Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Media

  • Don’t Blame Polls for Bad Predictions

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages)

    The red wave wasn’t, and American journalists blame the polls.

    Before the midterm elections on Tuesday, many media predicted a “red wave” of Republican victories that would repudiate Democratic president Joe Biden.

    37 House and three Senate elections remain to be decided, but it’s clear the red wave didn’t materialize. Some two dozen out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives changed hands, switching the majority from Democratic to Republican. Control of the Senate is still in the balance. At best, Republicans would net two seats. Even that would make this the most lackluster Republican midterm-election victory since 1962.

    Reporters blame the polls for giving them the wrong impression, but they didn’t cite the polls in their stories. They predicted a “red wave” or even a “red tsunami” based on everything from “abortion peaking too soon as a motivating issue” (Axios) to Joe Biden’s absence from the campaign (National Review) to Donald Trump’s analysis (The Wall Street Journal) to Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman’s poor debate performance (The Hill) to a moral panic about non-existent fentanyl-flavored Halloween candy (Fox News) to “fundamentals” (CNN) and “momentum” (Washington Examiner) and “growing signs” (The New York Times) to increased Democratic campaign spending in blue districts (NBC).

    They should have trusted the polls. (more…)

  • Alt-Right Picks Wrong Side in Dutch Farm Crisis

    Agrifirm Veghel Netherlands
    Agrifirm animal feed factory in Veghel, the Netherlands (Brabants Dagblad/Domien van der Meijden)

    The international alt-right has picked the wrong side in the Dutch farm crisis.

    Former American president Donald Trump, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, Danish climate-change sceptic Bjørn Lomborg and media like Breitbart, The Federalist, Fox News and The Spectator may think they’re backing the little guy against out-of-touch political elites, but they’re doing the bidding of Big Ag.

    In Areo Magazine, I point out that the farmers protesting in the Netherlands are funded by three of the largest animal feed companies in the world as well as dairy and meat processors. They stand to lose the most from a reduction in livestock farming. (more…)

  • More Misinformation About the Dutch Farm Crisis

    Netherlands farm pigs
    Pigsty in a Dutch farm (LLTB)

    I debunked four misconceptions about the Dutch farm crisis here a month ago: that reducing Dutch farming will lead to food shortages; that the Dutch government prioritizes an elite green agenda over the livelihoods of its people; that farmers are being chased off their land to build homes; and that the media weren’t covering the story.

    That’s certainly changed, but with all the media attention there have also been more mistakes and a few outright fabrications.

    Before I debunk those, let me recommend better sources. AFP and Time have excellent stories. I wrote an explainer about the farm crisis in June and have an article in World Politics Review about what it portends for food producers elsewhere.

    Onto the blunders! (more…)

  • Misinformation About the Dutch Farm Crisis

    Dutch dairy farm
    Cows are fed by a robot on a Dutch dairy farm (Lely)

    When I wrote my explainer about the Dutch farm crisis a month ago, there had been little interest in the story abroad. Now when you type “Dutch farmers” in Google News, you’ll get hundreds of results.

    I noticed a change when I suddenly got 10,000 readers in a day. (I usually have a few hundred.) Two things happened.

    First a policeman shot at a tractor leaving a farmers’ protests. The driver turned out to be a sixteen year-old boy. Nobody was injured. National police are investigating exactly what happened, but it appears the officer thought the tractor was deliberately trying to crash into a colleague. (He didn’t realize the driver was a teenager.) In a country where cops seldom draw their weapons, much less shoot at people, the story was frontpage news, which led to Netherlands-based foreign correspondents filing their own stories.

    Then Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a failed parliamentary candidate for the Netherlands’ far-right Forum for Democracy, was interviewed about the protests on Fox News. (Vlaardingerbroek was credited as a “legal philosopher” rather than a former politician for the only political party in the Netherlands that still defends Vladimir Putin.) She told one lie after another. Media Matters has the details.

    Other right-wing commentators and media, some writing about the Netherlands for the first time, repeated Vlaardingerbroek’s fabrications. I’ll debunk the four most common misconceptions. (more…)

  • Netherlands’ Kaag Disappoints Liberal Well-Wishers

    Sigrid Kaag
    Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, leads then-Dutch trade and international development minister Sigrid Kaag up the stairs of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam for a conference on mental health in humanitarian crises, October 7, 2019 (MFA/Martijn Beekman)

    When the pro-European Sigrid Kaag became the Dutch finance minister in January, hopes were high that she would take a more relaxed view to debts and deficits in the EU.

