Predictably, President Reagan's death yesterday wasn't getting more than a top-of-the-news coverage from German TV this morning. (I wouldn't expect the death of a former German leader to get much attention from the US media, so I'm not all that surprised or disturbed that Reagan's death would only get basic coverage here.)
On the other hand, on the Web, there's this winning piece from Spiegel Online, which opens with:
Ronald Reagan was an actor, trade unionist, lifeguard, and for eight years, President of the USA. When he left the White House in 1989, he left behind a gigantic national debt and innumerable homeless.
Yikes!
But CNN International and BBC World weren't talking about Ronald Reagan all that much either, because the main news story of the day, with hours of live coverage and commentary, was the 60th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day invasion in Normandy. Poor French President Chirac -- CNN and the BBC both ran his speech in its entirety, but neither one chose to translate it from French! I switched to n-tv, a German station that was also broadcasting live from Normandy, in hopes that I could find out what the heck Chirac was saying, but they didn't translate him either -- even though President Bush's subsequent speech was translated from English into German. Those French just can't get an even break from anybody ...
A temporary descent into American politics: I noticed that CNN's first lead story on President Reagan's death included this recent quote from Nancy Reagan in support of stem-cell research:
"Now science has presented us with a hope called stem cell research, which may provide our scientists with many answers that have for so long been beyond our grasp," Reagan told an audience in Los Angeles. "I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this."
. . . I would hope that this appeal, considering its source, might cause some of America's more hard-core conservatives to reconsider their ban-it-all-now-dammit stance on stem-cell research, but no, Nancy Reagan has already been tried and found wanting on National Review's "The Corner". (When are those conservatives who so vehemently oppose stem-cell research going to speak out in favor of an outright, total ban on in-vitro fertilization, which is just as strongly intervening in the natural order of things and "playing God" -- and is the process responsible for creating the fertilized embryos that they claim to care so ferverently about in the first place? I don't want either procedure to be banned, but it seems awfully inconsistent of them to turn a blind eye.)
Here's more elaboration on Nancy Reagan's stem-cell remarks from the BBC and an earlier CNN article.