|
With UN Rebuffed in Sudan & Sri Lanka, UN Law & Order
Episode Covered by CNN
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
March 31 -- The UN increasingly
moves in a dream world, and media like CNN only take notice when pop
culture or
a dwindling number of hot button issues are involved. How else to
explain the
UN's bragging that its decaying building is to appear in the background
of a
spin-off television crime episode tonight -- Law & Order: Special
Victims
Unit -- and CNN
showing up at the UN for the first time in a while, to cover
not politics but show?
After a
panel discussion about Battlestar
Galactica at the UN earlier this month, a UN
official breathlessly told Inner City Press that negotiations were
still
ongoing if Law & Order would include a quote from Radhika
Coomaraswamy, the
Under Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict. On the
Battlestar panel,
Ms. Coomaraswamy said she'd watched not panelist Edward James Olmos'
"Stand and Deliver" but moderator Whoopi Goldberg's "Sister
Act" back in her native Sri Lanka, "with female friends."
At the
March 31 noon briefing, after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's
Spokesperson
Michele Montas read out her office's second teaser for the Law &
Order
episode, Inner City Press asked if Mr. Ban had any response to the president
of
Sri Lanka openly rejecting Ban's call for a cessation of the
bombing in
Northern Sri Lanka. Ms. Montas called the president's statement that
the
country will not give in to international pressure, placed on the
government's
web site, a mere "media report" to which the UN has no response. Video here
at Minute 14:57.
When
Inner City Press went on, tongue in cheek, to ask if Ms. Coomaraswamy's
quote
had made it into the Law & Order episode, video here
at Minute 21:30, Ms. Montas said, may
I suggest that you watch it tonight?
Actor Olmos at UN this month, Law & Order in world not shown
Media analysis:
one wag quipped, of the so-called
"CNN effect," that the network has devoted more focus to the TV show
at the UN than to the 3000 civilians killed in the conflict in Sri
Lanka this
year. Another noted that with the UN now so often rebuffed "in the real
world" by the leaders of Sudan, Sri Lanka, North Korea and elsewhere,
and
told to be quiet by the UK and World Bank, it may be comforting to
parlay the
UN's icon status into publicity: at least something's going right, in
the world
of fiction.
There's a
fine line, it seems, between educating the public and
deceiving oneself and others.
Click here for Inner City
Press' March 27 UN debate
Click here for Inner City
Press March 12 UN (and AIG
bailout) debate
Click here for Inner City
Press' Feb 26 UN debate
Click
here
for Feb.
12 debate on Sri Lanka http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/17772?in=11:33&out=32:56
Click here for Inner City Press' Jan.
16, 2009 debate about Gaza
Click here for Inner City Press'
review-of-2008 UN Top Ten debate
Click here for Inner
City Press' December 24 debate on UN budget, Niger
Click here from Inner City Press'
December 12 debate on UN double standards
Click here for Inner
City Press' November 25 debate on Somalia, politics
and this October 17 debate, on
Security Council and Obama and the UN.
* * *
These
reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click here
for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali
National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
Feedback: Editorial
[at] innercitypress.com
UN
Office: S-453A, UN, NY 10017
USA
Tel: 212-963-1439
Reporter's
mobile (and
weekends):
718-716-3540
Other,
earlier Inner City Press are listed here, and some are available
in the ProQuest service, and now on Lexis-Nexis.
Copyright
2006-08 Inner City Press, Inc. To request
reprint or other permission, e-contact Editorial [at]
innercitypress.com -
|
, 
