“Liberty” Contemporary Mosaic Art

There is an international component to my business, so my day-to-day routine exposes me to a lot of news sources from outside the US.

Most Europeans have experienced domestic terrorism for decades or have lived or worked in a different country or have friends or acquaintances from the Middle East, etc. Their opinion of the Iraq war is an informed opinion. The vast majority of people in the Western, educated democracies were passionately against this war, and if you listened to international radio stations back in 2003, you got to hear their detailed arguments for and against it, discussed at length, in interview after interview. If you only listened to American news, you didn’t hear hardly any of that. You mainly heard shallow stories about the French and how fickle and ungrateful the Europeans are, or how they only act in self interest.

Virtually all of Europe’s radio stations can be listened to over the Internet. For business and a variety of other reasons, I listen to about eight hours per day, mostly BBC stations and some stations from Spain. In the evenings when my wife comes home, we turn on the TV and watch CNN, Fox etc. The difference is amazing, literally amazing. Many stories aren’t covered at all in the US media, and the content seems to be much more diluted. But here’s the real difference:
When European news channels need to show public opinion in the streets of Baghdad or New Delhi, they actually interview people in the streets of those places and broadcast the interviews in depth. In the US media, the only foreigners interviewed are western-looking diplomats or experts in the news studio.

I’ve noticed that the confidence a person has in President Bush seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of time they spend following international news sources, including those that have a significant amount of pro-US programming.  I think Bush supporters as a group would score lower than non-supporters when quizzed on basic facts about the international world, and I mean objective facts like who is the chancellor of Germany, etc.

You can read or listen to all of Europe’s major news sources over the Internet.  Here are just a few:

BBC Radio 4
Talk radio at a higher standard with in-depth interviews, analysis, etc.

BBC Radio 5Live
Live news coverage.  Great for covering important international events.

BBC Radio Worldservice
World news.

Online Newspapers.com
A guide to online newspapers worldwide

The Times
British newspaper online.

El Mundo
Spanish newspaper online.

El Pais
Spanish newspaper online.

Le Monde
French newspaper online.