March 25, 2011

Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk gets into semantics

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:22 am

“The way Americans follow Holland in the news, that’s how Europeans follow the Middle East.”

Just before that, he mentions that us peeps in the Netherlands are all stoned and visit whores because that’s what the media shows you. We laugh at that, but that’s his point: so many people think it’s reality.

Joris Luyendijk: ‘The old model of journalism is broken’
How can journalism meet the challenges of the Internet age? Former reporter Joris Luyendijk is looking for new ways to tell stories.

Watch a 5 min interview with Joris Luyendijk from The Guardian. (warning, it starts up automatically)

My dream would be if he’d explain to Dutch journalists to stop using terms like ‘black and white schools’, where white equals Dutch and black equals anything not white, which is totally inaccurate and painful to write about. Can we also do away with ‘ambitious women’, implying we’re not by definition and lose ‘good fathers’ (ouch to my friends with children) and even ‘luxury sandwiches’? The more you stick an adjective in front of a word, the less the noun has meaning on its own. Sometimes it makes it better, but not in the press, as Luyendijk explains.

(Tip: Thanks Sueli!)

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