A very quiet day. I am very tired after my 43 hour trip where I didn't really get much sleep at all...
Do some wandering around the area where my hotel is and sun-drenching and reading and the rest sleeping. I'm in Cambridge and the hotel is right beside the Charles River. It couldn't be more beautiful really and I enjoy sitting by the river, and walking around it.
On the other side of the hotel is a huge shopping mall so I wander round that. It is described in a guidebook here as "exactly the same as every other large shopping mall in the United States" and so it is. There is a big Borders bookshop so I linger there for a bit but I don't buy anything other than two Sunday newspapers.
With papers in New Zealand so thin these days, and the well-known problems with the newspaper industry worldwide I was wondering if the papers might be thin. They are a bit thin - it is summer holidays here to be fair. But there isn't much advertising.
Still there's a depth of reporting in the papers here that you just don't get in New Zealand. I've seen The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and USA Today - all to be fair, among the best papers in the country. But all are great reads, full of real reporting. What do I mean by this? Well it's three months to the mid-term elections here, and the papers are full of politics, but not the political reporters are out around the country giving you a feeling for what is troubling voters, not just the spin from Washington. The other thing I notice is that though Americans are said to be insular, international news gets a big run here. Changes in the Kenyan constiutution - the sort of story I doubt we would do on Morning Report - are on page 3 of thhe LA Times one day and prominent in the NYT too.
And the design! The Herald has gone for two-story front pages under its latest rethink. The NYTimes had NINE stories on its front. It was a bit of a jumble compared with the fronts you see in New Zealand - but you did get a feeling that you are getting a bit to read here.
Did some TV channel surfing. There are about 100 channels here but as I channel-surf there seems to be a lot of ads and infomercials. And religion and politics. You can see a fair bit of politics on TV here and its at a reasonably high level.
There are oddites though. I watched for a bit a religious talk show. There were two people, a woman interviewer, and a man who did most of the talking. He was very persuasive, articulate, charming even. His message though was startling. Obama is a socialist who dreams of a "new world order" where the US will be merged, firstly wuth Canada, then with the European union. He will become the socialist dictator of the world. It's all laid out in Revelations in the Bible. But it's all good news really because that will be the time Jesus will return to Earth. Although he didn't say it specifically, he was saying Obama is the anti-Christ or "the Beast". It was all argued very persuasively too, with lots of Bible references and news clips. We'll have to start planning our coverage on Report, I guess. I wonder if Obama ever watches this type of programme.
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"You can see a fair bit of politics on TV here and its at a reasonably high level."
ReplyDeleteDoesn't sound like you found Faux News then.
"I watched for a bit a religious talk show. There were two people, a woman interviewer, and a man who did most of the talking. He was very persuasive, articulate, charming even. His message though was startling. Obama is a socialist who dreams of a "new world order" where the US will be merged, firstly wuth Canada, then with the European union. He will become the socialist dictator of the world. It's all laid out in Revelations in the Bible."
Then again, maybe you did.