The New York Times gets into the act with an interview with David Cerny. But when we read an interview with a man who just falsified biographies of 26 artists for a major EU commission, should we believe anything he says? This is not a question that the Times addresses.
Tag: journalism
Slovaks, Czechs and the New York Times
A number of people forwarded me the most recent New York Times article on Slovakia while I was on vacation, and I found it problematic enough to think about breaking silence and writing something, if only to comment on the lovely horse-drawn wagon, apparently the mascot of all journalists visiting Slovakia. I didn’t but fortunately Scott Brown did, with his usual humor and sense of perspective.
The thing I found most surprising about the article was not the tired “rural” image, but the fact that anybody bothers to write about Slovak-Czech rivalry. When I read the headline, “Neighbor’s Shadow Still Large in Slovakia” I assumed it was about Hungary, a neighbor that actually does cast a shadow on political debate in Slovakia on a daily basis.
Articles like this create for me a big problem: having seen how a good newspaper’s coverage of a country I occasionally visit contains basic errors of interpretation and asks the wrong questions, what can I make of that same paper’s coverage of countries I know nothing about? Is the stuff on Indonesia and Ghana just as limited? I hope not but I fear so.