June, 2008

Some supporters of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty are making wild, and so far unsubstantiated, allegations that American "neocons" were responsible for the treaty's defeat in the Irish referendum June 12.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson visited Norway last week looking for foreign investors, and the local media back home reported his trip as a success.

European media outlets reported extensively when flooding of the Mississippi river caused major damage in the U.S. Midwest last week. Much of the European reporting linked the latest floods to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which received huge amounts of negative media coverage in Europe and was widely used to accuse the Bush administration of insensitivity and incompetence.

On June 11, Tom Baldwin and Gerard Baker of The Times of London reported on an exclusive interview with President George W. Bush, President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war.

A Pew Center report entitled Media Pivot to November, Iraq Debate outlines trends in media coverage during the week of May 26-June 1, the period just before Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination on June 3.

The trial of five terrorists accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks is making headlines in Europe unlike those in the United States. Journalists from Italy, Germany, and Britain, along with Canada and Pakistan, were among those present when the trial began at the U.S. Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba on Thursday, June 5.

The German newspaper Die Welt published an article with the headline, Mit Bush, verlieren die Deustchen ihr Feindbild (With Bush, Germans Lose Their Bogeyman), which argues that Bush’s prestige has deteriorated so much that Germans no longer think

In Europe, the performing arts are generally funded by public subsidies and most people believe that support of the arts is a government obligation. It is the opposite in the United States. American cultural institutions are primarily funded by individual donors, foundations, and private enterprise.

The continental European media swelled with excitement as Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, clinched the nomination. Here are some of the headlines:

In a column in the Süddeutschen Zeitung, one of Germany's leading dailies, the German Marshall Fund’s Constanze Stelzenmüller discusses Barack Obama’s popularity among German politicians and the German population in general.