Putting things in perspective
I woke up this morning to find that Owen has been playing with my clock radio again. Fortunately it still went off on time, and not at a deafeningly high volume as it has in the past, but it was on a differet station. No idea what the station was but they had the BBC news bulletin. I listened, interested to see if the Australian election got a mention, and it did, but that came second to news about the elections in Afghanistan. Which is fair, since for them it’s a very historic and momentous occaision. So I don’t begrude them first mention.
Following on from this, I though I’d take a look to see at how some of the other international news services are reporting our election. It’s always good to see yourselves through the eyes of others…
- CNN - had to scroll down to find it; terrible picture of John Howard there too
- BBC - small link but at least it’s near the top; much better picture of Howard (and one of Latham too)
- Times of India - had to really search for that on their site; though this was the first entry on their front page, about the cricket (go Aussies!)
- New York Times - Australians Re-elect Howard as Prime Minister - that’s what it says now, but according to Tim, it originally said “Australians re-elect Howard as President” - kinda ironic that.
It’s funny most of the international services, including the BBC radio bulletin I caught this morning, made a central part of their stories about Australia the fact that our troops will now stay on in Iraq, while here this turned out to be a very peripheral issue in the election campaign. Interesting to see that people on the outside see things from their own perspective, and emphasise what’s important to them, even though that may be a skewed emphasis. And I’m not even criticizing them for that - I think it’s very understandable that an American news service would emphasize that, just interesting is all.
And the Afghans trumped us on pretty much every news site I could see - once again, fair enough I suppose.
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