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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Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'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


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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


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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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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Looking back is great, but look forward too.

One of the things I very much like about the IHT is how it comes back to stories that were big, and sees where we're at.

A good example would be this article below on where a girl, who was at the centre of an epic cultural and political battle in Turkey earlier this year, is now and her views.

My only complaint, is that it's simply too long, focusses too much on the past (which isn't new-s) and doesn't bring enough that is new and forward looking. Clearly there is a need to put this recent interview with her in context, but this much?

To give a sense of this time-line issue, I've put in bold, in the article below, that which is new (to me at least). And it explains why this article, interesting in part as it is, doesn't make the cut for my blog A Place in the Auvergne.





A young woman leads Turkey to examine modernity and devotion
By Sabrina Tavernise
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
ISTANBUL: High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right.
"There was no sincerity," she said. "It was shallow."
So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.
In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism.
Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Yilmaz had to drop out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.
Like many young people at a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Yilmaz is more observant than her parents. Her mother wears a scarf but cannot read the Koran in Arabic. They do not pray five times a day. The habits were typical for their generation - Turks whose families moved from the countryside during industrialization.
"Before I decided to cover, I knew who I was not," Yilmaz said, sitting in a leafy Ottoman-era courtyard. "After I covered, I finally knew who I was."
While her decision was in some ways a recognizable act of youthful rebellion, in Turkey her personal choices are part of a paradox at the heart of the country's modern identity.
Turkey is run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law is strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East.
For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.
They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, between modernization and tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.
Yilmaz's embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics. She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in the past year and a half and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest what they said was a growing religiosity in society and in government - though just how observant Turks are remains in dispute.
By dropping out of the education system, she found her way into Turkey's growing, lively culture of young activists.
In the middle of January, the head scarf became the focus of a heated national outpouring, with Yilmaz one of its most eloquent defenders.
The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to pass a law letting women who wear the scarves into college. Staunchly secular Turks opposed broader freedoms for Islam, in part because they did not trust Erdogan, a popular politician who began his career championing a greater role for Islam in politics and who has since moderated his stance.
Turkey remains a democratic experiment unique in the Muslim world.
The Ottomans dabbled in democracy as early as 1876, creating a Constitution and a Parliament. The country was never colonized by Western powers, as Arabs were.
Turkey gradually developed into a democracy. The fact that young people like Yilmaz are protesting in the first place is one of its distinguishing features.
In many ways, Yilmaz's scarf freed her, but for many other women, it is the other way around. In poor, religiously conservative areas in rural Turkey, girls wear scarves from young ages, and many Turks feel strongly that without state regulation, young women would come under more pressure to cover up.
The head scarf bill, in that respect, could lead to less freedom for women, they argued. Even so, for Yilmaz, the angry reaction against the bill was hard to understand.
"It's frustrating when you watch people," she said, sitting in a chair wearing a tunic, jeans, and Timberland-style boots. "You think, what's the big deal?"
She continued: "When you look at it, we have all the reason to be afraid. We were mocked in the streets, we were insulted, we were expelled from universities."
With a microphone and a strong sense of justice, Yilmaz marched into a hotel in central Istanbul and, with two friends, both in scarves, made her best case.
"The pain that we've been through as university doors were harshly shut in our faces taught us one thing," she said, speaking to a group of reporters. "Our real problem is with the mentality of prohibition that thinks it has the right to interfere with people's lives."
Yilmaz's heartfelt speech, written with her friends, drew national attention. They were invited on television talk shows. They gave radio and newspaper interviews. Part of their appeal came from their attempt to go beyond religion to include all groups in Turkish society, like ethnic and sectarian minorities.
By March, the month after Parliament passed the final version of the head scarf proposal, the debate had reached a frenzied pitch.
Yilmaz and some friends - some in scarves, some not - agreed to go on a popular television talk show. The questions from the audience were angry.
One girl stood up and, looking directly at a girl in a scarf, said that she did not want her on campus, said Neslihan Akbulut, a friend of Yilmaz, who had helped to compose the head scarf statement. Another said she felt sorry for them because they were oppressed by men. A third fretted that allowing them into universities would lead to further demands about jobs, resulting in an "invasion."
Yilmaz said later: "I thought, are we living in the same country? No, it's impossible."
They did not give up. They spent the day in a drafty café in central Istanbul, wearing boots and coats and going over their position with journalists, one by one.
The girls say that the scarf, contrary to popular belief, was not forced on them by their families. Nor are they paid to wear it. Some women wear it because their mothers did. For others, like Yilmaz, it was a carefully considered choice.
Though it is not among the five pillars of Islam - the duties required for every Muslim, including daily prayer - Yilmaz sees it as a Koranic command.
"Physical contact is something special, something private," she said, describing the thinking behind her covering. "Constant contact takes away from the specialness, the privacy of the thing you share."
The head scarf debate ended abruptly in June, when Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled that the new law allowing women attending universities to wear scarves was unconstitutional, because it violated the nation's principles of secularism.
Yilmaz got the news as a text message from her friend. In her bitter disappointment, she realized how much hope she had held out.
"How can I be a part of a country that does not accept me?" she said.
Still, she has no regrets and is not giving up. "What we did was worth something," she said. "People heard our voices. One day the prohibition is imposed on us. The next day, it could be someone else.
"If we work together, we can fight it."






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NYT spots a new trend - which is now 16 years old.

I received an email recently from Anon. in the Paris newsroom who has accussed this blog of being too strident and paranoid. Strident I am sure it can be - it is afterall a blog and I care about my subject, the future of newspapers, the IHT/NYT in particular. (God forbid that IHT/NYT columnists and editorial writers had been more strident in their warnings of the financial meltdown, a term they didn't use in a headline until late September or October of this year.)

Paranoid, that I don't get. About what?


No matter: point taken on strident although no specific examples were offered, so, as of today - less strident? (Is that going to a be a good thing or a dull thing? Am I capable of being less strident? Am I strident? I have no idea.)



Moving on....or back.

I thought the article below was well written and researched but for a trend that started in 1992, was codified in 1997 and was made wildly and widely popular in a very well known French film in 2001, what exactly is it doing on the homepage of www.iht.com in 2008? Beats me. Not much that is 'new' in this newspaper article.




From Paris, an ad hoc, urban ballet
By Simon Marks
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
EVRY, France: Back in 1992, the dreariness of life in the Paris suburb of Evry - typical of the concrete jungles thrown up in the 1960s to provide low-cost housing - drew Laurent Piemontesi and six friends together in developing what became a new art form.
They called it "l'art du déplacement," or, roughly, the art of movement. It was a "human reaction," Piemontesi said, to the many obstacles of life.

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