, on Monday, 27th October, 2008 are going to be black, pitch black.

Here in The Valley I have not had one single conversation with one person about the financial meltdown, neither with friends on Friday night, nor on Saturday at the protest march against the closure of rural services, nor yesterday when a friend dropped by with some cheese. In the Auvergne, not many of us own stocks, or have much debt, we are close to the land and the food it brings, close to the wood to heat to our homes, water to drink. This is not our problem.

Yet.

But here is something I heard just now, while I was making this post. According to a source at the post office bank in our local town (with a catchment area of 24,000 people), the Post Office bank received €24 million in cash deposits, money withdrawn from the town's local banks and moved to the state owned/backed post office bank.

Think about that.

And if you believe in omens, there were three major earthquakes yesterday and here this Monday morning the dawn was a burnt red of a type I have never seen here in three years.

Now I hear thunder and it is raining.

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Media Criticism of the IHT: Obits.

It's taken a full week for the IHT to wake up to or find space for the significance of the life and death of Sister Emmanuelle.

Her death was announced on October 20th, 2008 and at the time the IHT did run a brief news piece on this.


Even though the French press, not forgetting the IHT is headquartered in France, has been full of her all last week, it does seem to beg the question of timeliness to run her obit in the IHT a full week later.

Yes, it was a busy week with the financial meltdown et al, space no doubt at a premium, but no excuse not to do more on www.iht.com sooner (the IHT obit is basically a worked-up AP piece available the day after her death as you can see from the time line below) and why in print today? Too late to my mind. It just makes the IHT look behind the news curve.


Sister Emmanuelle, 99, an advocate for the poor, dies
By Bruce Weber (The Associated Press, The New York Times) SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2008
Sister Emmanuelle, revered as a defender of the disenfranchised, was best known ...
Obituaries in the news
(The Associated Press) TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2008
Tony Dean
France's beloved nun Sister Emmanuelle dies at 99
(The Associated Press) MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2008
Sister Emmanuelle, a nun who lived for years among scavengers in Cairo ...

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Suzy Menkes ought to stick to clothes

A ghastly page by Suzy Menkes in the IHT last Tuesday, with a number of fawning, poorly written celeb-based pieces ranging from 'cool artists' to some Greek princess and her extremely expensive clothes for children in Sloane Street.

I am a huge admirer of Suzy, but when she operates out of area (to use NATO parlance) it gets very messy.

Witness this from her, a piece in its conclusion completely at odds with two pieces by the IHT's and the NYT's art writers.

Frieze power: Art shakes up London society
By Suzy Menkes
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: Where would you find a congregation of celebrities from Lily Allen through Kate Bosworth to Emma Watson? And fashion folk like Roland Mouret, Raf Simons or the milliner Philip Treacy? Not to mention cool artists like Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, wearing a necklace of his alter-ego, Claire, dressed as Bo-Peep.
The latter names are the clue: It was last week's Frieze contemporary art fair in London that drew an international crowd and spawned a host of related events.
Such is the power of Frieze to pull in the hyper-hip and former super-rich that it has become a stronger magnet for the stylish than London Fashion Week.
Whether or not they were buying (count in the glam Moscow gallery owner Daria Zhukova, partner of the billionaire Roman Abramovich), Frieze has had an extraordinary impact on London society, making it the 21st-century version of the old guard's "Ascot" week and "the season."
Art folk did not just ricochet from Frieze to the spacious new Charles Saatchi gallery. They also went cool-hunting in the stores. Matthew Slotover, co-founder of the five-year-old fair in Regent's Park, said that Martin Margiela's London store was a must-see for all his arty visitors. Dover Street Market also says that it counts on Frieze for its best selling week of the year. Recession? The "R" word was replaced by the "F" word: Frieze.

