Elfstedentocht 2012 a national Dutch skating drama – North Korean style

Dutch State Television (NOS) had a special prime time news bulletin of 30 minutes on a skating event in the Northern Province of Friesland, that has been cancelled because of insufficient good ice. This is seen by Dutch media as ‘a national disaster’, after them whipping up public attention and commercial expectations during the recent cold winter weeks.

De Elfstedentocht (the eleven town tour) is a 200 kilometer skating tour and competition through the Northern Province of Friesland, existing since 1909 and – only rarely – takes place, because of  too soft winters. The last skating tour was held in 1997.

On wednesday February  8th the association that organises the tour called it all off, because of insufficient thickness of the ice (15 centimeter were needed ‘iceologists’ explained). This non-event was blown up beyond proportions, with five or so journlists at different spots in the Northern province telling us that nothing would happen.

Everything was so serious and exalted in the presentation of this “world news” – a life press conference on non-skating – that it managed almost to reach the level of the famous North Korean public television drama display of ‘national suffering’, though others may have thought to watch the Monty Python News.

The journalist in the middle of the picture is the senior and schizophrenic sports reporter Mart Smeets who said first (February 5th.) that the whole skating event of the Elfstedentocht was nothing more than “an abject commercial funfair” (een platte commerciële kermis) and later could not stop himself to be in the camera lime light of this ‘local world news’, even where it was nothing more than an anti–happening.

In the previous week I noticed also the NOS reporter Peter ter Velde  (his name means “in the field”) well known as an embedded NATO journalist in Afghanistan, standing in front of a half frozen ditch in Friesland, with the same serious face as he puts on when reporting about the successes of the Dutch troops in Uruzgan and Kunduz in schooling Taliban fighters.

When you missed it you can enjoy it all at: http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1238898

World disasters and local misery have to wait a bit for receiving again full Dutch State Television attention, till after the Frisian meltdown.

Side effect is – once more – that we are updated on the social and political priorities of the editorial staff of the NOS Television Journal.

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World news on the cheap in Cairo November 2011: who speaks English here?

WORLD NEWS ON THE CHEAP like yesterday a Dutch crew of the television news (NOS/NTR Nieuwsuur) in Egypt doing ‘street interviews’ and proving that the support for the Egypt Revolution is faltering with two third of those interviewed speaking some form of English and only one or two questions posed in Arabic, whereby it remains unclear who is posing the question.

Gone are the days of a correspondent in Cairo for the Arab world, gone are the days of at least having a journalist speaking Arabic being part of a crew, gone is any historical knowledge on the part of the journalists, at best a quick check of Wikipedia before leaving or in the hotel room…. as a multi-cultural nation it is a shame that the Netherlands have not been able to train and recruit a group of say Moroccan young students to become journalists for events in the Arabic world….

“Who speaks English here?” asks the camera crew on Tahrir Square in Cairo untill they bump into a man that does not like the way they are filming… and when people on the street might return the question to them  (hal tatakallam al-lughah al-’arabīyah?) هل تتكلم اللغة العربية؟, the Dutch journalists of the crew fail to understand.

There seems to have been a translator with the crew, but  the position of the translator remains unclear. The tiny bit of Arabic we hear spoken from the side of the crew seems clumsy, was it a Dutch Arabic speaker or a locally rented service. If the last thing is the case, how much embedded is this translator in the Egyptian state media, how does the translator relates to the political spectrum of Egypt, how were the choices of who to speak to made?

The clumsiness of the reportage is at times embarrassing, but fully in line with the cheap glamour of the Nieuwsuur television studio in the Netherlands and the anchor woman waving her hairs while posing question to the crew in Cairo to enlighten the Dutch audience.

Nieuwsuur (NOS/NTR) reporter Jan Eikelboom explains how he found out that the Egyptian revolution is faltering on the basis of "hear say" from the streets, speaking with shopkeepers in the bazars, tourist entrepreneurs and a man at the Cairo stock exchange, they outcome of these talks are of course fully predictable, as all these people see their business frustrated by the social unrest. Shopkeepers, tourist workers and a broker can of course not stand as a representative group for Egyptian society as a whole... but the Dutch crew clearly had no access to other social layers.

(19':50'') Dutch captions for a tourist entrepreneur in Giza interviewed in English: "I do not know what those people want. It is not good for us, we are working with tourists"

(20':38'') Dutch captions for an interview in English. "On the square they say: We want peace." Actually the reporter says not 'peace' but 'freedom'... sloppy translator there, at the NOS/NTR... The over-generalized question may have been posed in English by Jan Eikelboom and the answer is as general as the question: "...freedom will come, but slowly."

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Source = http://beta.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1116886

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