Media Watch

What comes after COVID?

16th September 2022 in Conversations, Culture and Technology, Education & Technology, Media Watch, New Video, OE Videos

An interview with a university president Some time back I conducted an interview with the President of the University of Agder, in Southern Norway, Ms. Sunniva Whittaker. The interview was part of a process preparing for our annual conference World Learning Summit, where our university president has participated in parts each year since she entered office. Enthusiastic as we are about that, we also wanted to know a bit more in detail her thoughts on how a university re-connects after a long period of so-called ´lock-down´. Here is that interview.

What is global journalism?

14th September 2022 in Global journalism, Media Watch, New Video, OE Videos

Big question, simple explanation In this video I go though basic issues and questions related to the concept of ‘global journalism’ – what it means, and how it is being used. Should we understand ‘global journalism’ as a particular style of news reporting? Or do we concentrate on the political economy of globalization? These questions are raised for a simple reason: ‘Global journalism’ has become a term, used generally and also particularly to refer to university&college degree programs. All of thich begs the question: What is it, really all about?

Første på norsk

17th December 2018 in Media Watch, Norsk

Dette er min første bloggpost på norsk etter overhaling av denne sida. Tanken er et forsøk på å også være tilstede på mitt eget morsmål. Det blir fort så mye på engelsk. Så får vi se.

The fall of great men

30th November 2017 in Current issues, Journalism, Media and Politics, Media Watch, Power, This week

Around the world, an agenda-setting attention is focused on the abuse of power by men in position to treat women unfairly: Code word is sexual harassment. One of the latest installments in the unfolding story is the fall of both Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, veterans of the US TV and talk show eco system. Watch this video from the New York Times.

Ending our fascination with the digital

19th November 2017 in Culture and Technology, Education & Technology, Media Watch

A noteworthy op-ed in the New York Times, November 18th 2017, adds to the mounting awareness of how digital technologies steal time as much as they save it, erodes relations as much as they enable them; offering a sense of “global belonging” and at the same time a rush to “belong” – all the time. Dan Sax writes: Many of us bought into the fantasy that digital made everything better. We surrendered to this idea, and mistook our dependence for romance, until it was too late. Today, when my phone

Uncharted homeland territory

31st October 2017 in Global Development, Media and Politics, Media Watch, Power, Trump Watch

Disrupted: The politics of belonging David Brooks, in the New York Times this morning – October 31st, 2018: “What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture references, financial stress and chronic drinking, which make it harder to sink down roots into something, or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning

Education and the erosion of social capital

13th June 2017 in Media Watch

Here is a link to a Washington Post commentary by George Will. And here is a citation: “The report was so “seismic” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s word — that Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration released it on Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman Report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested interests. And 50 years on, it is pertinent to today’s political debates about class and social mobility. So, let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, sociologist James Coleman, author of the

The Planet and the Donald

22nd April 2017 in Current issues, Global Development, Global Economy, Media Watch, The Global Economy, Trump Watch, Watching the Donald

A New York Times opinion editorial, April 20th 2017: Will we recover from the Trump presidency? Perhaps not: The thing with climate change is we don´t have much time, and not much is happening — so what happens when what little is happening gets reversed? “President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people. It’s much the same as

Trump’s alternative realities

18th February 2017 in Media Watch, Trump Watch

What to read and what to do about it – – – A Saturday morning ritual for many years, I read the New York Times more or less from cover to cover. When I can, I do it on paper. When I can’t, and that’s most of the time, I do it online. In recent years, I have started to prefer the online version even when the paper version is available to me. As global news go, it’s changed my way of staying informed, in part because what happens when