At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on
By Souren Melikian
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: The two-round match played out on the London auction scene this weekend left contemporary art badly bruised. Round One, fought at Sotheby's, revealed for the first time in years that all is not well in that field.
Sotheby's session on Friday night got off to a dashing start thanks to Oliver Barker, a "senior international specialist" and one of the most brilliant upcoming young auctioneers in London. Calling out bids at top speed, he managed to convey for a while the impression that raving buyers were scrambling on top of each other to put in bids.
Lot 1, "The Pink Tree" by John Currin, an oil on paper that could be a spoof of 16th century German painting, improbably doubled its estimate at £139,250, or $241,300. Next came Antony Gormley's "Domain LXIV," a construction of small stainless steel rods conjuring up the figure of a man standing. Like so much of contemporary art, it has a whiff of Dada, the art of the absurd invented a century ago by Marcel Duchamp as a slap in the face of the then-bourgeois establishment. Today's new establishment coughed up £193,250, well above the high estimate.
But an auctioneer's brio will take you just so far. By the time the third lot, Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Jaggy Snake Charity Painting" came up, enthusiasm was dying down. The 2007 Hirst, which resembles an enlarged close-up of traditional marbled paper painted in gaudy household gloss, sold with difficulty, under the low estimate, for £115,250.
That made the public uneasy. Howard Hodgkin's "Ekow," a kind of haphazard smear, dropped dead. Next, an abstract bronze and lacquer sculpture by Anish Kapoor also crashed. The failure of two works, both executed in 2008, did not augur well.
The sale became sticky. The first big lot, Andy Warhol's "skulls" of 1976, which reproduced 10 times in acrylic and silkscreen ink the image of a skull, very nearly failed and was retrieved by one £3.85 million bid, bringing the full price to £4.35 million, still far below the lowest expectations.
The second biggest lot, Gerhard Richter's "Abstract Picture (Red)," likewise sold by the skin of its teeth, for £2.84 million - one fifth less than the lowest price forecast by Sotheby's.
By the end of the sale, 27 percent of the works remained stranded. At the press conference held in a subdued atmosphere, a Sotheby's spokesperson revealed that the auction house had worked hard to persuade consignors to bring down their reserves. The house evidently succeeded to some extent - the six highest prices paid that evening were all well below the lower end of the estimate. All told, sales added up to £22 million. This was not a debacle, but undoubtedly a severe retreat.
As Christie's took over on Sunday afternoon in a leaden atmosphere, there were empty seats in the room.
In an eerie parallel to Sotheby's, the first three lots sold. Ron Arad's "London Parpadelle," a steel contraption which looked like a rug of steel mail unfolding and was No.6 in an edition of six, managed a generous £139,250. Takashi Murakami's composition "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," done in a futuristic comic strip style, then rose to £421,250, followed by Farhad Moshiri's "Golden Love Super Deluxe," a spoofy gilt wood cabinet filled with equally spoofy gilt porcelain and wooden pieces at £145,250.
At that point, the room lost interest. Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" dropped dead, and so did Jeff Koons's "Jim Beam-Log Car," a small stainless object produced in 1986 in an edition of three plus an artist proof. It matched its description but amused no one.
But Gilbert & George's set of 29 gelatin silver prints did. Titled "Muscadet," the set was "executed in 1973." Featured in many exhibitions, ranging from the Centre George Pompidou in Paris (1981) to the Hayward gallery in London (1987), it sold for £301,250.
Christie's, like Sotheby's, had persuaded some consignors to bring down their reserves, and that allowed the auctioneer to unload several heavyweights, all below the low reserve. A Lucio Fontana pulled through, on a single £8 million bid, missing the £10 million estimate quoted by Christie's "on request." But the oval piece of canvas, pierced with holes that give it the appearance of a moth-eaten doormat, was not cheap at £9 million, the price it cost with the sale charge.
Neither was the second most expensive painting, a realistic study of Bacon's face done more than 50 years ago by Lucian Freud. That realized £5.42 million, also less than the low estimate - but, again, a huge price.
By the auction's end, Christie's had sold 26 of 47 works for £32 million. The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson.

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