    AFP reported that Kaag was “tipped to smooth ties with debt-hit Southern European states that have previously been lectured by the Dutch to cut deficits.”

    EUobserver knew it was “widely expected” Kaag would strike “a more dovish tone” than her Christian democratic predecessor, Wopke Hoekstra.

    The Financial Times predicted that the “polyglot” Kaag — who led her left-liberal party D66 to a “surprise surge” in the polls despite receiving much “opprobrium” from the far right — would be “less hostile on topics such as revamping budgetary rules, joint EU borrowing and fiscal risk-sharing.”

    Her presence around the Eurogroup table should help rebuild trust with southern capitals that often found themselves in Hoekstra’s line of fire.

    It was wishful thinking. (more…)

  • Give Joe Biden a Break

    Joe Biden
    American president Joe Biden boards a helicopter at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, October 7, 2021 (White House)

    One year into Joe Biden’s presidency, the media consensus is that he is failing.

    The Financial Times reports that the Democrat is trying to “reboot” his “faltering” presidency. The Washington Post believes he is “stumbling”. The Wall Street Journal calls it “flailing”.

    Foreign journalists agree. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper writes that Biden is historically unpopular and “much of his domestic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.” Here in the Netherlands, EW Magazine wonders if anyone is still happy with the president while RTL reports that he has “blundered” abroad and “broken” his election promises. (more…)

  • Germany Has Bigger Drug Problem Than Netherlands

    Frau Antje
    Illustration from the cover of Der Spiegel, October 16

    Der Spiegel makes a mockery of the Dutch drug policy. Under the header “Käse, Koks und Killer” (Cheese, Coke and Killers; English version here), the German weekly portrays the Netherlands’ stereotypical Frau Antje with a joint between her lips, a Kalashnikov in one hand and a round cheese stuffed with cocaine in the other. The Netherlands, it claims, is “terrorized” by drug traffickers.

    To Germans who are thinking of following the Dutch in decriminalizing cannabis, Der Spiegel has a clear warning: don’t, or we’ll suffer the consequences. (more…)

  • Political Fragmentation Isn’t the Problem

    Swedish parliament Stockholm
    Parliament House in Stockholm, Sweden (iStock/Roland Lundgren)

    Another political crisis in Europe, another chance to beat on multiparty democracy.

    It’s not like the two-party systems of America and Britain are crisis-free, yet journalists in those countries have a tendency to find complex causes for their own political problems while reducing continental Europe’s to “fragmentation”.

    Today’s example: Bloomberg, which argues the “turmoil” in Sweden “reflects a shifting political landscape” and this is a “warning to other countries with key elections looming — like Germany and France — where fractured politics have also upended old alliances.” (more…)

  • Foreign Press Are Missing the Story in the Dutch Election

    Mark Rutte
    Prime Minister Mark Rutte answers questions from Dutch lawmakers in The Hague, September 17, 2020 (Tweede Kamer)

    The big story in this year’s election in the Netherlands is that all parties, including the ruling VVD (of which I am a member), have moved to the left. As a result, there is broad consensus for deficit spending, far-reaching climate legislation, closer defense integration in Europe, more central government involvement in housing and raising corporate tax.

    Not all foreign media have noticed. Many are still obsessed with yesterday’s story: the far right. (more…)

  • Financial Times Smears Netherlands’ Rutte as Bigot

    Mark Rutte
    Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte arrives in Brussels to meet with other European leaders, February 12, 2015 (European Council)

    In an hour-long election debate with Geert Wilders on Thursday night, Prime Minister Mark Rutte took his far-right opponent to task for treating nonnative Dutch as second-class citizens. He pointed out that Wilders wants to ban the Quran, close mosques and deny voting rights to dual citizens.

    Because Morocco won’t allow even the descendants of Moroccan nationals to give up their passport, Wilders’ proposal would disenfranchise some 400,000 Dutch citizens, including the speaker of parliament, Khadija Arib.

    It is a plainly racist proposal, and Rutte called Wilders out on it — thrice. He asked Wilders to consider the effect of his rhetoric on the hundreds of thousands of Dutch Muslims of good will, not in the least children, some of whom Rutte teaches civics every week on a middle school in an immigrant neighborhood of The Hague.

    He demanded an apology from Wilders for his infamous 2014 election promise to get “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands. Far from apologize, Wilders said he wanted fewer Somalians and fewer Syrians as well, and he accused the liberal party leader of presiding over the “destruction” of the Netherlands by admitting so many non-Western immigrants.

    Rutte, as he has for years, ruled out forming a coalition government with Wilders’ Freedom Party.

