As the development of Intercultural Competence involves contact with other world views this week we’ve been supposed to compare the news regarding the elections in Italy and in the United States in sources from three different countries. Through this task we had the opportunity once again to experience a shift of perspective and appreciate similarities and differences among different cultures and languages.
This time I’ve decided not to analyse sources from Italy and the United States, but to concentrate on what other countries think and write about the two political elections. I chose to follow the online news of newspapers from three European countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. I decided to focus on newspapers with a slight centre-right inclination and I came up with the English newspaper The Times, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. They all are daily national newspapers with wide circulation in their countries and abroad.
taken from students.usm.maine.edu
Before I started looking for news I was really curious to find out what United Kingdom, Germany and Spain thought about the general elections in Italy. When I began taking a look at the three online newspapers I was immediately disappointed; there is no trace of Italian elections! The latest news about Italian politics were about the dissolution of parliament by the president Giorgio Napolitano and the date for the general elections. Italy seems to be really forgotten by the close European countries which prefer to concentrate on other international issues and on more powerful countries.
On the contrary, all three newspapers have a special part in their websites for US political elections.
From the homepage of The Times’ online version TimesOnline you can access the News and then choose the section World News. From this point you can further narrow down your research by selecting the news regarding the world’s most critical areas. So you will click on the US and Americas News and find a special link to a blog about US elections and the latest news in the centre of the page about White House 2008.
Once you open the homepage of FAZ.NET, the online version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, you will find under Politics a special section called Wahl in America. Here you can find a table with all the primaries’s results so far and the latest news.
From the homepage of the online newspaper elmundo.es you can access the news about US elections through the section International. Here you can find material on the right side of the page by clicking on a linkable section called La Carrera Hacia La Casa Blanca. In this special website you can read the main news about the super tuesday, comment on the blog’s posts, watch videos, see pictures and the primaries’ calendar.
All of them offer a lot of information about US elections, but I noticed some differences in the amount and visibility of coverage. While English and German material is daily updated, Spanish reportage only focuses on the fundamental news. Furthermore, the Spanish online newspaper has the link to US elections on a little image on the right part of the page. It has been actually more difficult to find Information about US elections on the Spanish website than on the English and German websites. German and English journalists might give more space to US elections than Spanish ones do because Germany and the United Kingdom have stronger links with the United States.
As regards the words and the images used in the latest reportage, I noticed similarities in all three online newspapers. In the last few days’ articles the most frequent words are racism in TimesOnline, racismo negro (black racism) in elmundo.es and schlamm (dirt), hautfarbe (skin color) in FAZ.NET. All three newspapers convey the idea of an American racial politics. They all focus on the way the nominating battle between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama is going ahead. As both democratic candidates have same ideas and goals in their programs their battle focuses on their different personal roles: she is a woman, he is a man; she is white, he is black. This way democrats are increasingly dividing along ethnic lines and both campaigns are pointing fingers at each other over who is to blame for bringing a virtual race war into the elections.
Have a nice week-end!
Selena
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