Latest news about US elections...

According to Sarah’s instructions I have been checking the news on the Web sources I mentioned in the last post. Today in particular I took some time to read some articles taken from The Guardian and Le Monde and I surfed the Net looking for information about the two Democratic candidates in general. The Guardian, in its section dedicated to US elections, primarily focused on Obama raising again the so called "racial question" after some controversial remarks made by Revered Jeremiah Wright. The pastor, whose church Barack Obama has been attending for 20 years, has recently encouraged his congregation to sing something like "God Damn America" because of its long history of violence, intolerance and discrimination towards its own people as well as foreign countries. Considering his relationship with the Reverend, Obama made a public speech claiming that he is aware that Wright’s words might have caused controversy and pain and said that he disagrees with some of his points of view; he is, however, a friend, a man that helped him to strengthen his faith and officiated his marriage. Hillary immediately stated that a man like Reverend Wright couldn’t ever be her pastor, that she would have left his church after those terrible declarations and that “You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend”. Undoubtedly she took advantage of Reverend Wrights’ painful comments (which are considered to have ruined Obama’s campaign in Pennsylvania) to distract the media interest away from the fake declarations she made about a presidential trip to Bosnia in 1996: she said she remembered landing under sniper fire together with her husband and daughter but the CBS found a video which demonstrates that the landing at Tuzla was calm and was just part of the ruotine. So Hillary lied in attempt to demonstrate that thanks to her long experience as First Lady she is definitely more prepared to became President if compared to the other candidates and she was caught. As a result she publicly confessed she made a mistake, she said that it happens and it only shows that she is human, a kind of revelation to some people: it was the first time Hillary admitted she was wrong.
Let’s switch to Le Monde. The most important French newspaper focused instead on the "money question": it seems that Obama has made public his income-tax return and defied Hillary to imitate him. This is quite a common practice in the United States, of course it is not necessary but lot of candidates do it anyway. I was wondering if that could ever happen in our country but honestly it is hard to imagine someone like Silvio Berlusconi as well as other Italian politicians to publish their annual income. Besides I came across another appealing article titled "Les dollars pleuvent sur la campagne électorale américaine" and "Les fonds de campagne" which revealed the unbelievable amount of money that the three major candidates have raised since the beginning of their campaign. The journalist stated that in January and February 2008 they have collected about 814 million dollars and that each candidate is believed to gather 100 million dollars per month. This is really amazing as it means that by November they will surely gather at least one million dollars, that is to say more than the budget –or the GDP – of many African States. It is true that the American electoral campaigns are longer if compared to our and that the candidates need a lot of money to buy commercial spaces in television, radio and the Internet and that each State in the Us organises conventions and a caucus, so they actually need a lot of money. In the article an important question emerges: who are the donors? There is only a very restricted group of people in the Us able to provide the candidates with such sums of money and at this point another question, quite scaring if compared to the previous one, comes out: once elected, will the candidates make the interests of the community of those of the few rich people that have been supporting their campaign with thousands of dollars?

As regards the issues we could talk about in the forum I think it could be a good idea to discuss about the abortion and in general the influence that religion has in both our countries. Of course I will ask the members of my group and see what else they suggest. Anyway I just had a look at the forum, commented the last question about death penalty and I can’t wait to read what is the next issue. So far the American students have raised interesting matters, so I’m really curious to see how this forum will progress.

Comparing three online newspapers

According to Task 3 I have been reading and analysing the articles about the elections in the US and in Italy published in three different online newspapers belonging to three different countries. As I have been studying English and French I decided to examine The Guardian and Le Monde and as far as the third source is concerned I chose L’Unità. As you can see the last online newspaper is Italian: I have been studying German as well but unfortunately I don’t know it well enough to read a German newspaper, otherwise I would have probably chosen Die Zeit rather than an Italian newspaper. The three newspapers presented, however, very interesting articles and I enjoyed reading them, analysing their contents and trying to compare the different points if view. Actually it was not easy to compare them: although they are all supposed to be left oriented, lots of differences emerged. I would like to start my analysis comparing the British and the French newspapers, in fact I prefer talking about the Italian L’Unità lately as it clearly differs from the previous papers for a lot of aspects.
As regards the British The Guardian and the French Le Monde I noticed that they both have a rich international section in their online versions and they both have a page totally dedicated to the American elections: in these interactive pages there articles about the protagonists of the 2008 elections and every sort of information about them and situation State by State. This week the two papers seemed to focus primarily on the “race issue” raised by Geraldine Ferraro, a leading member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign who decided to resign after having made a racist comment on Barack Obama. According to The Guardian she stated that Obama “would not be in the in a position to claim the Democratic nomination if he was white or a woman” but Hillary immediately said that she disagreed with Ferraro’s statement and apologized for the offensive remark. The news was presented more or less in the same way by Le Monde, anyway I realized that the French newspaper gave more details about Geraldine, her role in the campaign and her past and similar comment on Jesse Jackson, while The Guardian gave little information about her personality, it ommitted to write that Mrs Ferraro absolutely did not regret what she said about Obama and specified that after all, one of Barack Obama's collaborators - Samantha Power - recently definied Hillary a "monster". Just out of curiosity, I had a look to Le Figaro as well, another important French newspaper whose editorial line is definitely conservative. Surprisingly, in the article about Geraldine Ferraro’s comments titled “Nouveau coup dur pour le camp Clinton” the reporter insists on the fact that Hillary is surrounded by a dangerous team and as a consequence the author talks about the case of Eliot Spitzer. Moreover, the journalist argues that Hillary is usually reluctant to apologize, but in this case she simply couldn’t avoid it. So, reading the two newspapers I had the impression that The Guardian is willing to be more “well-balanced” whereas, on the French side, there are often nasty comments about Clinton and her entourage.
Finally I would like to talk about L’Unità, whose online version is a little bit poor. First of all there were no articles about the US elections (or at least I couldn’t find any) and I was a little bit disappointed: as far as I know there is no “International section”. Maybe it is because this is one of the minor newspapers, but frankly I don’t know why it did not mention what was happening abroad, especially as regards the struggle between Obama and Hillary. Usually I don’t read this kind of newspapers, I prefer something like Il Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica, but I thought it was a good idea to take into consideration a paper considered highly and openly left oriented. On Thursday there was an interesting article about the leader of the Democratic Party Veltroni and his financial policy, or better, the financial policy he would like to develop if he is going to win the elections. The article was extremely well written and clear: I think that the journalist succeed in introducing the positive points of Veltroni’s campaign and his ideas to reduce taxes. Today there was another article about Belusconi and I laughed while reading what the journalist reported about his recent public speeches: I was impressed by one of his hilarious statements that in English could sound more or less like this “I definitely would do something else with soubrettes rather than insert them in our lists” .