    Here is how the Financial Times summarizes the exchange:

    Rutte … felt compelled to insist that he wasn’t in fact a Muslim — twice. Ahead of the debate, Rutte told [de] Volkskrant he was ready to seal Dutch borders in the face of another EU migrant crisis and declared the country’s values “nonnegotiable” for foreigners.

    Rutte’s preternatural ability to pander to the far right is part of the reason he is a shoo-in to keep his job for the next four years.

    I don’t know if the author, Mehreen Khan, speaks Dutch, but it doesn’t sound like she listened to the debate. (more…)

  • Hit Piece Calls Center-Left Sánchez Spain’s Donald Trump

    Pedro Sánchez
    Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez speaks at a congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in Huesca, October 1, 2019 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)

    I’ve been a fan of Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion, which was founded to resist the illiberal turn in American media. The newsletter deliberately publishes analysis and commentary from across the political spectrum to make it readers think. I’ve disagreed with several pieces, and that’s the point.

    This is the first time I’m disappointed by one.

    Mounk has published a hit piece that makes Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a mainstream social democrat, out to be the greatest threat to Spanish democracy since Francisco Franco! (more…)

  • There’s Only So Much Race Can Tell Us

    Democratic voters Davidson North Carolina
    Democratic voters in Davidson, North Carolina listen to a speech, October 12, 2016 (Hillary for America/Alyssa S.)

    American journalists continue to parse the November electorate, specifically the Latino vote.

    Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox, has a good newsletter about Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters in which he links to Harry Enten’s analysis for CNN. It turns out Trump didn’t appeal to just Latinos of Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan descent, who may have been alarmed by Democratic flirtations with socialism given the experience in their home countries; he did better with Latinos of all backgrounds compared to four years ago.

    This is fascinating to political junkies like us, but having just moved back to the Netherlands, where the campaign for the general election in March is slowly getting underway, I’m reminded that this sort of demographic analysis is almost entirely absent in Europe. (more…)

  • American Criticism of Macron Becomes Hysterical

    Emmanuel Macron
    French president Emmanuel Macron answers questions from reporters in Helsinki, Finland, August 30, 2018 (Office of the President of the Republic of Finland/Juhani Kandell)

    The American left’s vilification of Emmanuel Macron continues.

    Karen Attiah accuses the French president in The Washington Post of “pandering to Islamophobic sentiment” and flirting “with political authoritarianism.”

    His crimes? “Pressuring” Islamic leaders to respect “republican values”. Putting restrictions on homeschooling, including canceling a program with teachers from Algeria, Morocco and Turkey. Somehow making “life miserable for innocent Muslims” — Attiah gives no detail.

    The same Attiah earlier retweeted the fake news that Macron was planning to give Muslim pupils ID numbers when all French pupils have identification numbers except those being homeschooled, and a proposal to give homeschooled pupils the same IDs was taken out of the bill. (more…)

  • English-Language Media Blame France for Islamic Terrorism

    Place Masséna Nice France
    Place Masséna in Nice, France, April 29, 2014 (iStock/Rossella De Berti)

    You would think the murder of three Christian worshippers in Nice — a 60 year-old woman, the 55 year-old sexton and a 44 year-old Brazilian-born mother of three — coming on the heels of the beheading of a schoolteacher in a Parisian suburb, would convince American and British journalists and opinion writers that France really has an Islamic terrorism problem, and it’s not a figment of President Emmanuel Macron’s imagination.

    But no. (more…)

  • Media Bubbles Have Replaced the Blogosphere

    Frederik deBoer:

    So when I started blogging in 2008, a thing that would happen would be that a conservative writer would publish something on a conservative website, and then liberals at liberal publications would read those conservative websites, write up their own liberal responses and publish them on their liberal websites, and conservatives would write responses to responses, and so a decent number of people got to be employed.

    And what I can’t scientifically say but which seems screamingly obvious to me is that this is almost unthinkable today. It just doesn’t happen. Liberals don’t even bother to read conservative publications, and they certainly don’t respond to them. I can’t say what conservatives do because, unlike in 2008, I barely read conservative publications anymore. It was a thing I felt honor-bound to do and now I just… don’t do it.

    I remember that time, and it was nice!

    But, like deBoer, I’ve stopped reading conservative blogs and websites that have turned into mouthpieces for Donald Trump. Nor do I read Jacobin or The New Republic. I make an effort to read left- and right-leaning publications, from Talking Points Memo and Vox to The Bulwark, The Dispatch and National Review, but they have to fall within what I consider to be parameters of reasonableness. (more…)