For months, German doctors had resisted taking the AstraZeneca vaccine, following the pharmaceutical company’s controversial data set – which has yet to receive approval in the United States.
With the first deaths, the Nordic countries began to suspend, and then most of Europe, but UK coverage, not only from the tabloids but from the Times to the Financial Times, shifted from immunizer defense to criticism of the European Union.
Until this week, the European Health Agency has pointed to the link with the clots – and London could no longer resist. “Now even the UK,” John Authers, a decades-long FT columnist, commented today to Bloomberg of the UK agency’s announcement that minors under 30 should use a other vaccine.
At the same time, confirmation of the deaths in the UK itself has also been made public, by the BBC and others, after all.
Days earlier, Ireland’s main newspaper, Irish Times, had published a warning article by editor / columnist Ruadhán Mac Cormaic about the distorted image of herself that the EU ends up receiving and accepting.
In one of the statements, “the biggest sources of information about the EU are outside the bloc – and this distorts the way the continent sees itself”. More precisely, the dysfunction lies in the “strong penetration of the British media, with its complexes and its prejudices”, which distort the narrative.
Germany, France and other members see themselves through the prism of a country that has chosen to leave them.
Citing grotesque myths about the EU as a ‘ban on curved bananas’, Cormaic writes:’ If you spoke French and German or were patient with Google Translate, you could follow the debates in these countries and see for yourself. . The problem is, that’s not how most people get their information ”.
With Brexit, the problem became obvious, also because it affected “a large part of the world”, he says. “This is one of the reasons the EU’s global coverage so often portrays it as a remote economic zone, perpetually on the brink of collapse.”
This is not the first alert. Wolfgang Blau, former editor of the German Die Zeit, wrote in November that the continent, to face the problem, does not need “another France24 or Deutsche Welle” but “to work with the prestigious vehicles. national laws existing across the EU ”.
The debate did not echo in the London press, but it spread to the United States from a publication by the Nieman Journalism Lab, a Harvard-based study center, introducing a question:
“What if the vehicles covering the United States weren’t in New York or Washington? If they were all, I don’t know, in Iceland? Or in Japan? “
This is valid for the European Union as for ascending Asia, another region seen by the rest of the planet through the prism of London or New York, despite the largest newspapers in the world.
Not only that. This week, the authors of “Terra Incognita”, which collects “maps to survive the next hundred years”, shared a map of the world with a small circle on China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and others, along with the caption:
“There are more people in the circle than outside.” The cover that the world sees, however, is almost entirely edited from the outside.
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