Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Unobtrusive Tones on the News Tonight

Well I have moved to my new town, whose name translates as "Sleeping on a bed of money," and working full-time at my new position as "Small Enterprise Technical and Management Advisor" with the Koloharena farmers' Cooperative. You can see a brief overview of this work in the Oct. 2 post, and I will try to write-up something more detailed soon. Needless to say, it is a very different experience from my previous two villages, as I am in a big town working in an office most of the day from 8-6... Even now, at 9pm, I am up checking email from the American buyer and working on digital documents. Crazy.

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to write was to draw attention to an interesting study a friend and fellow Mada PCV (1st time around) wrote up. Brendan took a look at news coverage of Madagascar's coup (almost 2 years ago now!) Take a minute to absorb some great lines like "
So far, we've seen that web users care more about movies than Malagasy murders, regardless of how much noise the news makes." and "But come on - there were more articles written in Romanian than in English about the crisis in Madagascar. Romanian! I don't even want to think what that would look like in terms of articles per fluent capita!"

Great stuff Brendan! The political impasse has continued, although a new "transition" parliament took office this week, and the campaign for the referendum on the new constitution (scheduled for Nov. 17th) has begun - There are "Yes" signs and advertisements everywhere!

That's all for now, but I'll try to put something together again soon...


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