It’s scarcely mentioned outside of Italy that there are actually some fine journalists working for Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset. Under the directorship of Enrico Mentana, the news broadcasts of Canale Cinque, have by and large maintained an impartial and professional stance when reporting the news (in comparison with one of Berlusconi’s other channels Retequattro, and its […]
Travelling into work the other day, during a break in “Morning Ireland”, I heard a sequence of clips of famous Americans giving famous quotes. There was Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you”, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, and Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” […]
Today’s New York Times reports that New York neighbourhoods in the Bronx, Yonkers, and Queens that have traditionally been home to Irish immigrants are seeing both naturalised citizens and illegals who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s returning to Ireland in unprecedented numbers. Such is the scale of the exodus that, according […]
One of the (few?) advantages of maintaining a blog is that it prevents you from indulging in that most futile of bourgeois literary exercises: writing letters to the editor. Two pieces in this weekend’s papers got my letter-writing dander up.The first was by Mark Lawson, in the Guardian. His op-ed columns are often rather lazy, […]
My post-colonial hackles are bristling again. This time the offender is the toxic AA Gill. In yesterday’s Sunday Times he reviewed some new gardening show co-hosted by Diarmuid Gavin:Diarmuid is the bad boy of gardening, a bit of a little rude rebel, a red-hot poker among the lilies. Gavin defends his wicked rep with a […]
While commentators in America are still analysing what exactly went wrong with the Kerry campaign, or indeed what went right with the Bush campaign, most politicians here have opted for the cautious approach when trying to extrapolate specific lessons for Italy. Most, but not all. There are some who have been keen to pull the political moral out of the magician’s hat, as if the American elections were merely a proxy or practice run for Italy’s next general election [due in 2006, though as likely to be in 2005].
Silvio Berlusconi, barely concealing his delight, took the opportunity to lecture the Italian left on the politics of demonization. “There’s a lot to be learned from this election – he told La Repubblica – they [the left] have to understand that no one wins by demonizing their opponent the way that the press and media did with Bush”[1]. Handy for a man who would like to keep his personal conflicts of interest out of the limelight, but he failed to take into account the fact that to a large extent George W.’s election victory was firmly founded on a demonisation of John Kerry -witness the skilfull proliferation of the ‘flip-flopper’ title for Kerry. Bush’s victory has certainly provided Berlusconi with a temporary respite from his political problems (dissapointing European Election results, the loss of key seats, the Buttiglione fiasco, a stagnant economy and fractious coalition partners). Appropriately enough, Berlusconi is pushing ahead, against advice from left, right and centre, with proposed tax cuts
It seems concerns about “moral values” are even seeping into “old Europe.” A report that appeared in Le Monde a few days ago detailed a bit of moral outrage over the resting place of Victor Noir in the graveyard of P�re-Lachaise in Paris. Noir was a journalist who was fatally wounded on 10 January 1870 […]
The concession speech by John Kerry and the victory address by President Bush brought home what was lost to America, and indeed the rest of the globe, yesterday. I’m biased (who isn’t), but I thought that Senator Kerry was eloquent in defeat and showed an emotional core that many accused him of lacking. (But I […]
In the wake of Bush’s gobsmacking victory, the insight de jour is that voters (or rather slightly more than 50% of them) ignored the quagmire in Iraq, the unsustainable economic situation, and the general incompetence of the administration, preferring to focus on the issue of the candidates’ “morality” and “character”–secular euphemisms for being religious. Yet […]