In today’s world of intense media scrutiny, it’s almost always bad news when “the medium becomes the message”; e.g. when a public figure wants to talk to you about something, but what actually happens is that you end up talking about the person him/herself, rather than the thing that person was trying to talk about. …
So the BBC are being their usual snarky selves about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Mandarin exploit – a Chinese New Year speech in, yes, Chinese. Rather than lauding Zuck’s obvious linguistic achievement, Auntie chooses to lead with the insinuation that the whole thing was little more than a publicity stunt to butter up a country in …
Watching the wall-to-wall news coverage of the backlash to the recent events in Paris, I was particularly taken by the English-speaking media’s adoption of the « Je suis Charlie » slogan. And it got me thinking… Firstly, it’s commendable – indeed mandatory – that we should stand in solidarity with the victims of such an …
