News Roundup - Hour 2
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-01-21/news-roundup-hour-2
Leading Arab nations suspend efforts to help Lebanon end a government crisis; Iraq is shaken by a sharp spike in violence; and South Korea agrees to military talks with the North. A panel of journalists joins Diane for analysis of the week's top international news stories.
Guests
Moises Naim
chief international columnist, El Pais.
Elise Labott
senior State Department producer for CNN.
Abderrahim Foukara
Washington bureau chief of Al Jazeera Arabic.
Comments
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So interesting that the young women in the Berlusconi scandal are characterized as teenage prostitutes and have no last names. They are non-citizens and underage. How did they get into Italy? Where is the outrage over this. It harks back to your previous shows on human trafficking.
With Tunisia's new leadership to hold parliamentary and presidential elections in the next six months, I think it is important to also have Instant runoff voting (IRV) to avoid election day protests like the ones that swept Haiti
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Haiti: “Let them eat cake!”
Marie Antoinette was said to have mocked the hungry people
of France with the quote ”Let them eat cake!” Your panelists
delivered a similarly superficial and thus misleading discussion,
avoiding any examination of the causes of Haitiians’ plight
or of their long struggles toward democratic process.
To place the abusive dictator Baby Doc Duvalier -- supported
by Washington in his depredations -- on the same level as
President Aristide (who was voted President after pledging to
defend Haiti’s farmers from US dumping of artificially cheap rice
that repeatedly destroyed their nation’s agriculture) creates
a distortion of a sort we’ve learned to expect from Faux/Fox News.
Aristide was pushed out of office by Washington not once but
twice, yet instead of having learned from that second bizzarre
abuse of power, CNN’s State Dept reporter simply delivered
the official Washington line.
Why is that a problem?
To fail to tell the honest story of Haiti is to deliver your listeners
a racist conclusion: a pretense that black people are unfit
to govern themselves. But Haiti has a proud history, and
as an interview on Phil Donahue’s show years ago stated,
the pro-democracy history of Haiti’s Lavalas Party can offer
us Americans useful lessons in democracy.
It’s a story that’s not hard to package: “Who’s keeping
Haiti’s majority party out of the current elections, and why?”
Please invite to your mics the journalists who understand
the rigged global economy and are capable of an honest story
when the weakest and poorest country in the hemisphere
is being abused...without mercy.
We might even find some useful insights for our own plight.
It's disappointing that I had to chase down the online repository / archives to hear/stream the News Roundup from 1/21. The podcasts from this week were never posted (at least not to the iTunes distribution).
Though the content of each Roundup's hour is always terrific (probably the best broadcast summary of each week's events), the digital retransmission is odd in several ways:
1) The 2 hours are posted as separate events, often requiring the user to request iTunes to individually download the 2nd show manually. Why not combine them, at least for the podcast download? or else, why not call them separate names, suitable for separate automatic subscription/downloading?
2) Of all the NPR shows I download to time-shift (and play at double-speed), only the DRS includes every minute of the musical delays inserted during the actual show, when local stations play news, station ID and promotional adverts for upcoming shows. Surely this can't be very hard to remove for the audience who listen to the canned event.
I've wondered if the prideful effort to release the recording promptly (Diane mentions it'll be posted in only 1-2 hours) isn't serving to cause a less-useful digital package.
3) This isn't the first time that a week went by without an updated podcast. Kinda unprofessional, no?
4) The DRS doesn't beg to its podcast subscribers for contributions, unlike my other shows. I'm always willing to provide direct support to a show that doesn't get anything from my local station (because they don't subscribe), but what's the expectation for shows where my local station does purchase the rights to broadcast?